Liu Xiaodong

Beijing, Central Academy of Fine Art Gallery, Liu Xiaodong Retrospective 1990-2000, September, 2000
Beijing, National Art Museum of China, Figurative Oil Painting Exhibition, 1993

Liu Xiaodong’s Dreaming (1991, Lot 109) depicts a nude young man casually lounging on a bench in what appears to be a bath house.  The figure’s relaxed, unselfconscious pose is matched by the artist’s succulent, bold, yet seemingly effortless brushwork, which melds the figure and his environment into a harmonious unity.  Eyes closed and head peacefully tilted, the dreaming figure appears lost in another world of private contemplation that we as viewers are implicitly invited to join. 

Liu Xiaodong clearly relishes the act of painting, and populating the surface of the work are any number of details – three slashes of orange in particular – that serve only to balance tonal and compositional objectives, creating a painterly world of surprising abstraction for a realist scene so raw in its intimacy.  As such, Dreaming is a better indication of the Liu Xiaodong to come than of the recent Academy graduate whose fresh take on realism had recently surprised the Beijing art world.   

Dreaming was painted early in Liu Xiaodong’s career.  Born in 1963, the artist graduated with a bachelor’s degree from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1988 (he would return for a Master’s in 1995).  In 1989, Liu was included in the seminal China Avant-Garde exhibition, and the following year he was given his first solo exhibition in the galleries at CAFA.  Visitors to this exhibition were highly impressed with the dynamic formal qualities of Liu’s work:  the fluidity of his brushstroke, his unique color choices, and his compositional strategies.  But it was the artist’s forceful turn toward the frank depiction of scenes from daily life that was most startling.  The exhibition firmly established the young artist as a leading painter of his generation.  At the time, however, his practice remained primarily wedded to a more mimetic form of realism, a higher-resolution focus with a more descriptive brushstroke. 

In this early work of 1991, we see the artist breaking away from that trajectory towards the freer hand that would subsequently come to characterize his practice, and the subject matter of Dreaming is ideally suited for such formal exploration.  Liu is first and foremost a painter of figures, and the nude form, long the basis of academic practice, is one to which the artist has returned throughout his career.  Dreaming is in some sense a stylistic resume of the artist who was then only twenty-eight:  a familiar academic subject becomes a relaxed figural study of striking yet seemingly natural intimacy, facilitating an objective play between paint and flesh that must have been liberating.  The impasto that defines the musculature of the sitter’s left thigh, the bold skin-toned strokes and balance of tan with adjacent white highlight that serves to define the sitter’s clavicles, the vibrant orange and umber daubs that form the right shin and calf – these passages and many more indicate the graceful fluidity with which the artist is capable of rendering his sitter and setting.  Beyond their descriptive purposes, such passages signify a profound engagement with the sitter that expresses not only the artist’s but also the dreaming bather’s individual humanity.  No small achievement for a young artist, even one who now ranks among the greatest painters of his generation.