No cat picture. Also no video.
20. June 2018
RAQs Media Collective. EVERYTHING ELSE IS ORDINARY. Take your time for this exhibition! It is everything, but ordinary.
4. July 2018
Coming home slowly. Illustrated broadsheet of a life journey
Peter Handke’s narrative “Slow Homecoming” (1979) is the inspiration for the title for this solo exhibition, and thus, serves as a riddle and a hint at the same time. What has this exhibition to do with the traveling of lonely geologist Valentin Sorgers whose exhausting journey back from the Arctic Circle to New York, at least in the narrative, finds no end? Well, Liu Xiaodong transforms his life journey, which apparently has not come to an end, into art. A mono show in two places, namely the Kunsthalle and the NRW Forum, presents more than 60 works that have been created over the last 25 years. With painting, drawing, (overpainted) photography, even a film from 1993, “The Days”, in which Liu Xiaodong and his wife play the lead roles as an artist couple, a mono show introduces a Chinese artist who is already among the well-established Big Names in China. On a tour through the two museums, where his work is grouped in various rooms, according to the various stages of his journey, we travel with him: experiencing his homeland, encounters in China, traveling outside his country, and finally the way back to Beijing. The NRW Forum focuses on photography and the Kunsthalle presents Liu Xiaodong’s paintings.
Classic painting tradition. And irritating breaks.
It is noteworthy that Liu Xiaodong does not work from a photo, but actually in a “classical“ manner, in the face of his motif, often “en plein air“. He chooses and arranges his artistic motifs very carefully, and is not concerned with the single moment, but rather with „getting hold of“ and keeping the memory of a situation.His digital “painting machine” stands in a strange contradiction to this, a camera on the roof of the NRW Forum, whose incessant digital recordings are just as incessantly and without selection translated into the analog brushstrokes of a painting machine. However, the actual transformation process of machine „painting” again has the appearance of a “classical” style of painting: slow, sometimes even hesitant, the “machine image“ emerges from the digital camera recordings.In his figurative, impasto-painted, often monumental works Liu Xiaodong uses forceful brushstrokes to capture what he sees: people who are directly affected by tremendous events and upheavals, such as the construction of a railway track through their land, an earthquake that took their home away from them, or workers on the construction site of a giant dam. Liu Xiaodong always focuses on the individual, and makes him or her the center of his art. These identifiable individuals reveal social, social, political or historical reality. And that often does not seem to fit, reveals „tectonic” lines, as in the various huge works whose overall picture is composed of smaller „tiles”, that do not fit together perfectly, but have slight displacements and jumps along the edges.For example, the monumental painting “Time” (2014), composed of smaller picture tiles, shows a group of men and women sitting on the floor which even look idyllic somehow. In the background and in the distance a man lies face-down. Is he sleeping, is he dead? The floor tiles all around have rust-red spots. Is that blood? One of the women from the small group in the foreground looks over, she is the only one. The picture is inspired by the South Korean Gwangju massacre. What do we see there? Does reality re-assemble itself over time and in retrospect, though nevertheless, remains fractal?
