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拍品专文
“In my eyes, painting is the most fascinating artistic medium, because it is the most direct way to connect with the perception of the viewer. It can compel us to deploy all our mental faculties to observe certain things - it is like a flame.”
- LIU XIAODONG
The flame that Chinese artist Liu Xiaodong describes is the mysterious force that burns within the painting The Fire of 1841 (Lot 43). This painting is the fruit of an in-depth sociological survey. Liu Xiaodong, his studio assistants, and a film crew travelled to a town hidden in the mountains of Austria and stayed there for a month. During their stay, they staged a large-scale plein air painting event entitled The Process of Painting. It initiated a dialogue between local experience and the history of a foreign land.
The story began in a little town near Graz named Eisenerz. Historically, its economy is primarily driven by the mining of iron ore. A local painter by the name of Johann Max Tendler (1811-1870) painted a work that depicted the arrival of the King to observe the prosperity of the town (Fig. 1). Due to years of mining and the economic impact of globalisation, industry in the small town has waned. The population has declined to less than five thousand residents, with industrial ruins and abandoned properties littering the landscape. Liu Xiaodong visited the town’s museum and talked to many locals. As he learned more about the history of this town, he became a sensitive observer of its circumstances. He came to the street where the King received the revelling miners — it was the same place that was depicted inTendler’s painting. This experience became the basis of his work The Fire of 1841. The cheers of the parade had long since faded away. What was left in front of Liu Xiaodong was the somber silence of its history. With this work, he was determined to inspire the viewers to contemplate on the nature of society.
Liu Xiaodong has received great acclaim in the artistic community for his portraiture, so it was unexpected that he submitted two large scale landscape paintings for the programme The Process of Painting. Although his work references the composition of Tendler’s historic work, Liu Xiaodong insisted his usual practice of painting plein air for The Fire of 1841. This enabled him to empathise with the time, place, and people and to be guided by these factors (Fig. 2). These once bustling streets are now desolate, populated by only four figures, dressed in all black, loitering in the corner. They echo the four figures in Tendler’s work — this arrangement hints that the small town can no longer return to its bygone days of prosperity. Their dubious presence at the margin of the picture paradoxically draws more attention to that area of the composition, creating a sharper contrast with the natural landscape. The orderly road in Tendler’s work has now been transformed by the artist into a river, which reflects the images of the four figures. The dying embers, symbolising the former glory of this town, flicker eerily in the reflection; the overall effect is a cinematic scene with the strange overtones of a cryptic atmosphere. This amalgamation of fiction and documentary illustrates the inextricable relationship between Liu Xiaodong and the cinematic art.
Humanity has always been the core of Liu Xiaodong’s artistic practice. He graduated from the oil painting department at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in the 1980s. At the time, China was going through the early stages of economic reform. Western modernism was introduced to China, influencing the formation of the Chinese contemporary art. Liu Xiaodong was crowned with the title “Artist of the New Generation”, because his subjects are always the ordinary people, presenting a break away from the restraints of the historic narrative and religious subject matter that were taught in the academy. In Courbet’s painting Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet (Fig. 3), the artist depicted himself carrying the tools of painting up the mountains to paint plein air. His objective was to find a new direction from reality that rejects the academy and idealisation. This attitude precisely mirrors the aspirations of the young Chinese artists in the 1980s. Both Liu Xiaodong and Courbet feel that they have an obligation to be socially responsible. Violation and Train are metaphors that reveal the injustice within society. The Migration of the Three Gorges and New Migrants of the Three Gorges are direct interventions with a social incident. After painting Eighteen Arhats in 2004, Liu Xiaodong began laying the foundation of painting plein air during his travels to Fengjie County, Cuba, and Israel. Painting was transformed into a holistic process that involves creativity, site-specific execution, and exhibition.
The Fire of 1841 is no ordinary landscape painting. It is the crystallisation of history, society, humanism, as well as the exercise in plein air painting and imagination. Liu Xiaodong’s treatment of light and shadow, colours, and brushwork is reminiscent of the jovial pleasure of the Impressionists (Fig. 4). If the adage “travelling for a thousand miles is better than studying a thousands volumes” still holds true, Liu Xiaodong is also correct to “travel around the world to paint instead of staying in the studio”- he is closer to a vagabond than an artist. Liu Xiaodong’s painting practice is not bound by borders- the world is his studio. This devotee of realism faithfully reveres social reality. Stories from foreign lands are his mirror on which viewers with different backgrounds can reflect on their lives. To understand the impermanence of existence is to understand the eternal truth.
- LIU XIAODONG
The flame that Chinese artist Liu Xiaodong describes is the mysterious force that burns within the painting The Fire of 1841 (Lot 43). This painting is the fruit of an in-depth sociological survey. Liu Xiaodong, his studio assistants, and a film crew travelled to a town hidden in the mountains of Austria and stayed there for a month. During their stay, they staged a large-scale plein air painting event entitled The Process of Painting. It initiated a dialogue between local experience and the history of a foreign land.
The story began in a little town near Graz named Eisenerz. Historically, its economy is primarily driven by the mining of iron ore. A local painter by the name of Johann Max Tendler (1811-1870) painted a work that depicted the arrival of the King to observe the prosperity of the town (Fig. 1). Due to years of mining and the economic impact of globalisation, industry in the small town has waned. The population has declined to less than five thousand residents, with industrial ruins and abandoned properties littering the landscape. Liu Xiaodong visited the town’s museum and talked to many locals. As he learned more about the history of this town, he became a sensitive observer of its circumstances. He came to the street where the King received the revelling miners — it was the same place that was depicted inTendler’s painting. This experience became the basis of his work The Fire of 1841. The cheers of the parade had long since faded away. What was left in front of Liu Xiaodong was the somber silence of its history. With this work, he was determined to inspire the viewers to contemplate on the nature of society.
Liu Xiaodong has received great acclaim in the artistic community for his portraiture, so it was unexpected that he submitted two large scale landscape paintings for the programme The Process of Painting. Although his work references the composition of Tendler’s historic work, Liu Xiaodong insisted his usual practice of painting plein air for The Fire of 1841. This enabled him to empathise with the time, place, and people and to be guided by these factors (Fig. 2). These once bustling streets are now desolate, populated by only four figures, dressed in all black, loitering in the corner. They echo the four figures in Tendler’s work — this arrangement hints that the small town can no longer return to its bygone days of prosperity. Their dubious presence at the margin of the picture paradoxically draws more attention to that area of the composition, creating a sharper contrast with the natural landscape. The orderly road in Tendler’s work has now been transformed by the artist into a river, which reflects the images of the four figures. The dying embers, symbolising the former glory of this town, flicker eerily in the reflection; the overall effect is a cinematic scene with the strange overtones of a cryptic atmosphere. This amalgamation of fiction and documentary illustrates the inextricable relationship between Liu Xiaodong and the cinematic art.
Humanity has always been the core of Liu Xiaodong’s artistic practice. He graduated from the oil painting department at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in the 1980s. At the time, China was going through the early stages of economic reform. Western modernism was introduced to China, influencing the formation of the Chinese contemporary art. Liu Xiaodong was crowned with the title “Artist of the New Generation”, because his subjects are always the ordinary people, presenting a break away from the restraints of the historic narrative and religious subject matter that were taught in the academy. In Courbet’s painting Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet (Fig. 3), the artist depicted himself carrying the tools of painting up the mountains to paint plein air. His objective was to find a new direction from reality that rejects the academy and idealisation. This attitude precisely mirrors the aspirations of the young Chinese artists in the 1980s. Both Liu Xiaodong and Courbet feel that they have an obligation to be socially responsible. Violation and Train are metaphors that reveal the injustice within society. The Migration of the Three Gorges and New Migrants of the Three Gorges are direct interventions with a social incident. After painting Eighteen Arhats in 2004, Liu Xiaodong began laying the foundation of painting plein air during his travels to Fengjie County, Cuba, and Israel. Painting was transformed into a holistic process that involves creativity, site-specific execution, and exhibition.
The Fire of 1841 is no ordinary landscape painting. It is the crystallisation of history, society, humanism, as well as the exercise in plein air painting and imagination. Liu Xiaodong’s treatment of light and shadow, colours, and brushwork is reminiscent of the jovial pleasure of the Impressionists (Fig. 4). If the adage “travelling for a thousand miles is better than studying a thousands volumes” still holds true, Liu Xiaodong is also correct to “travel around the world to paint instead of staying in the studio”- he is closer to a vagabond than an artist. Liu Xiaodong’s painting practice is not bound by borders- the world is his studio. This devotee of realism faithfully reveres social reality. Stories from foreign lands are his mirror on which viewers with different backgrounds can reflect on their lives. To understand the impermanence of existence is to understand the eternal truth.