Liu Shiming and Lois Conner shine at the Liu Shiming Gallery

Liu Shiming 'Bejing Stories' Installation View, courtesy Liu Shiming Foundation

Beijing Stories

Sculptures by Liu Shiming and photographs by Lois Conner

Liu Shiming Art Gallery

15 E 40th St 5th FL, New York, NY 10016
 

By DAVID JAGER February 7, 2025

Liu Shiming, a Chinese sculptor whose iconoclastic career led him away from the monumental into the deeply personal, is subject of a quiet retrospective in the center of Manhattan. Housed at the Liu Shiming art gallery, part of a foundation dedicated to his legacy, the show features dozens of Shiming's small-scale figurines, works of contemporary sculpture dedicated to moments of community and shared intimacy. In this show they are paired with the photographs of Lois Conner, photographs of urban China that act as neutral backdrops to Shiming's timeless scenes. Contemporary China and eternal China meet in the same room.

Shiming's artistic journey reflects a larger story arc in twentieth century Chinese culture that often goes underreported. He reached international success early with his monumental public sculpture “Cutting Through Mountains to Bring Water” (a model of the sculpture is included in the exhibit’s lobby). A tribute to the waterworks projects of the great leap forward, it distinguished itself with its inclusion of naturalistic landscape elements. It also brought him lasting fame. The heroic figure, thrusting his muscled, uniformed chest into the future, became an icon of the new China and was displayed internationally.

 Liu Shiming "Cutting Through Mountains to Bring Water" Bronze maquette. Courtesy Liu Shiming Foundation. 

With the shift away from the excesses of the revolution, especially during the reform years- years marked by Shiming's own years in re-education- his heroic style was supplanted with something strikingly original. His large, abstracted and heroic figures shrank in scale, replaced by figurines so modest and tenderly human you are afraid your gaze might jostle them.  These small-scale marvels of clay and bronze chronicle mark a shift away from political concerns and striving to provide a glimpse into the daily lives of ordinary people. He is the best contemporary example of sculpture devoted solely to perennial Chinese themes.

Shiming's figures are deeply rooted in the Chinese working class. They are his sole subject, and he records them in the process of doing the simplest activities. Working, gathering, living together. He shows them in their boats, pushing wheelbarrows, weaving, selling fruit at market or simply sitting together communal courtyards. Ordinary work and the activities of daily living and family life are his most prized themes.  His grandson is a popular subject. His tiny figures embrace often, whether it is lovers, or a mother encircling a child in her arms at a train station. The intensity and warmth of these moments are palpable and often belies their scale.

His small bronze from 1983 “in Love”, is a summation of several deep cultural shifts that occurred during Shiming's lifetime. The couple, squatting on the floor are embracing in an open show of affection that would have been unthinkable in the China of Shiming's youth. It also shows his incredible talent for conveying gestural emotion. Everything in the couples embrace reflects the intensity of their union, but conveyed with such homespun empathy and lived-in subtlety you might miss it. In recalls the revolutionary naturalism of Rembrandt, whose similarly small-scale etchings of ordinary Dutch life marked a departure from the starchy Hellenistic Classicism of his predecessors.

The same sentiment carries through with Shiming's sculpture  ‘Bejing Lovers’, where the comfortable embrace between a man and a woman tells a subtle story of its own. Watching them lean together and seeing the woman’s face turning smiling to the side, we see the same adept psychology at work, Shiming's ability to use simplicity as a cover for what is in fact a complex and subtle psychological study.

    Liu Shimming "Bejing Lovers"

      Courtesy Liu Shimming Foundation

Part of his talent for simplicity grows directly out of Shimming’s immersion in Chinese Folk Art and his love for rural Chinese village life. The simplified sense of shape, often bordering on caricature, is present in every figure. Through this visual nod to its aesthetic we sense his allegiance to the long arc of Chinese history, its time-honored ways of going about its everyday business. Shimming addresses a timeless China, one that has persisted for millennia.

 Liu Shimming 'Residential Building' Courtesy Liu Shimming Institute

His portrayal of a Chinese Courtyard, for instance, featuring worn buildings that lean almost comically with age, somehow manages to convey a deep love for the perennial Chinese way of life. Equally touching are his tiny moveable figures he places outside a sculpture of a prefab Chinese building, ‘Residential Building (2005)’. Even with the buildings forbidding, utterly modernized façade, his little human figures appear as natural as ever. It seems to say “History may demand monumental shifts, but the Chinese people abide”. China’s entrenched rural character, expressed through its people and customs, persists unchanged.

Shimming attended the Bejing art academy under the tutelage of its president, noted Chinese calligrapher Xu Beinhong, who personally selected students solely on the basis of their talent. After working for Zhen Zhusao he was transferred to China’s first national institute devoted to sculpture, the Chinese Sculpture Factory. Despite his success in Bejing, Shimming requested a transfer to the largely agricultural Henan province, a move many saw as baffling. A historic region that was also lampooned as a back water, it nonetheless contains some of China’s earliest paleolithic artifacts. These were the figures that became the focus of the rest of his career.

After a decade in Henan province, much of it spent in hardship and re-education, Shimming forged a new style, one considered highly irregular for the time, but that gained slow traction nevertheless. He persisted in his solitary art as a sort of outcast, if not an outright crank. His self-portrait from 1989, with its nearly rectangular body and expressive, oversized head, shows the bravery this must have entailed. His face is weathered by decades of upheaval but still endeavors to look, with unflinching and rather severe determination, into the verities of everyday life.

 Liu Shimming 'Self Portrait'  courtesy Liu Shimming Foundation

The scale and range of Shimming’s work in this retrospective is so broad it can’t entirely be covered here. Contrasted with Lois Conner’s handsome, imposing photos of Bejing architecture, we get a sense of the Chinese paradox, of a country deeply committed to cutting edge modernization that is nonetheless one of the oldest continuous civilizations- four thousand years and counting- in human history.

Shimming is an intriguing and iconoclastic figure in contemporary Chinese art, a man who went beyond modern China’s abstract lionization of the proletariat to portray a Chinese working class in a manner that proves far more enduring and touchingly human. His figures transcend the political trappings of his tumultuous era to show us the perennial spirit of the Chinese people. As Shimming said himself about his work:

“ I primarily want to express spiritual things. Spirit represents life. And things like a sculptural sensibility, anatomy, or form, these things are secondary” WM

Exhibition continues to March 25^th, 2025