Lois Conner and Liu Shihming, the two artists showing in «Beijing Stories,» are both established artists in their respective countries. Conner (from America) and Liu (from China make, respectively, striking black-and-white photos and small bronzes. Each body or work addresses Beijing life. Conner is reportorial, but also highly lyric in her presentation of people, architecture, and nature; she has been traveling to China, particularly, Beijing, from New York City for several decades. Liu, trained at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, and made much of his work there durig his adult life. He makes three-dimensional art, mostly of people, that reports on everyday life in China during the latter part of the 20th century.
Conner is still living, while Liu died in 2010. Both persons are consummate artists. Conner produces marvelous street scenes and images of nature, transforming her point of view into that of an artist grappling with China’s outstanding tradition of paintings from nature. Her urban perspective holds sway, though. She captures China’s most important city, both in art and politics, and shows us its workings while refusing to take an evident political stance.
In the case of Liu, whose career proceeds that of Conner’s, his bronzes capture much of the everyday life of his time. Viewers pick up Liu’s emphasis on personal life: a grandmother with her Pekingese dog, the head of a father supporting the upside-down head of his infant son. The political conflicts of the 20th century are simply not regarded, although Conner’s sharp eye records scenes that could be interpreted as a kind of political commentary—even if she is scrupulously objective in subject matter.
China is a place of charming contrasts. Since the turn of the last entry, it has completely caught up with the rest of the world, although there are moments in the work of both artists that can remind us of a time when the dynasties were in place. Maybe these ties are the reason why Liu never left his repertoire of family life, the result of a style that only used recognizable forms. But Conner’s photos, classic images that reveal a modernist view, point to more recent times—and this means that she, unlike Liu, is closely attuned to the present. As time goes on, modernism will remain in the embrace of many artists; Cpnnner is so good at what she does. It becomes clear that her manner of working will look back to early documentary photography and forward to a reportorial vision that maintains the humanistic values she espouses in her art.
This objectivity and high regard for comp-positional arrangement can be seen easily in Conner’s photos. In many ways, Corner is a classical artist who has taken interest in an ancient culture she records with anthropological tact. One can see this at once in the pictures. The black-and-white photo titled World Fantasy Hotel, Shijingxian (2000), known informally as Star Hotel, concerns the rooftop of the building, on which the image of eight pointed stars dominate. They have a hollow interior and rise from the roof up against the sky, overcast as the Beijing heavens so often are. The stars are propped up by lengths of lumber. In the middle distance we see buildings, but they are obscured to some extent by the stars, which stand out and occupy.
In a second image, Yuanming Yuan (1994), a photographic triptych of trees and leaves, a trunk stands in the foreground of each, with one or two slightly thinner trunks directly behind the main one, Following that, there is the bucolic image of many silver-tray leaves, halfway totally dark between the light gray of a typically overcast sky and the darker tones of the trees in this black-and- white picture. The triptych of similar scene may be modernist, but their bucolic aspect is puzzling: Where did Conner find so romantic a piece of nature in Beijing, home to millions and millions of people–a huge megalopolis? The images are beautiful in a traditional sense; they look like a composition from the Ming. We need not speculate on the influences so much as we are supposed simply to enjoy what we see.
The last image to be considered by Conner is a terrifically complex shot of hutongs, the crowded alleyways with sharp angular roofs making the images a fine study in differing perspective. Again, the differing tonal values, ranging from whitish to gray to black, make for a nearly textural achievement in the image. It refers to a time in China when tall, anonymous apartment towers had not yet overtaken Beijing. Conner is outstanding at pictorial composition the density of Beijjing’s population is suggested in an architecture that is much harder to find in the present-day city. But in her hands the sharp angles of the tiled roofs and differing windows become their own theme, an agreeably formal exercise in shifting the buildings to a two-dimensional presentation and reading them nearly as sculpture.
Liu, in contrast, is a much more traditional artist, although it may be a mistake to compare Conner’s photography, a relatively modern genre that was developed in the 19th century, with the art of Liu, who modeled his works in clay and then cast them in bronze—a much older process. One of his works, Where the Mountains and the Rivers End (2000), shows a mother, wearing a simple but striking hairstyle ending in a bun, and a long red dress, keeping a toddler standing. The maternal figure closely resembles other sculptures its size from the Tamg Dynasty, a great cultural moment in Chinese art.
There is an equally charming work, called Grandmother’s Pekingese Dogs (2000), which presents an older woman with short hair, also wearing, like the first, a long dress. She holds closely her two Pekingese dogs, which extend along her waist. She is smiling, and the center of the sculpture is more her happiness than the dogs. Bother works are simply shaped, yet they relate to sculptural traditions that were strong a millennium years ago.
Liu’s treatment of adults and those who rely on them, children’s and animals, is meant to be seen as humorous sculpture, in clay. Eternal Love: The Continuation of Life (1991), is a formally comic image of a father, smiling with barely hidden. mirth, holding a baby boy upright with his thin arms as he stands upside-down, head to head in a pose that looks like an acrobatic trick. The baby has a noticeable pot belly, as babies do. Liu generally is very much a traditional master, in tune with the keeping of figurative art. Perhaps he is driven by Western art history as well as China’s past. It is hard to say. In any case, his psychological subtleties and warmth of person stay evident throughout his body of work.
The last piece to be discussed, Chinese Courtyard (2000), looks like the meeting courtyard of a farming town. The forms are done in miniature: Seven buildings, with just enough detail—tiled roofs, doors, windows—to make them interesting—form a square, boundaries by the buildings, in which we find a group of peopl. One seems to be sifting rice, Again, as with the two email figures mentioned, there are precedents for this architectural model that go way back in cultural time. Liu is a modeler who does not deliberately advance his vision with skills; rather, he conveys, subtly the simple forms with a highly accurate hand.
“Beijing Stories” is a remarkable exhibition. Two people from different have revealed their understanding of China in work of highly different sorts. But both are determined to give us a sense of the old and the new in China, a great classical culture. The imagery convinces us that the Chinese are remarkably open to a present determined by a nearly limitless past. If Coonor’s work offers a studiously objective imagery related to a recent China, then Liu celebrates the spirit of his times through warm and often humorous three-dimensional works of art. This leaves us to enjoy the extraordinary culture we see rendered by their efforts. The show keeps this sense of extraordinary achievement and emotional depth alive. And when traces of the historical China become visible, we know that the Chinese vision is often supported by it nearly endless past, keeping the current art alive.
Texto en español
