Installation view, Beijing Stories: Liu Shiming and Lois Conner at Liu Shiming Art Foundation
Beijing Stories: Liu Shiming and Lois Conner
Liu Shiming Art Foundation
15 E 40th St 5th FL, New York, NY 10016
Jan 16 – March 21, 2025
This show, located at the Liu Shiming Foundation on East 40th Street in New York City, presents two outstanding artists: Liu Shiming, who lived in Beijing for most of his adult life from 1975 until his death in 2010, and Lois Conner, who earned her MFA in photography at Yale and has visited Beijing almost annually for decades. One might observe, upon seeing the exhibition, that both artists have engaged in realist studies of Beijing, China’s capital and home to the Central Academy of Fine Arts—China’s most prestigious art school and the site of Liu’s education.
Beijing still exudes chaos, overcrowding, and bureaucratic power in equal measure. Liu’s works often convey a sense of domesticity and emotional closeness, whereas Conner’s black-and-white images are more objectively descriptive, sometimes depicting the city’s urban decay. The Chinese temperament—its preference for public harmony despite private complexities—emerges in both bodies of work.
Liu’s bronzes tend to be small, requiring pedestals to make them easy for the audience to view. In the wonderful, nearly folk-art-inspired arrangement Chinese Courtyard, we see a group of seven small buildings, their rough windows and doors protruding from the structures themselves. Within this makeshift enclosure, several figures appear, including one on the left who seems to be sifting rice. The style of the piece harks back centuries, and much of its charm lies in the ingenuous simplicity of its architectural forms. This work is as much a meditation on memories of early craftsmanship—dating back millennia—as it is a product of the 21st century.
In the charming red and tan clay work Mother Returns (Standing) (1993), Liu portrays a mother standing upright in a light red coat, while a small child with simple features stands between her knees and thighs. The piece strongly resembles a Tang dynasty work, down to the suggestively historical hairstyle of the figures.
One challenge for artists in a culture as venerable as China’s is how to engage with its vast artistic history. Many 20th-century and contemporary Chinese artists borrow visual vocabularies from past millennia. There are moments when the old and new meet successfully, as they do here.
Grandmother’s Pekingese Dogs (1983) is a charming depiction of a grandmother figure holding two Pekingese at her waist. Her expression exudes warmth and contentment, to the point where the sculpture nearly borders on sentimentality. Many of Liu’s sculptures depict domestic life—modernism’s dramatic shifts were not part of his artistic vision.
In contrast, the works of Lois Conner communicate both strength and sensitivity, addressing the physical and emotional decay of contemporary life. Conner deftly deconstructs the visual language of a country that once embraced extreme idealism but now leads a double life, balancing capitalist and communal ties. While she may not deliberately frame this duality, her images contain evidence of disquiet—an unease shared worldwide.
For instance, in the marvelous horizontal photograph Star Roof, eight outlines of stars rise from wooden supports on a rooftop, leading the eye toward buildings and trees in the middle distance. Above, Beijing’s ever-present gray sky looms. One is drawn to Conner’s visual skill, yet there may be a subtle critique of stagnant political structures embedded in the image.
Another photograph, emblematic of everyday life, depicts a strip of open houses, a generator positioned two stories above the street, a banner with Chinese characters, and people standing casually across the horizontal plane. The image possesses the sweep of a realist painting, but it also suggests a bygone era, replaced by a faster, more electronic, and increasingly congested cityscape.
The final image, an unlikely trilogy of trees and leaves, is said to have been photographed in Beijing. Each of the three images features one or two large trees in the foreground, with smaller trees positioned just behind them. Above, in a gray but luminous sky, patterns of leaves stretch across the upper register. Their dusty hues are strikingly evident in Conner’s careful compositions.
This exhibition makes a compelling case for seeing Beijing as a continuum, bridging the early second half of the 20th century to the present. These works are not historical pastiches, though they might appear as such, given the rapid acceleration of technological (electronic) time. Liu and Conner, both major artists, document a Beijing that is nearly unrecognizable to those who lived there one or two generations ago. The show moves fluidly through memory, spanning decades and even a century, demonstrating that historical awareness is not merely an academic theme but a moral perspective—one that visual culture can powerfully sustain.
