Liu Xiaodong
On the face of it, Liu Xiaodong’s latest exhibition at the Lisson Gallery in London reinforces usual descriptions of the artist’s work as ‘realist’. At the exhibition’s core are a series of large-scale paintings, depicting the interiors of public houses and a restaurant, that have been rendered with a distinctly under-idealising eye for detail. In one painting a large dog slumps over a bar counter, while its owners stand in attendance dressed in stained chef’s whites and scruffy summer working casuals. In another, an oriental style interior, uncannily empty of people, is represented, its kitschy petrolite surfaces and serpentine decorations contrasting with the sentinel presence of two starkly black, symmetrically counter-posed electric fans. In yet another, a vampirically grey-skinned and sclerotic-eyed couple, again dressed in working clothes, preside bathetically over a pub interior, in which a young child at play on a roughly boarded wooden floor seeks to return our gaze. For those familiar with the urban interiors of London this is the instantly recognisable territory of the quick (or not so quick) after work drink, and the drunkenly impulsive late night curry or kebab—a world of intensely cosmopolitan babble and conversational telegraphings of almost certainly exaggerated urban professional lifestyles. Liu has grasped the manifest visual semiotics of this intensely mixed-up gentrified ‘spit and sawdust’ world with evident aplomb.
Liu’s capacity to render the ripped backside of London life in such apparently knowing detail was aided not only by the artist’s now well established method of painting in situ but also of interacting actively with the individuals and communities he depicts. This signature approach no doubt enables Liu to gain far greater insights into the significance of the social milieus