Two Tales of a City
Installation view of Beijing Stories: Liu Shiming and Lois Conner. Courtesy of Liu Shiming Art Gallery and Lois Conner.
In an unsuspecting midtown office building, the Liu Shiming Art Gallery brings together the sculptural work of its eponym and the photographs of Lois Conner. Titled Beijing Stories, the exhibition attempts to weave together the work of two artists with drastically different backgrounds, mediums, and styles into a cohesive narrative, giving the viewer a sense of China’s capital city.
Upon first glance, the conversation between these two artists is difficult to discern aside from its setting. Conner’s work distances itself from its subjects—the environment often built, occasionally natural, is mostly photographed at a distance. In all but a few photographs, human presence seems almost incidental.
Conversely, Liu’s work is largely figurative. There is an intimacy that accompanies the sculptures, something to be expected when many subjects are members of Liu’s own family, as in Eternal Love and Grandmother’s Pekingese Dogs. But Liu’s scenes of city dwellers, workers, and the animals that live alongside them are no less intimate. Liu shows a deep tenderness and reverence in his explorations of humanity and change.
A deeper consideration of their work reveals that both artists’ work is underscored by an exploration of labor and the tensions between tradition and innovation in a rapidly modernizing country.
Installation view of Beijing Stories: Liu Shiming and Lois Conner. Courtesy of Liu Shiming Art Gallery and Lois Conner.
Liu’s sculptures document a changing China through juxtapositions such as Siheyuan (Chinese Courtyard) and Residential Building, which illustrate the shift from residences designed in the traditional Chinese to a more “modern” or ubiquitous apartment complex that could be pulled from virtually any urban city across the world and the impact on the social lives of their inhabitants. The attitude Liu takes towards these changes fluctuates between nostalgic and forward-looking. But his figurations of members of China’s workforce in Educated Youth Janitor and Female Lineworker are decidedly more sanguine than those of the agricultural laborers he envisions in Farm Woman Vendor and Hu Water.
Liu sparks a conversation on industry and the hands behind Beijing’s transformation, which, once engaged in, is difficult to ignore throughout the show.
Even in Conner’s images of architecture alone, which once seemed so far from Liu’s intimate effigies, it is easy to begin thinking of the builders who erected the scaffolding she captures in IM Pei, Bank of China (Under Construction), Beijing, China, or the residents that might gather under the rooftops in Hutong courtyard (from the rooftop), Beijing, China.
Installation view of Beijing Stories: Liu Shiming and Lois Conner. Courtesy of Liu Shiming Art Gallery and Lois Conner.
The last piece of the puzzle comes together in Beijing, China [New Neoclassical], a photograph taken in 1998. Horse-drawn carts stand idle in front of a building reminiscent of a movie set with its colonnade and archways topped with billboards. The image serves as a striking acknowledgment of the fact that the traditional and the modern may not be quite as distinct as one might imagine. Beijing, like any other city, is a place where the threads of time are woven together.
Leaving the gallery and stepping out onto the midtown street only to look up at the MetLife building is a final reminder that modernization is coming for us all, but the past will always have a way of making itself known.
Installation view of Beijing Stories: Liu Shiming and Lois Conner. Courtesy of Liu Shiming Art Gallery and Lois Conner.
Beijing Stories: Liu Shiming and Lois Conner is on view from January 16 to March 21, 2025, at 15 E 40th Street, 5th Floor, New York.
