Liu Xiaodong B. 1963

In the 2004 essay that accompanied Liu Xiaodong's major solo show of paintings created on-site at the Three Gorges, the artist and curator Ai Weiwei coined a term that captivatingly summarizes Liu's painterly perspective, calling it "a standpoint without position."

Ai Weiwei noted how Liu Xiaodong's "crazy world lacks the hypocritical airs and graces as well as the hackneyed and stereotyped aesthetics which are representative of the ordinary artists' questionable cultural position and standpoints. This standpoint without position becomes a more candid free, and simple narration of each of these life stories, while the characters and events reflect a strange yet distant reality, as if from an alternate word, adding another layer of meaning to the outwardly stable world."[1]

Indeed, Liu's work-from the student painting "Smokers" he exhibited at the iconic China/Avant-Garde exhibition in 1989, to the monumental cycles of migrant workers and Thai sex workers he has completed in recent years-all aim at this project of presenting a reality at once more lyrical and more real than the one from which his paintings grow. The present work, Standing Upside-Down (Lot 143) dates to a key moment in the development of that painterly world.

In the spring of 1993, Liu Xiaodong and his fiancee, the painter Yu Hong, traveled to the U.S. to participate in an exhibition. In June of that year, they were married in New York. Their friend and mentor, the artist Chen Danqing, convinced them to remain stateside after their wedding to observe the American scene. In New York they came into contact both with American artists-notably the realist painter Mark Tansey—and members of the Chinese artistic diaspora then living in New York such as Ai Weiwei and Xu Bing. Liu emerged from this formative year with both an expanded sense of artistic practice beyond the Beijing he knew so well, and a renewed commitment to exploring its visual motifs. He managed to take from his encounter a sense of the Western art world, but not to get caught up in the themes of cultural difference that captured those who stayed abroad longer.

The present work was executed soon after Liu Xiaodong got back to Beijing, eager to return to his studio in the southeastern suburbs after a long period of limited output. In the summer of 1994 he painted this and two other canvases of identical size (174 by 119 cm) and vertical composition in succession, all of which endure among his major works. The first was "Blind Man Walking," depicting a solitary male figure holding a cane and proceeding down a street. The second, "Descendant of Yugong," shows a young, shirtless boy kicking futilely against a wall (Sotheby's sale HK0216, Lot 35). "Standing Upside-Down" is the most playful of this grouping, depicting a pair of lovers clad in bathing suits on a beach, the male holding the female upside down.

The present work appears together with "Descendant of Yugong" in a preliminary acrylic sketch entitled "Last Summer" along with a detail of the lower male torso that is the central motif in the work. The caption below the initial rendering of  "Standing Upside-down" reads simply, "Yellow light shines on lovers." This line is crossed-out, suggesting that this was considered, and then retracted, as the title for the work. As in most works by Liu Xiaodong, the simplicity of this canvas's subject matter belies the complexity of its texture and composition.

The shirtless male figure recurs throughout Liu Xiaodong's entire corpus, from the self-portaits of the "Mahattan Bathtub" series he completed in New York in 1993 to his "Boys in the Bath House" series of acrylics on paper 2000, and including major works such as "Disobeying the Rules"(1996) and "White Fatso"(2000). These figures, often chubby and pale, offer a way of depicting vulnerability under the cover of reality, and as such they form a cipher for Liu Xiaodong's entire project of turning the social realist lens onto the non-monumental subject. The present work is unique in taking up this central motif but placing it in a context of joy and playfulness rarely found in Liu Xiaodong's often-solemn work.

The critic Yi Ying has remarked that, "The art of the New Students Generation reflects an emphasis on individual experience, which is actually also a new recognition of individual value. This kind of value is unlike the humanist and individual liberation that took place under the collectivist spirit of the 1980's, marking rather an emphasis by individual people on individual interests."[2] The present work, in its straightforward and unsentimental portrayal of an everyday scene from a nascent leisure culture, speaks astutely and obliquely to this emphasis on "individual value," showing the development of Liu Xiaodong's "standpoint without position."

[1] Ai Weiwei, “A Standpoint without Position,?excerpted in Red Flag Collection: Liu Xiaodong, Hong Kong, MAP Book Publishers, 2006, p. 128.

[2] Yi Ying, Liu Xiaodong: Chinese Contemporary Oil Painters Series, Hubei Fine Arts Press, 2000, p. 55.