Finding the Modern Spirit in Tradition: The Sculpture of Liu Shiming at Mason Gross Galleries
(Above photo, left: Liu Shiming, “Female Line Worker,” 1983. Pottery, 3.2"x2"x8.” Right: Liu Shiming, “Dream to Fly,” 1982. Pottery, 9.5"×6"×3.5." (Images courtesy of the Liu Shiming Foundation)
From time to time, a wise thinker comes along, helping us contend with existential mysteries.
Liu Shiming, celebrated as a sculptor in his native China, thinks and speaks like a philosopher. "You should look at life like a child does,” he wrote in his diary in 1982. “When you take the perspective of an innocent child, all love and everything in life feels fresh and lovely."
“LIU SHIMING: Life Gives Beauty Form” – a retrospective on view at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University through Sept. 22, with a public reception and panel discussion Sept. 6, 5-8 p.m. – includes more than 80 sculptures made over the artist’s 60-year career, including 27 works that are being exhibited for the first time in the United States. Shiming (1926–2010) was one of China’s first modern sculptors, embracing a range of styles and approaches that reflected the changing culture of his era.
Most of the works were created in clay and have been cast in bronze, and most are no larger than a melon – his Zodiac figures are about the size of fingers – and yet the feelings they evoke are enormous.
Liu Shiming, “Dream to Fly,” 1982. Pottery, 9.5"×6"×3.5" (Image courtesy of the Liu Shiming Foundation)
In “Looking at Each Other Through the Cage,” two birds, seemingly in love, are separated by the wires that keep one in captivity. Shiming had been inspired by a small bird brought home by a boy that was kept in a cage hanging from the eaves. Soon, an adult bird heard the fledgling’s chirping and came to nourish it. “Looking at Each Other” is about freedom and captivity, and a deep longing to save the suffering.
“He has endowed daily life with poetry,” says art critic and professor Yin Shuangxi in exhibition materials.
“He taught me firing techniques, but I also learned how to be an artist,” recollects a former student of Shiming. “There was no lesson plan, I simply had to pick things up along the way.”
In a video screened in the gallery, Shiming tells rapt young students that his sculpture, casual and simple, is made with no method; that he didn’t entirely abandon his training in Western art at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, in Beijing, but put it in a secondary position, that his primary goal is to express spiritual things. “Spirit represents life,” he tells them, with anatomy and structure being secondary.
In China, his sculpture was seen as earthy and unconventional. He depicted sailors on a boat, a farmer taking a pig to market, a cobbler mending a shoe, travelers carrying luggage.
Women figure prominently. The work takes us into the world of a line worker with a utility belt at her hip, a farmer selling DVDs as she cradles her baby. Women are frequently depicted with their children, and exhibition materials suggest Shiming used his daughter to model for these.
“Sculpture is a vessel for the emotions of life,” Shiming wrote. “I think that sculpture must be focused on people, regardless of whether they are rich or poor.”
The son of an engineer, Liu enrolled in art school as a young boy. Because of childhood polio that led to muscular deterioration and impaired his ability to walk, he ambulated by leaning on a bicycle. And yet this disability never held him back.
After graduation, he won awards and was selected to participate in national projects. He gained international acclaim for his 1950 work “Measuring Land,” a public monument that was also a work of art. He continued to create large-scale, publicly displayed sculptures throughout his career, but he also needed to create personal expressions.
Liu Shiming, "Re-Education," 2004. Bronze, 5.9"x4.9"×3.1"
In 1961, during China’s Cultural Revolution, Shiming left Beijing for Henan, an area of rural villages. There is some discrepancy as to whether his motive was based on an internal longing, or whether it was part of the government’s reeducation program. The Liu Shiming Foundation attributes the move to his love for an opera singer from Henan. (The Foundation was established as a nonprofit in New York in 2021 to promote Shiming’s legacy. It awards annual scholarships to students in Shiming’s name.)
His love for traditional Chinese opera borders on obsession, according to exhibition materials. He collected records and watched opera on TV. He would create opera characters and scenes in clay, including a series on backstage performers. One on view here is of a mother nursing a child as chickens peck at her feet.
Another reason given for his move to Henan was that he was more likely to make a creative breakthrough in the countryside than in Beijing; he wanted to learn about life from the grassroots.
Shiming remained in Henan for 10 years. He wrote that the time he spent there changed his life. “The difficulties of life brought me closer to kind-hearted hard-working ordinary people. They left deep imprints on my memory and were an endless source for my work.” These people might otherwise be forgotten, he wrote.
He was a fan of folk songs. “Contemporary artists should never abandon their roots: folk songs, folk art forms, literature, poetry, painting, stone carving,” he wrote. When living conditions were simple, he believed, and tools and materials were lacking, the artwork developed a personality and a distinctive form.
Liu Shiming, "Self-Portrait," 2000. Bronze, 4.25"×5.5"×5.5”
Today, he is revered in China for depicting ordinary people. He finds rapture in a man hauling a raft, a woman selling vegetables from a street cart. “Human life is finite,” he wrote, “but the life of art is infinite in my work.” He believed that after he was gone, people could still know him from his artwork.
From Henan, Shiming was transferred to Hebei for four years, to the Baoding Mass Culture and Art Center, but left in 1974 to return to Beijing where he was hired by the National Museum of China for artifact restoration. Co-workers say they recall how enamored of the works he was, how he stared at it, and that he felt he was engaging in dialogue with the ancient people. He wrote that during his seven years studying these artifacts, he was influenced and transformed.
It was at this point that everything came together for Shiming, combining traditional sculpture, Chinese folk culture, Western classical sculpture and modernism.
In 1980, the sculpture department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts hired him to manage the kiln. It became a haven where he could make sculpture. Here he delighted in creating scenes from life – such as people riding their bicycles through the city, or a bus driver. In the decades that followed, as the art market became lucrative, Shiming continued to work on what came from his heart and not by what customers were buying.
Liu Shiming, "Portrait of Mengmeng (as a 100-Year-Old)," 1988. Bronze (originally colored plaster), 3.6"×4.3"×6.0"
He made many sculptures based on his grandson Mengmeng. On Mengmeng’s 100th day, Shiming presented the grandson with a portrait of the infant as an old man with the inscription “Long Live Mengmeng.” Shiming made a piggy bank, shaped like a Santa Claus, for Mengmeng. Shiming’s son, Liu Wei, says the only time his father ever got angry was when he was disciplining Mengmeng. “Both my mother and father were fiercely protective of Mengmeng.” When Mengmeng left to study in the U.S., both grandparents cried.
Many subjects of Shiming’s sculptures are pursuing their passions: drummers, flutists, trumpet players pouring their souls into their music; a figure drinking lustily from a vessel; a mother kissing her child; a winged man attempting to fly.
He wrote that life, conscience, and love are the sources of creativity, and he sculpted lovers in many forms, from embracing or sharing affection on a park bench to making love on the back of a horse.
“I am searching for myself,” he wrote. “No matter how other people or trends change, that will never change… An artist can never cast off his roots.”
For children, families, and would-be sculptors of all ages: An interactive clay room will be set up inside the galleries where guests can try their own hand at sculpting in Shiming’s flexible, intuitive style.
