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by Richard Vine (Author)
Liu Shiming (1926-2010) is a revered Chinese artist whose works have had a distinct impact on the course of modern Chinese sculpture. Born in Tianjin in 1926, Shiming attended the prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing, where he was part of the first generation of sculptors trained by the People's Republic of China to study both traditional Chinese art and French modernist principles. Shiming received early recognition for his work, and his student project Measuring Land (1950) was one of the first works exhibited abroad following the establishment of the People's Republic of China.
Though well respected in China, the sculptor, who died in 2010 at the age of eighty-four, is only now beginning to win the wider recognition he deserves. Meanwhile, contemporary competitors are numberless, most of them Instagram-friendly, while art history tends to focus on towering names and indisputably major movements and events: Braque and Picasso inventing Cubism, Duchamp's readymades redefining art itself, Warhol's mind-bending Brillo Boxes, and so on. So why examine an artist in the middle ground? Perhaps, first, because that is where the vast majority of us live, trying to make sense of our lives and grateful for the occasional insight, release, or enrichment that visual art can bring us. Second, because the story of Liu Shiming reveals a great deal about the forces that have shaped postwar art worldwide. He was a man who sought to lead a simple life, dedicated entirely to art, in the midst of China's epochal, dangerously complex twentieth-century social and political changes.
Author Biography
Liu Shiming was born in Tianjin, China in 1926 and is a sculptor trained at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in both Chinese tradition and French modernism. After early recognition for monumental works, he made a radical shift, leaving urban life to observe daily rhythms in rural Henan and Hebei. Returning to Beijing in 1975, he worked in cultural relics restoration at the National Museum of Chinese History. Rejoining CAFA in 1980, access to an electric kiln enabled his distinctively human, free-spirited clay sculptures.
Richard Vine is a New York-based art critic and the former managing editor of Art in America.
