Liu Xiaodong’s Time is a large painting composed of twenty smaller-sized canvases, made in response to the 10th Gwangju Biennale theme of obliteration and renewal.After spending four weeks in Gwangju, meeting young students and teenagers from various social and economic backgrounds, Liu painted a small group in the vicinity of Chonnam Provincial Office, a location that is significant to the Gwangju Massacre. Here, Liu portrays the young generation that did not witness or participate in the Gwangju Democratic Uprising. He selected his subjects based on letters they had written, which described their personal relationship with the past and major historical events. All in their late teens, his subjects were portrayed individually, but brought together as a group in the composition. By painting each canvas on a different day, under different conditions and at varying times, Liu produces a composition that is formed of unique fragments. This way he constructs a puzzle from the built environment, where each canvas both continues and disrupts the architectural setting.Through his painting he redefines the role of the individual in society, and the manner in which a collection of individuals work to form a collective.
Liu is a painter of modern life, whose large-scale works function as a kind of history painting for the present. Engaging with the human dimension of such global issues as population displacement, environmental crisis, and economic upheaval, his carefully orchestrated compositions walk the line between artifice and reality, while his subversion of figurative painting amounts to a conceptual stance.
Quote from the exhibition catalogue accompanying 10th Gwangju Biennale, Burning Down the House, 2014.