'Four Art Gallery Shows to See Right Now' - Liu Xiaodong in The New York Times

24 July 2020

“Spring in New York,” an online exhibition of Mr. Liu’s recent watercolors at Lisson Gallery, presents some of the finest artistic representations I’ve seen of the pandemic-gripped city: small, ardent paintings of empty streets and budding trees, whose delicacy gives them astonishing authority. (The exhibition officially “closed” on July 12 but remains on view in full online.) Initial pictures of the view from Mr. Liu’s balcony precede cannily spare watercolors of an empty park, a lone pedestrian, or a hand truck laden with Amazon deliveries, mostly painted in the West Village under an electric blue sky. Yu Hong, Mr. Liu’s wife and a fellow painter, walks with another artist under a flowering magnolia tree, its rich pink leaves complementing the light blue of their face masks. By June, Mr. Liu is painting a Black Lives Matter protest as a spare panorama specked with gray, and gents sunbathing at what looks like the Greenwich Village riverfront, their half-dressed picnic explicitly recalling Manet’s 1863 “Déjeuner sur l’Herbe.”

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Image: Liu Xiaodong, Liu Wa and Yu Hong under Flowering Trees 2020.4.17, 2020 (detail)