Guided Workshop: Interpreting the Paintings of Liu Xiaodong

In today’s visual culture, we consume images at an unprecedented speed—visual information that can be instantly recognised, retold, and quickly scrolled past. Painting, however, has never been merely an image.

Before anything else, it is a tangible object in the real world. It possesses weight, a breathing surface, layers of accumulated colour, and brushstrokes that reveal moments of hesitation or resolve. Through its physical scale and material presence, painting enters our bodily perception, asserting itself upon our senses with either quiet subtlety or undeniable force.

At the same time, painting resists immediate comprehension. It draws upon memory, suspends judgement, and compels us to confront forms of lived experience that cannot be readily summarised amid the accelerated circulation of images.

Guided Workshop: Interpreting the Paintings of Liu Xiaodong brings together three speakers from different professional backgrounds to redirect our attention to painting itself. Rather than simply extending the exhibition narrative, the workshop serves as a shared exercise in close looking: tracing how a painting comes into being, how it occupies physical space, and how it quietly weaves together people, reality, and the viewer within the exhibition.

Photographer De Gejinfu, painter Huang Bingjie, and curator and writer Sun Dongdong will each select one or two works from the exhibition for a 30-minute gallery walkthrough. The programme will then continue with an approximately 40-minute discussion at 2/F, Taikang Art Museum, Timber Shade – Space for All.

Through these three distinct ways of seeing, we hope participants can momentarily set aside the habit of “image searching” and rediscover the richness of painting as a material medium. For an artist like Liu Xiaodong, whose practice remains deeply rooted in lived reality, such an inward-looking conversation may be particularly meaningful.

In this workshop, we will explore:
💬 Looking Across Disciplines

What does the same painting reveal to a photographer, a painter, and a curator? This workshop is an experiment in cross-disciplinary looking. By moving between different professional approaches, we hope to relearn how to look at painting—and, in turn, reconsider how we look at the world.

💬 The Material Presence of Painting

If painting is more than an image, what is it first and foremost? From the physical impact of scale and the texture of pigment to the movement of the brush, how do Liu Xiaodong’s paintings engage our bodily experience through their tangible presence?

💬 The Resilience of Painting

Why do certain realities remain more compelling in painting than in the news? How are fragments of everyday life—lacking dramatic conflict yet quietly affecting us—anchored on the canvas? And why does painting allow these fleeting moments to generate sustained reflection?