05 / LIU QIMING
Media & Publications
News and interviews, critical writing and artist-authored essays, catalogues, books, magazines and newspapers.
Criticism & Essays
Beyond Borders · The Art of Empathy
Grace Yang’s curatorial essay for Pandemic · Empathy considers freedom of thought, artistic empathy and the human condition during the pandemic.
Forced Demolition and the Spirit of Contract
Liu Qiming considers land use, demolition and the spirit of contract through the experiences of Suojia Village, Chaoyang’s art districts and Songzhuang.
From Social Reciprocity to Play: A Sociological Reading of Liu Qiming’s Red Envelope
Liao Liao reads the one-fen electronic red envelope through the changing relationships between social reciprocity, exchange, equality, and play.
The Meaning of Images in Liu Qiming’s Social Media Circle
Liao Liao examines fragmentation, shared identities, visual consumption, and the distance between an image and the event it represents.
Floating Clouds: A Work of the Inner Life Beyond Vision
Liu Xiaoqian considers the pared-down compositions, social experience and thought in Floating Clouds, and the difficulty of bringing vision and imagery into resonance.
Examining History and Facing Reality
Li Pin responds to Liu Qiming’s Sensitive Words for a Day, discussing historical memory, social responsibility and the writer’s own views on contemporary society.
Art’s Contemporaneity and the Entanglements of Fate — Wu Yongqiang in Conversation with Liu Qiming
Wu Yongqiang and Liu Qiming discuss cultural relevance, the equality of artistic media, historical memory and the relation between contemporary art and social criticism.
The “Suojia Village Phenomenon” Is Not a Story — An Interview with Liu Qiming
Li Jianzhang interviews Liu Qiming about the Suojia Village artist community, threatened demolitions, the 2007 Restart exhibition, art education and artists’ responsibilities as citizens.
A Reverie on an Oil Painting: Floating in the Air
Jing Yu reflects on the figure, gray space and troubled sense of fate in Liu Qiming’s Swimmer No. 01, in an essay written in Hangzhou in 2009.
Preserving Personal Historical Memory — On Liu Qiming’s Oil Paintings
Wang Lin considers Liu’s painting as a personal, poetic response to historical forgetting, and a challenge to collective discourse.
Life Hanging by a Thread — Liu Qiming and His Paintings
Gao Ling follows the thread connecting Liu’s personal experience, symbolic political landscapes, and the precarious figures suspended within them.
Between Passion and Reflection — On Liu Qiming’s Oil Paintings
Wu Yongqiang reads Liu’s changing visual languages as a continuous inquiry into dignity, memory, passion, and the individual’s historical condition.
Open Letter to the Artists Participating in Restart: Suojia Village—International Art Camp Exhibition
Before the opening, Liu Qiming and Li Fang explain preparations, fundraising, publicity and arrangements for opening the artists’ studios.
The Art of Liu Qi
He Duojun considers Liu Qi’s rural childhood, his journeys between the plateau and the city, and the recognition of his paintings, examining their social critique, viewpoint and developing individuality.
Against the Norm
Curator and critic Fang Zhenning examines the fine red lines in Liu Qiming’s oil paintings as a visual language shaped by painting and lived experience, exploring bodily suspension, conflict with order, and lives poised between faith and the abyss.
Liu Qiming: Art Is Noah’s Ark at the Site of Human Catastrophe
In a CCA interview during the COVID-19 pandemic, Liu Qiming discusses life in New York, political and cultural divisions, volunteer work, and New York COVID-19 Color Diary.
Asking Heaven (A Faint Light)
A poem dedicated to the painter, moving between darkness, an almost vanishing light and the thoughts prompted by his work.
Interview for an American Art Magazine
A bilingual conversation on artistic independence, historical memory, changing forms of expression, and the relationship between personal life and social criticism.
Farewell to the Mask: The Art of Liu Qi
Gong Shui considers passion, ideas and social masks through Liu Qi’s black-and-white paintings and works shown in his 1995 solo exhibition, reading his artistic practice as a succession of farewells and acts of self-transcendence.
One Yuan for One Hundred People?
Peter Agni examines Red Envelope through the social, commercial and reciprocal meanings of the gift, focusing on the expectations and inner responses elicited when one yuan is divided among one hundred participants.
Liu Qiming: Recording History in Painting
Wang Yaqing reflects on encountering Liu Qiming’s paintings through Wu Yongqiang’s writing, and on the recovery of historical truth and personal memory through color and form.
The Highest Directive: Drinking Water of One’s Own Accord, Urinating Involuntarily
An archived visitor’s account of an afternoon at 798, including a personal response to Liu Qiming’s A Single Thread paintings and their tension between lightness and weight.