The flow of life amid a dam’s rise

THE biggest painting in Liu Xiaodong’s exhibition at the Asian Art Museum is a strangely ominous sight. Lost souls and ravaged nature meet the Chinese government’s notion of progress in “Three Gorges: Newly Displaced Population,” a gritty panorama that stretches out almost 33 feet.

Liu has painted the Yangtze River as a vast expanse of grungy water pressing the land into triangular wedges while a great gray hulk of a dam, still under construction, creates a gigantic reservoir. He has taken a high vantage point on the left side of the four-panel work, looking down on the dam, which connects a town on the near side of the river with distant hills.

At the center of the painting, where two sections of land plunge into a V-shape, his viewpoint shifts. Three nasty little kids confront viewers, face to face, with menacing expressions and toy weapons. As the riverbank veers up to the right in a sharp diagonal, a pair of men in dark suits turn their backs and watch the rising water in silence. Behind them, a dead duck falls from the sky. Two other men stare out of the painting with an air of angry resignation. On the far right, scantily clad adolescent prostitutes and cheeky young men appear to have been interrupted while striking a sex-for-money deal.

Life goes on, for better or worse, on the banks of the Yangtze, and Liu is a witness.

“Chinese society is very complicated,” he said at the museum, speaking mostly through his wife and interpreter, Yu Hong, also a highly accomplished figurative painter. They live in Beijing, where both artists teach painting and drawing at the Central Academy of Fine Art, China’s leading art school.

Liu views the dam as “a typically grand-scale Chinese project without human feeling.” But his monumental work has “many complicated meanings,” he said.

If subtleties are lost on an American audience, the main point is clear enough.

“Liu Xiaodong paints the psychic landscape of the new China,” said curator and critic Jeff Kelley, who organized the show. It’s composed of four paintings from the artist’s ambitious “Three Gorges Project” and a 30-foot scroll that tracks Liu’s life through his art.

“The ‘Three Gorges Project’ is an epic narrative about loss,” Kelley said. “This is painting in the service of social issues, but it’s also some of best painting I’ve see in my career. It’s painting on a cinematic scale. It unfolds over time.” But it has nothing to do with heroic spectacles. “It’s the antithesis of Chinese Propaganda painting,” he said.

More than a decade under construction and three years from the expected completion, Three Gorges Dam got its name from the Qutang, Wu and Xiling gorges, which stretch from Fengjie, in Sichuan province, to Yichang, in Hubei province, in central China. The dam is shaping up as the world’s largest hydroelectric facility and one of the most ambitious civil engineering projects in history.

It’s intended to provide tremendous benefits in terms of power and flood control, but at an enormous cost. The reservoir made by building a dam across the Yangtze, the longest river in Asia, will displace 1.9 million people and submerge 13 cities, 140 smaller towns, about 1,350 villages and 62,000 acres of farmland, along with a vast wildlife habitat and archeological sites that will never be excavated.

“When I first visited the area, in 2002, I was shocked,” Liu said. “I knew about the dam, but there are many big projects in China and I couldn’t imagine it. After I saw it, I went there many times. I wanted to paint something, to make a big project of my own.”

The result is a group of paintings that grapple with the spiritual costs of material advancement amid a social transition that is both thrilling and wrenching. Each painting tells its own story -- and each of those has many chapters -- but they share a sense of physical and psychological disjuncture. In “Three Gorges: Newly Displaced Population” and the slightly smaller four-panel painting with a similar title, “Three Gorges: Displaced Population,” abutments of the canvases are jarring. The color of the water shifts; brush strokes are cut off and objects on the ground appear to have been jostled. “Displaced Population” depicts six laborers, each in different dress, shouldering what appears to be a long metal pole. But the level of the pole rises abruptly in each successive panel as the scene moves from left to right.

Does the stepped-up level of the pole reflect the rising river in the landscape behind the men?

“Maybe,” Liu said. But again, it’s complicated. “I am interested in feelings,” he said. “I want to hear the human spirit. The government may get electricity from the dam, but for the people who have to move, it is very sad. They can’t control their lives. They just carry the load. In some ways, they are like the pigs in some of these paintings. But the struggle between humans and nature goes on everywhere in the world, not just in China. My work is always about that conflict and tension.”

One painting in the exhibition, “Wolf Smoke (Smoke Signals),” pairs a smudgy landscape with bright blue mountains in the background with a striking image of a young man squatting on a precipitously high wall. Lost in thought, he looks away from a modern bridge that divides “nature” -- a swath of grayish water -- from the man-made clutter of ramshackle buildings. Two pigs just below him are shut into a small, walled pen. Nearby, a tiny human residence is stuffed into underpinnings of the bridge.

The son of factory workers, Liu was born in 1963 in the village of Jinchen, northern China. He went to Beijing in 1978 to study at the secondary school division of the Central Academy of Fine Arts and continued in the college program, majoring in painting. He was awarded a bachelor of fine arts degree in 1988 and a master’s degree in 1995. Liu learned the official Socialist Realist style but absorbed Western influences as China opened to the outside world. One of many artists who have questioned Socialism’s unfulfilled promises in their work, he returned to his roots for subject matter and developed a style that Kelley calls “a kind of slack Expressionism” -- somewhat like that of American painter Eric Fischl.

Liu paints loosely but precisely, the beauty of painted passages often contrasting with the troubling ugliness of his content. And that’s no accident.

“People’s lives are sad,” he said. “They seem hopeless because they have to stay in environments like the one around the dam. But every day they can enjoy many things. In these paintings, the water is coming to cover everything, but the people have love. I like to use beautiful color and detail to reflect that.”

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A work on location

WHILE working on the “Three Gorges Project,” Liu took many photographs in the region to use as references for paintings made later in his Beijing studio. Last fall, as he wound up the series, he took a different approach, painting a monumental work on location at the riverside town of Fengji. He spent three weeks working with a group of male laborers hired as models on the roof of an apartment building, at the level to which the reservoir is expected to rise.

The process was filmed and is documented in the exhibition catalog in essays by Kelley and William L. Fox. The painting made at Fengjie is part of the project showcased in San Francisco, but it will debut at the Sydney Biennale, June 8 through Aug. 27.

Working from photographs affords many conceptual opportunities for Liu, who sometimes repeats images of particular people -- and pigs -- in different compositions. Painting directly from models is more like work.

“It’s a kind of labor,” he said. “You have to work fast because the sun goes fast and the models move.”

But finding models in Fengji was easy.

“They said I was a good artist because I paid them every day,” Liu said, bursting into laughter. But the project was rewarding and energizing for him.

In China, as elsewhere, he said, many young artists prefer to work with video or electronic technology. “Painting is old. It needs some sun,” he said. “Painting people in their environments can give it more power, more flash. Painting is very close to human feeling.”

In the last few months, Liu has moved to other projects. In Bangkok, he recently hired 11 young prostitutes as models for a series of paintings, created and shown at the Tang Gallery. The subjects are clothed and relatively relaxed, but they look bored and unhappy. Much like the people in the “Three Gorges Project,” they seem to be waiting and hoping for something. Both series deal with the migration of Asian people, some displaced by growth and development, others by economic necessity.

Liu has no illusions about art effecting social improvement. But he hopes people who see his work think about the conflicts he finds so compelling.

“Humans are part of a life chain,” he said, “but they want to change everything. I don’t know the answers. I just wonder if humans’ work is useful or useless. I create this art because I am not satisfied with the world around me.”