Public Reception and Panel Discussion for the Exhibition, “LIU SHIMING: Life Gives Beauty Form”, to be Held Soon

The Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University presents “LIU SHIMING: Life Gives Beauty Form”, a retrospective of the renowned Chinese modern sculptor Liu Shiming, from 31 July to 22 September 2023. The exhibition features more than 80 sculptures created over the course of Liu’s six-decade career, including 27 works that are being shown for the first time in the United States. The exhibition also features 12 paintings that demonstrate Liu’s methodology in close observation and research of the human form and daily life.
 
As part of the public reception for the exhibition, which was  held at the Mason Gross School of Art on 6 September 2023 from 5pm to 8 pm, the Department of Art & Design hosted a panel discussion from 5:30 pm  to 7 pm. Guests were invited to discuss Liu’s art and legacy, and they include Tamara Sears, renowned Associate Professor of Art History at Rutgers University, John Yau, poet and Professor of Critical Studies in the Department of Art & Design, and Xiaojue Wang, Associate Professor of Asian Languages and Cultural Studies.
 
Marc Handelman, Chair of the Department of Art & Design, said he was confident that the exhibition would resonate widely. “The power of Liu Shiming’s artistic vision is that it speaks powerfully to audiences across national, cultural, and generational lines, registering a sense of connection and celebration of the everyday, which is simultaneously infused with wonder, and diversity of human life and experience. We are thrilled to be able to present such a rich historical and internationally significant art exhibition within Rutgers and to the wider communities of New Brunswick and Middlesex County.”

It is understood that the exhibition remained on view till  22 September.

Introduction to the guests expected in the panel discussion: 

 

 

John Yau has been publishing reviews and essays on art and literature since 1978. He currently writes for the online magazine, Hyperallergic Weekend, which he co-founded in 2012. Yau has published monographs on Thomas Nozkowski, Catherine Murphy, Philip Taaffe, and Jasper Johns. Currently, he is working on a monograph on Liu Xiaodong.

 

He has been honoured with the 2018 Jackson Prize for Poetry, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, Guggenheim Fellowship, and New York Foundation for the Arts in Poetry and in Fiction.

(Photo credit: Margarita Corpora)

 

  

Tamara Sears is Associate Professor of Art History at Rutgers University. Her research focuses on art and architectural history of South Asia, with a particular focus on the Indian subcontinent. Her first book, Worldly Gurus and Spiritual Kings: Architecture and Asceticism in Medieval India (Yale University Press, 2014), received the PROSE award in Architecture and Urban Planning. She is currently completing a second book that examines the relationships between architecture, environmental history, and travel on a local, regional, and global scale. A third book project, on architectural revivalism and the rhetoric of secularism in the twentieth century temple architecture, is currently underway.  Her essays have appeared in well over a dozen volumes and journals, including The Art Bulletin, Ars Orientalis, and Archives of Asian Art. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from Fulbright, the J. Paul Getty Foundation, the National Humanities Center, Dumbarton Oaks, and the Clark Art Institute. She was recently elected Vice President of the American Council for Southern Asian Art, for a 4-year term beginning in September 2022, after which she serves an additional term as President of ACSAA in 2026-2030.
 

 

Xiaojue Wang is Associate Professor of Chinese Literature in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and Director of Graduate Studies in the Program in Comparative Literature. Her research interests are Chinese literature and culture from late imperial to contemporary periods, cultural Cold War studies in global Asias, Chinese-German intellectual connections, cultural memories, film and media studies, gender and sexuality, and comparative literature. She is the author of Modernity with a Cold War Face: Reimagining the Nation in Chinese Literature across the 1949 Divide (Harvard University Asia Center, 2013), which examines the diverse, dynamic cultural practices in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas across the 1949 Chinese divide, and re-positions modern Chinese literature in the global context of the Cold War.
Professor Wang is currently completing her second book, tentatively entitled The Edges of Literature: Eileen Chang and the Aesthetics of Deviation, which seeks to chart the Cold War cultural geography in the transpacific and global Asias. Centering on the prominent bilingual woman writer Eileen Chang, this study explores how Chang maneuvered between art and politics; colonialism, modernization, and cosmopolitanism; migration and expatriation; as well as high art, popular culture, and technology.
Her work has appeared in Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR), and MCLC Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, and numerous Chinese-language journals including Twenty-First Century, Modern Chinese Literature Studies, Dushu, Foreign Literature Review, etc. She is also the Chinese translator or co-translator of Jürgen Habermas’ Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, Horkheimer Reader, Andreas Huyssen’s After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, and John Fiske’s Understanding Popular Culture, among others.
 

Information on the exhibition:

“LIU SHIMING: Life Gives Beauty Form” 
Duration: From 31 July to 22 September 2023
Public reception and panel discussion: 5-8 pm on 6 September 2023
Venue: Mason Gross School of the Arts, 33 Livingston Avenue, New Brunswick, New Jersey
The galleries’ summer hours (31 July – 2 September) are Monday through Saturday 10 am to 5 pm. 
Fall hours (5-22 September) are:
Mondays: 10:30 am - 5 pm
Tuesdays: 10:30 am - 4 pm Wednesdays: 10:30 am - 7pm Thursdays: 10 am - 8 pm Fridays: 10:30 am - 5 pm Saturday: 10:30 am - 5 pm