A member of the first class of sculpture students admitted to the National Art School in Beiping (precursor to the Central Academy of Fine Arts), Liu Shiming (1926-2010) began studying sculpture in his youth, trained by Wang Linyi and Hua Tianyou, part of the first generation of Chinese sculptors to study in France. After five years, Liu Shiming had internalized classical sculpture from the French academic school, as well as Rodin’s modern ideas about sculpture. As a result, his 1950 graduation piece attracted particular attention. Measuring Land won first prize in the “Red May” exhibition at CAFA and was recognized by president Xu Beihong. The work was selected by the Central Academy of Fine Arts for an overseas exhibition and was later collected by the National Museum of Czechoslovakia (now the Czech National Museum). Liu also petitioned Xu Beihong to allow him to remain at the academy to teach.

The next year, Liu Shiming enrolled in the graduate program for sculpture at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and graduated. 
After more than ten years of exploration and creation, at a time when he had experienced honors and successes, Liu Shiming chose to listen to his heart. In 1961, he left the busy capital city, following the melodies of Henan opera to poor villages in China’s Central Plains. He spent ten years in various places in Henan, followed by four years in Baoding in Hebei. He engaged deeply with these poor villages, he shared in the difficulties of these rural people, and he came to deeply appreciate the state and meaning of life.

Liu eventually became homesick and he allowed the tides of fate to carry him back to Beijing. In 1974, he began working at the National Museum of China, where he spent seven wonderful years cleaning, restoring, and replicating treasured artifacts from China’s past. He was immersed in the distinctive and lovely modeling aesthetics of various ancient pieces of China’s long history.
In 1981, Liu Shiming’s alma mater, the Central Academy of Fine Arts, opened its arms to an artist who had wandered elsewhere for twenty years, and he returned to teach in the Sculpture Department. He fired his own clay pieces, making nearly 2,000 works over twenty years.

In a sculpture career spanning more than 60 years, Liu Shiming always maintained a clear distance from the ideas and forms of Western sculpture, which held a commanding position at the time. Instead, he persistently grounded himself in a Chinese local context, uncovering various kinds of folk art within the Chinese tradition, and perpetuating ancient Chinese modeling methods. He advocated for drawing nourishment from past clay sculpture, making it contemporary using what he called “Chinese methods.” This was a path toward a local mode of Chinese sculpture that diverged from the ideas and forms of Western sculpture. 

Liu Shiming’s long and arduous journey, exploring “Chinese methods” of sculpture, was not unlike that of the legendary journey of ancient Greek hero Odysseus. Liu Shiming lived by his art, but he lived at a time that did not require him to singularly pursue his artistic ideals. As a result, he departed and returned as he navigated the long search for home. This “home” is his spiritual home of Eastern and Western, ancient and modern explorations of sculpture, but it also represents his hopes and hard work as he drifted for decades, pursuing peace and spiritual respite. The exhibition will present nearly forty bronze works that Liu Shiming personally cast during his lifetime in three sections entitled “Leaving with a Halo on His Head: Departing the Prosperous Capital for the Remote Countryside,” “Finding the Road Home: Liu Shiming’s Evolving Sculpture,” and “Home: Liu Shiming’s Real and Ideal Worlds.”
“Departure and Return: Liu Shiming’s Sculpture” is the first show in the “Chinese Methods: A Liu Shiming Traveling Sculpture Exhibition” series organized by the Liu Shiming Sculpture Museum at the Central Academy of Fine Arts.

The traveling exhibition will launch in New York, an international art capital, so that American and global audiences and art professionals will come to understand Liu Shiming’s unique sculptures and engage with the “Chinese methods” of sculpture that he proposed and pioneered. In this way, the world will recognize the hard work and contributions that modern and contemporary sculptors from China and the Central Academy of Fine Arts have made to sculpture. Viewers will also come to appreciate the modernization that has taken place in the last one hundred years of Chinese sculpture, which has uniquely Chinese characteristics and is rooted in Chinese traditional and local experiences—this mode is entirely different from the modern Western narrative. This perspective will enrich the diversity of narratives of modern art history in the world.

Hongmei
Associate Professor, Graduate Advisor, Ph.D., Central Academy of Fine Arts
Head of the Theory Publishing Department, CAFA Art Museum
Managing Curator, Liu Shiming Sculpture Museum at the Central Academy of Fine Arts