Focus: Frieze London 

Liu Ding: A Day A Year

VIP Preview: 2018.10.03 – 04

Public Days: 2018.10.05 – 07

Booth: H5

Magician Space is pleased to present Liu Ding’s recent project, A Day, A Year at Frieze London. Composed mainly of two groups of work, the project takes a self-reflexive approach and depicts changes in the political and cultural history of China over the past 40 years, while embedding the artist’s own trajectories of life and thoughts in this course of development.

Liu Ding’s artistic creation and curatorial practice bring attention to multiple viewpoints and modes of description in Chinese art history, exploring a trajectory of discursive thoughts that connect the contemporary and the historical. Continuously tracing the intellectual roots of contemporary Chinese art, Liu Ding weaves multiple threads in expanding the narrative of Chinese art subjectivity. His art benefits from his extensive researches in history and his interest in literature. Liu Ding has recognized the predicament that China’s art history is often legitimated only through its comparison with Western art history, and realized that the undiscerned discursive vocabulary formed within such a process of comparison restricts visions of researchers and creators. In his practice, he looks at the intellectual roots of contemporary Chinese art and studies the lasting legacy of Socialist Realism in China’s contemporary society. His artistic and curatorial work revisits the process of intellectual liberation since the end of the Cultural Revolution, rehearses a Chinese expression within a globalised context since the 1990s, and describes the ideological roots and logic of Chinese contemporary art and culture.

Image: Liu Ding, A Year · A Sentence, 2018, Silk, 153x116cm