The Brooklyn Rail

Luc Tuymans first visited China in 2003, when the nation’s growth seemed unstoppable. Morning Sun (2003), a canvas of about five by six feet, marks that moment. The painting is sourced from a photograph in the Financial Times, a view from the Bund waterfront looking east across the Huangpu River to the Pudong area. Framed by one of the wrought-iron ovoids in a railing in the historic promenade, Shanghai’s celebrated Oriental Pearl Tower (completed 1995) rises amid a span of skyscrapers on the Lujiazui peninsula, which in ten years would become a part of China’s first Free Trade Zone.¹ The photograph tethers China’s nineteenth-century colonization by the British to its twentieth-century concentration of economic power. That Tuymans chose to transcribe this specific photograph, with its lens-like framing, underscores several crucial throughlines in the nearly ninety works that he and curator Peter Eleey chose for this stunning retrospective at the independent, not-for-profit UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing.

Gray velvet curtains at the end of a softly lit corridor mark the entrance to the exhibition. Pushing them aside brings into view a vast, twenty-thousand-square-foot industrial shell with a nearly-thirty-foot-high ceiling. Suddenly dwarfed by the towering height and endless expanse, I felt disoriented, pensive, and wary. It was winter, the space was cold, and the guards’ coughing and sneezing resounded in continuous small explosions as a kind of ambient call and response. Moving from the open grandeur of a peripheral promenade to smaller, enclosed viewing spaces deeper in the hall made relative scale difficult to process: paintings seemed to shrink and expand in parallel with the size of the viewing area. Which side of the mushroom had I eaten?

To rework a photograph on newsprint into oil on canvas is to produce a multilayered simulacrum of vision. What the photographer saw through the promenade railing and translated into a light-based photograph was then printed and widely distributed in ink dots on paper, only for Tuymans to transform it into literal matter: oil paint. This iterative process can never offer the experience of that first view; the painting occludes not only the initial sight but all subsequent ones. As in a mise en abyme, we are left with only fragments of a faded memory.

Tuymans also blurs the contours of Pudong’s skyscrapers, veiling them in muted, sickly greens and blues, like shadows in a faded color photograph. The rendering subverts the intention of the source photo, which clearly attempted to showcase China’s juggernaut of financial power. In blurring the view and returning the railing’s ironwork “lens” to its origins as a sign of British rule, Tuymans shrouds in doubt China’s transformation into a capitalist economy and its ostensible adoption of free-trade policies. Even his process of sourcing, cutting, rephotographing, redrawing, and transmuting into paint may be thought of as an analogue of the layers of distance between that first vision and what his rendering implies. Beyond suggestive subject matter, Tuymans seeks to extend the relevance of historical painting techniques into present times. It is no surprise, then, that he titled this retrospective The Past:

We are turning back time and history. In terms of political leadership, we are already living in the past. We no longer have a shared vision of the future. A world in which things could be better for everyone is not in sight. What information technology and artificial intelligence have in store for us seems to me more of a dystopia than a utopia. The future is dark brown.²

Tuymans’s canvases use muted palettes to present veiled and fragmented subject matter, yet they are politically and socially incendiary. This retrospective was subjected to three separate reviews by China’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism during which several pieces were removed “in a fairly authoritarian manner.” Tuymans has said that, “certain works referred too ostentatiously to politics and history, to the war and fascism, [and were] mercilessly filtered out.”³

Morning Sun and Shenzhen (2019), however, remain. A city linking Hong Kong to the mainland, Shenzhen is renowned for its skyline, which Tuymans renders in hazy blues, grays, and rose. Smudges of impastoed white stand in for myriad balloons soaring over the skyline—this is a scene of celebration. Shenzhen’s two famous skyscrapers, the Ping An Finance Centre and the Diwang Tower, rise by means of dark contour lines and shadows—blurred, stilted, and strange. Moving closer, one sees the computer-monitor vector signs for “Back,” “Play,” and “Forward.” Shenzhen, yes, but obviously mediated: Tuymans has reworked in paint a freeze-frame from an online video, suggesting the pervasive ecology of a mediated and incomplete image-world that regularly substitutes for direct human experience.

As I stood before Inland (2018), a large work hung in its own recessed space, I was approached by a local Chinese woman who, using a voice translation app, asked why I thought Tuymans would paint a portrait of what she recognized as a Muslim Chinese farmer in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region of China. Inland is a rendering of a once-folded photograph, that fold bisecting a figure of a man framed by trees, walking on uneven ground. My interlocutor wondered why he was dressed in clothing from the 1970s. Had Tuymans been to China, and was this a photograph of what he saw? Or was this a photograph from fifty years earlier? She was shocked that Tuymans had made the painting as recently as 2018. When I asked her what she felt in front of the work, she said, “I don’t think the picture has any impact. I just wondered whether as a European painter, had he been to such an inland area of China?” An interesting and, to me, revealing interaction: the woman did not connect this portrait to China’s efforts to rout out Hui Muslims in Ningxia, and Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, through surveillance, indoctrination, forced sterilization, and detainment in mass-internment camps. The brimless hat (black or white) and the black coat worn over a white tunic confirm the stranger’s recognition of a Chinese Muslim. Tuymans’s painting reminds us of the forces of social, religious, and institutional control that surround us, as well as of the horrors of genocide. Such thoughts not only arise from the subject matter but are reinforced pictorially: as the figure is literally bisected, color and form dissolve; iterative Cézanne-like brushstrokes, quickly pulled into short, rectangular shapes, deliver the appearance of the invasion of matter by thrusts of light.

Such instrumentalization of paint invites formal readings just as surely as it requires intellectual penetration and historical understanding. Yet Tuymans’s sociopolitical agendas do not mask the extraordinarily rewarding aesthetic experience that is in play throughout. His vaunted practice of painting a picture in a single day may lead to our underestimating the intensity of his pre-painting preparation, but my point here is not that preparation but the act. The movements of his brush are quick and aggressive but seem contemptuous of any emotive readings we might make of such gestures; rather, they are simply a means of laying paint down rapidly on canvas. The paradox is that they are also sensuous and aesthetically sumptuous. The potted plant in Plant (2003), for example, is rendered in overlays of short, juicy horizontal brushstrokes and vertical sweeps, and rises in grays and greens from a rose-tinted plant bed. It’s as if this master painter cannot help but display the frisson he experiences when handling paint. Perhaps a weed sprouting in an urban setting, or one in a gridded tray of specimens in a nursery, the plant is limned along the length of the stalk with scalloped markings (possibly in graphite?) roughly filled in with white, producing an effect of backlighting even as gray-tinged variegated leaves suggest a “day-for-night” cinematic shot. Blurring effects further suggest the speed at which images pass through our everyday experience. Yet this work is an utter fabrication that simulates plant life rather than records it: Tuymans cut a plant form from paper, which he then photographed. “It’s about the color,” he has said, “this toxic green that bears no relation to plants or to reality.”⁴

Hung within a small, enclosed space in the exhibition, Plant is paired with the smaller Bend Over (2001). One literally recoils from this work’s greenish-yellow cast, which intensifies the toxic hue of Plant, while the arching shape of the figure depicted contrasts with the plant’s verticality. Bend Over wrenches from the viewer harrowing memories of past humiliations. The show’s audio guide (its text is available on the UCCA website) reveals the source for this image: a diagnostic view of someone undergoing a medical examination for scoliosis. The figure—faceless since we see it from behind—is doubled over, flattened against an overall greenish-yellow scrim-like tonality. Murky dark patches suggest a light source at upper right that throws the left leg, buttock, and crotch into shade. Yet, “duck-rabbit”–like, these shadows flip visually into Stalinist skyscrapers featuring a central spire (think the “Seven Sisters” in Moscow) and Soviet-style block buildings, symbols of authoritarian regimes. To me, Bend Over allegorizes our vulnerability to autocracies in all forms, here literalized in the guise of skewed power relations between doctor and patient. It suggests shaming and humiliation as well as human rights violations. Even Heillicht (Curing Light) (1991), while sourced from a photograph showing a doctor and patient during a session of light therapy, suggests interrogation techniques and their abuses.

Light is thematized again in Instant (2009), in which the flash from the camera of a woman facing us bursts from the surface. Again, according to the audio guide, this visual explosion is an effect of dueling light sources, as a camera Tuymans is holding—we see his hand to the right—snapped her picture at the same time she took hers, sparking a synchronous flash of blinding brilliance. Here we witness a contest of wills as each photographer simultaneously “captures” the other.

For a brief period in the early 1980s, Tuymans left painting to focus on film. When he took up his brushes again, he brought certain cinematic techniques to bear on renderings of photographic sources in paint. On view, for example, are three of the six oil paintings that make up the series “Arena” (2014), which is based on a Super 8 film that Tuymans made back then. He also created a fresco out of these images, working on the walls of the Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent, in 2017. All versions rework an early mixed-media composition, The Arena (1978). In what appears to be a theatrical or ritualistic scene, framed in darkness, people cluster to one side, seemingly intimidated or under threat. Like a stop-motion animation, each of the three scenes on view tracks a slight change in viewpoint as a sinister figure in shadow in the lower left corner emerges—a reference to political violence against humanity throughout history. Once again, such information depends on ancillary sources: Tuymans’s provocations create the unease of ignorance before pictures that intimate but do not tell.

In these as in other works on view, light projects outward from the surface, distancing the viewer from the painting. Contours dissolve and fuse with their grounds, creating flattened schematic shapes and liquidating contours into near abstraction. Tuymans’s works withhold information. I found myself thinking about the woman who found it nearly impossible to speak about her feelings in front of Inland. The furtiveness and refusal of Tuymans’s images, their withholding and diffidence, contribute to what he once described as the general inherent oppressiveness of images: “Most imagery is oppressive, because the image is, in a sense, made to be oppressive, it is intended to make you stand still, to make you see.”⁵ In the visual relay between Tuymans’s depictions and the experiencing viewer, we become, necessarily, the subject of the work, even as our efforts to come to terms with “the past” are at best feeble.