The Brooklyn Rail

Featuring works by Hank Willis Thomas and Liu Shiming, People Everyday, curated by Emann Odufu at the Liu Shiming Art Foundation, adjoins two artists whose work, at first pass, might strike the viewer as belonging to disparate traditions. Upon closer examination, however, one sees that although Thomas’s practice more closely cleaves towards modernist devices than Shiming’s, the two enjoy a common genealogy. In addition, Odofu’s pairings reveal a set of formal homologies and evince shared thematic interests amongst the geographically discrepant artists. 

Whether it be his public artworks, small-scale sculptures, text-based images or photo-conceptual installations, Thomas’s work is most immediately situated in the African-American visual-cultural tradition—one shaped by documentation, political critique, and tribute that countenances Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, and Deborah Willis (Thomas’s mother), amongst its antecedents. Thomas began his photography practice at age twelve, fostering his practice at Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Thomas, now forty-nine, continues to attend to epochal racial political and Black cultural memory, evidenced by his recent towering memorials such as his 2022 memorial, The Embrace, inspired by a photograph taken during the civil rights movement of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. embosoming Coretta Scott King. The 2019 Unity—a work that, by dint of its subject matter and geographical location (on the Brooklyn-side of the Brooklyn Bridge), became inextricably linked to the Black Lives Matter movement—finds a plumb sable arm pointed towards the heavens, its erect index finger signifying upward mobility. Although the Shiming Foundation show is punctuated by a number of scaled-down models of such well-known public sculptures, the stronger works are Thomas’s self-standing mixed-media sculptures. Untitled (Godspeed), Untitled (Acanthus), and Archimedean Solid I (all 2024) apportion an anterior layer of images, including lapping cerulean water channels and rolling waves, which represent the Middle Passage and Triangular Trade. Underneath are a set of luminous posterior images that only properly reveal themselves via flash photography, which illuminates buried stone faces and heraldic crests, indexing those parties who directed and profited from the slave trade and subsequent colonial ventures. Archimedean Solid I, which purposes Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao’s Dymaxion Map projection’s cartographic form, also indicates Thomas’s coincident interest in modernist art history. This is also apparent in Thomas’s Afrofuturist powder-coated incised steel silhouettes of Icarus mid-flight. In this series, bodies poised in dancerly steps are bisected by winged vermillion figures reminiscent of Henri Matisse’s cutouts.

Shiming (1926–2010) belongs to the first generation of Chinese sculptors trained by the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing. His early work was stoked by the period’s subtending Maoist communitarian aspirations and the Chinese communist revolution’s importation of Soviet Socialist Realism. Where Thomas presents fragmented body parts or flattened profiles, Shiming’s reliefs emphasize the blazoned sinewy laborers whose bodies are presented in full. Mentored by Chinese sculptural pioneers such as Wang Linyi, Hua Tianyou, and Zeng Zhushao—all of whom also engaged with the coeval process of collective artistic production, negating individual authorship (a bourgeois conceit)—Shiming’s sculptures from the late 1940s and early 1950s hew towards sympathetic depictions of the quotidian proletariat masses. One such sculpture, of significant historical relevance, is Measuring Land (1950). A trio of surveyors collaborate, one using a shovel to measure, another reading out the calculated lengths, and a third marking them on a tablet. Created as a student project at CAFA, where it was awarded the first prize accolade, the sculpture was published in The People’s Pictorial publication in 1950. It was one of the first artworks produced in the People’s Republic of China that exhibited internationally, circulating in Prague before entering the Czech National Museum’s permanent collection. A miniature version of Shiming’s best-known work, Cutting Through Mountains to Bring in Water (1958/70), is also on view. The sculpture finds a sinewy man plunging between a mountain pass, his arms and legs forming an X-shaped axis with the chiseled crags cradling him. The work, which was originally 13-feet high and showed at Zhongshan Park in Beijing shortly after Shiming finished it, was exacted from 1958 to 1959 during what the artist reflected on as “the energetic climate of the Great Leap Forward.” In a short treatise on the piece, Shiming remarks that, “at the time, the traditional view at the Central Academy of Fine Arts was that sculptures should not represent environments; they should be focused on the figure. Pieces like Rodin’s The Thinker were considered true sculpture. However, I boldly broke with this convention.” Herculean man is here presented in dexterous command of his raw environment, his limbs but technics with which to fissure mountains into apertures, therein figuring as a bastion for future generations.

Through the mid-1980s, much of Shiming’s sculpture practice is characterized by a populist vim that resounds of Mao’s “Yen’an Forum on Literature and Art,” according to which “all our literature and art are for the masses of the people and in the first place for the workers, peasants and soldiers.” Works like Woman Pushing a Wheelbarrow and Hu Water (both 1983) sympathetically portray scenes of Chinese industrialization, with farmers, well-diggers, and quarrymen depicted mid-toil. Such scenes at once commemorate and lionize the proletariat. It should be noted that, because a number of Shiming’s works are bronze-cast multiples, their veneers have a waxy effulgence compared to ceramics like Woman Pushing a Wheelbarrow, which emit a more complex and captivating surface texture. 

In the late 1980s, Shiming began looking towards different traditions for source material, including Greek mythology. Greek Mythology—Centaur (1986), mounted close to Thomas’s “Icarus” sculptures, is one of several points of synchronicity between the two artists, albeit the latter’s appropriative practice, coordinated as it is to Matisse, is oriented towards modernism where Shiming’s work is significantly more classical in execution. Shiming’s Dream to Fly (1982), a bronze sculpture of a winged fantastical figure, and Fuse (big) (1992), which dovetails two bowed figures in an arc, are formally consonant with Thomas’s “Icarus” sculptures and The Embrace. This serendipitous convergence perhaps speaks to a shared, formalism-attuned sense of taste between the two artists.

One could aver that the most striking through-line between Thomas and Shiming consists in the broader intellectual development of Maoist critique from the mid-to-late 20th century. Interpolated by the Third-Worldist movement of the 1940s–50s, French Maoism’s cultural turn during the 1960–70s, and the subsequent prominence of the New Left, a mode of analysis once disposed to strictly class-based exploitation became oriented to questions of critique involving race, gender, and intersectionality. Were this exhibition to pair Shiming with purely class-oriented Socialist Realists—including of American stripe, such as Ben Shahn, Philip Evergood, and William Gropper—this historical development would be compromised. Pairing Shiming with Thomas clarifies points of confluence, such as sculpture’s commemorative ethos, and departure, including Thomas’s modernism-inflected leitmotifs and sensitivity to the politics of race.