3 works by Liu Sheng are part of I'll Catch You Later, a group exhibition at the Guangdong Times Museum co-curated by Jiawen Li and Liang Jianhua.
I'll Catch You Later
Exhibition period: 19 September 2026 – 31 January 2027
Venue: Guangdong Times Museum
The exhibition examines emerging shifts in painting rooted in lived experience. Titled I'll Catch You Later, the exhibition frames painting as a space for renewed agency amid fragmented information and realities that resist single explanations, stepping outside ready-made narratives to reconnect with one's surroundings.
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In terms of felt experience, Liu Sheng's painting is grounded in sustained engagement with specific sites of everyday life. He returned to the social fabric of his hometown and built relationships with farmers by working the land, laboring, and spending time with them. The figures in his paintings are often at work-cultivating, carrying, waiting. Their bodies bear traces of the environments that have shaped them: skin darkened by the fierce sun, weary postures, tense expressions, and even the odors left by soil and labor. Liu's figures often wear arhat-like expressions: sorrowful, frightened, or numb, yet marked by tenacious vitality. Puppets shedding tears in flames and uncontrollable natural disasters-such absurd and symbolic images combine the powerlessness of daily life with vernacular imagination, producing a magical realism that seems to grow from the soil itself. These images arise both from the artist's bodily experience of reality and from the emotional bonds formed through living alongside the people he depicts. Through the combined force of bodily sensation and emotion, Liu translates the complexity of their conditions of existence into a painterly language. (Excerpt from the curatorial essay by Li Jiawen for You Go Ahead, I'll Take a Walk for a While.)
Learn more --
https://timesmuseum.org/en/program/i-ll-catch-you-later
