Liu Xuguang Between the Celestial and the Terrestrial

Tokyo Gallery + BTAP is delighted to present the solo exhibition, “Liu Xuguang: Between the Celestial and the Terrestrial” curated by Feng Boyi, which will be held from 8th March to 26th April 2025 at 798 Art District in Beijing.

Born in Beijing in 1958, Liu Xuguang, a Ph.D graduate in Fine Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts, Tsinghua University, currently works as a professor at the Beijing Film Academy. This exhibition aims to highlight Liu Xuguang’s artistic practice, showing 29 artworks, including paintings, installations, performances, and videos, under the theme of “Between the Celestial and the Terrestrial.”

The so-called “Between the Celestial and the Terrestrial” implies everything between the celestial and the worldly. The parameter between heaven and earth exists based on human knowledge of religion, philosophy, science, and artistic explorations. Humans are the key figures bridging the gap between heaven and earth. As an artist, Liu Xuguang draws on traditional and contemporary cultural resources to ritualistically blend his thoughts and experiences of space-time between the Celestial and the Terrestrial into his persistent artistic experiments, expressed through media such as installations, performances, videos, and paintings. Based on the I Ching, the ancient classic of divination and cosmology, he seeks to trace the relationship between different geographic spaces and natural ecology through the symbols of “Bu(卜)”, birthdays, and He-Luo diagrams, among other things. His works resemble altars and prophecies, converging under a somber gaze and hefty weight of history, or conversions of the earth and comforts to the symbolic color of the material culture, shaping what he calls a “dimensional space.” In the artist's own words, these works "integrate the knowledge of the universe, philosophical thoughts, and multidimensional explorations of aesthetic boundaries."

In this exhibition, Liu Xuguang presents his latest video work, Ink Eye. At the end of 2024, Liu set up a huge circular pool filled with dried ink on the site of Niang Niang Tan of the Yellow River, where an arrow trailing a long straight line was inserted into the pool of ink. The work renders the unique imagery of the “ink pupil” with the water in the Yellow River and ink, which not only resonates with the visual gaze in the character “Min (民) ” but also underscores the artist’s in-depth insights on history and reality when the work is viewed from above as if the natural and celestial landscapes merge into one, where a silent dialog between the codes of ancient time and its inherent vitality begins to unfold.

For this exhibition, Liu Xuguang expands this work into an installation, Ink Tower, based on the architectural structure of Tokyo Gallery + BTAP, offering a configuration of time and the pagoda of life. The artist stacks black magnetic strips with ancient numbers and time digits into a hexagonal pagoda, and its shape, inspired by Liang Sicheng's sketches of the tower's cross-section, not only exhibits formal beauty is also imbued with profound philosophical reflections, triggering in-depth thoughts on the concepts of the I Ching and He-Luo diagrams, which speak to human's understanding of the universe, time, and life, and symbolizing the flow of time and the cycle of life.

Liu Xuguang's art practice tries to predict the omens and fortunes of our existence amid our impermanent life. By adopting strategies of arriving, perception, and position, Liu Xuguang highlights the weightlessness, constraints, and anxieties between the celestial and the worldly. Through this solo exhibition, spectators are encouraged to discover and realize the visible and invisible “fields of diffraction” in his artworks through the vicissitudes of history, geography, and culture. The light that illuminates fate is where “darkness” arrives at itself, prompting us to reflect on, question, and explore our living conditions even without knowing where we are. As the Ming Dynasty poet Qian Zai wrote in the poem Passing by the Fields and Houses of Southern Town, “A lifetime between heaven and earth passes, a time marks past and present.”

The exhibition will commence on March 8th; the opening ceremony will be held in the afternoon of March 15th; and it will conclude on April 26th. Your presence is warmly welcomed.