Full Circle

An emblematic 2003 painting by the Belgian artist Luc Tuymans marks his first visit to China. Titled Morning Sun, it shows Shanghai's iconic Pudong skyline, complete with the orb-topped Oriental Pearl Tower, through a hole in the Waibaidu Bridge (Garden Bridge), located west of the Huangpu River.  

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This painting is featured in “Luc Tuymans: The Past,” a comprehensive survey of the 66-year-old painter at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, China. Curated by Peter Eleey, UCCA curator-at-large, the exhibition, on view through February 16, 2025, highlights 87 works spanning Tuymans’s career from 1975 to 2023. Tuymans is arguably one of the most influential European artists in China largely due to a certain book that introduced Chinese artists to his work. 

That same year Tuymans first traveled to China in 2003, Phaidon published the second edition of a 1996 monograph. The updated edition featured over 100 new pages, new writing by the artist, and an illustrated chronology. It also had a new cover, the 2002 painting The Nose, in which a man’s large nose is the work’s focal point. 

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“When I first came to China at around that time, like every artist studio, it was a book you would always see on the coffee table,” says UCCA director Philip Tinari, recalling how the book was productive for a certain generation of painters in China who came into maturity and prominence after 2000. “It allowed a lot of artists here to move their own practices forward in different ways,” he explains.

The artist himself wasn’t aware of how instrumental the monograph was in establishing his reputation in China until he worked on curating two exhibitions there, at the Palace Museum in Beijing in 2007 and the National Art Museum of China in 2009. “I didn't know what the impact of my work was until I came to China in preparation for these two projects,” says Tuymans. “I immediately understood the importance.” 

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Tuymans’s paintings resonate with Chinese artists because he possesses the gift of sifting through images, distilling particular moments in history, and portraying them through his observant eye and intentional brushstrokes. His process allowed them to reflect on their own personal relationships with history and how to recontextualize it within their own work. 

The retrospective includes several examples of this. There is The Heritage VI, a deceiving 1996 portrait of a man grinning in ‘50s-style browline eyeglasses. At first glance, it’s an innocuous image. Upon further probing, the man is Joseph Milteer, the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. In a 2005 painting titled The Secretary of State, Tuymans portrays a closely-cropped portrait of Condoleezza Rice, who at the time Forbes hailed as the most powerful woman in the world. There’s also Abe, a ghostly 2022  depiction of a Disneyland animatronic version of the 16th American president that’s been in operation since 1965.

In his paintings, we see images mined from his memory: the 1990 painting Body features a doll from his childhood that was lying around in his studio. Corso II,2015, is based on a photograph of a float from an annual Zundert Flower Parade in his mother’s hometown that his father took when Tuymans was a child. 

Several works connect Tuymans to China; along with the famed Pudong skyline, there’s a cityscape of the Shenzhen skyline with the play symbol before it, perhaps signaling that it was painted through a camera. 

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Instant—a painting of a 2009 work by a senior curator from the National Art Museum of China that Tuymans originally took with his iPhone—serves as a precursor to the image-obsessed society in which we live today. “What we see is essentially a photograph of a photograph, two people taking pictures of each other, which anticipates the image culture that we live in today. We're taking pictures, we're moving pictures, we're sharing pictures; at some point, they all obliterate each other, and yet they've become a kind of social civic ritual,” said Eleey.

Now in China, after two decades of seeing Tuymans’s work primarily through a monograph, artists can finally view a vast segment of his oeuvre in their own country. “He opened a door,” said Tinari, “so there's a lot of love for him among the community of artists here.” 

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Luc Tuymans: "The Past" is on view until February 16, 2025 at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art at 4 Jiuxianqiao Rd, Chaoyang, Beijing, China, 100102.