The Liu Shiming Art Foundation on East 40th Street in New York City is currently hosting an exhibition that presents two remarkable artists: Liu Shiming and Lois Conner. Liu Shiming, a native of Beijing, spent most of his adult life there from 1975 until his passing in 2010. Lois Conner, an accomplished photographer, earned her MFA from Yale and has been a frequent visitor to Beijing for decades. The exhibition showcases their respective works, which both highlight Beijing’s rich cultural heritage and its ongoing transformations. One might observe, upon seeing the exhibition, that both artists have engaged in realist studies of Beijing, China’s capital and home to the Central Academy of Fine Arts—China’s most prestigious art school and the site of Liu’s education.

The exhibition is a celebration of two Western artists deeply connected to a capital brimming with vibrant stories. Beijing is not just a backdrop for their art; it is the living organism breathing vibrancy into their works. Liu Shiming spent his life in Beijing, attempted to understand its rhythms and breathe through his sculpture, while Lois Conner landed in the city to give the echoes of a critical view of it through its architectural decay and the impact of communal living within the metropolis pathway. China’s cultural zeitgeist, Beijing still exudes chaos, overcrowding, and bureaucratic power in equal measure. Liu’s works often convey a sense of domesticity and emotional closeness, whereas Conner’s black-and-white images are more objectively descriptive, sometimes depicting the city’s urban decay. The Chinese temperament—its preference for public harmony despiteprivate complexities—emerges in both bodies of work.

Liu’s small bronzes require pedestals to make them easily viewable. If you were to witness the near folk-art-inspired configuration of his Chinese Courtyard, you’d see seven buildings, their rough windows and doors confronting the viewer with waves of memories of a Beilin that didn’t just exist two decades ago, they were real. Within their womb-like enclosure are small figures, one seemingly on the left, sifting rice. The style has its roots centuries back, and much of its charm lies in the guilelessness of its architectural forms.

In the charming red and tan clay work Mother Returns (Standing) (1993), Liu portrays a mother standing upright in a light red coat. Both the statue and the figure gave it a semblance of authenticity, and a small child with simple features stands between her knees and thighs. The piece resembles a Tang Dynasty work, down to the suggestively historical hairstyle of the figures.

One challenge for artists in a culture as venerable as China’s is how to engage with its vast artistic history. Many 20th-century and contemporary Chinese artists borrow visual vocabularies from past millennia. There are moments when the old and new meet successfully, as they do here. Grandmother’s Pekingese Dogs (1983) is a charming depiction of a grandmother figure holding two Pekingese at her waist. Her expression exudes warmth and contentment, to the point where the sculpture nearly borders on sentimentality. Many of Liu’s sculptures depict domestic life—modernism’s dramatic shifts were not part of his artistic vision.

Many of Liu’s sculptures depict domestic life—modernism’s dramatic shifts were not part of his artistic vision.

In contrast, the works of Lois Conner communicate both strength and sensitivity, addressing the physical and emotional decay of contemporary life. Conner deftly deconstructs the visual language of a country that once embraced extreme idealism but now lives a double life, balancing capitalist and communal ties. While she may not deliberately frame this duality, her images contain evidence of an unease triggered by ever-expanding urbanization and tech-hungry youth, an unease shared worldwide.

In the marvelous horizontal photograph Star Roof, out eight outlines of stars rise glide elegantly into the sky, chartlifted by wooden supports on a rooftop, which lead the eye to buildings and trees in the middle-distance. Looming ever-present, Beijing’s enduring gray sky. This might sustain a conversation about the political gridlock and socio-economic turnaround within the city.

The final image, an unlikely trilogy of trees and leaves, is said to have been photographed in Beijing. Each of the three images features one or two large trees in the foreground, with smaller trees positioned just behind them. Above, in a gray but luminous sky, patterns of leaves have been rooted; dusty hues are strikingly evident in Conner’s careful compositions.

This exhibition makes a compelling case for seeing Beijing as a continuum, bridging the early second half of the 20th century to the present. These works are not historical pastiches, though they might appear as such, given the rapid acceleration of technological time. Liu and Conner, both major artists, document a Beijing that is nearly unrecognizable to those who lived there one or two generations ago. The show moves fluidly through memory, spanning decades and even a century, demonstrating that historical awareness is not merely an academic theme but a moral perspective—one that visual culture can powerfully sustain.