Liu Shiming
Linnéa Gad

[Press Release]

New York, New York – The Liu Shiming Art Foundation is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Breath is Everywhere, on view from November 12 through December 19, 2025. Curated by the gallery’s director and curator Maëlle Ebelle, the exhibition brings together the work of the late renowned Chinese sculptor Liu Shiming (1926–2010) and contemporary Swedish visual artist Linnéa Gad (b. 1990) to explore the shared vitality that connects humanity, material, and landscape.

 

The title, Breath is Everywhere, refers to the vitality that both artists conceive of as running through all matter. The exhibition stages a dialogue between Liu’s figurative sculptures and Gad’s materially-driven, organically-shaped sculptures and landscape paintings. The selection of works focuses on moments where recognizable forms begin to dissolve into abstraction, where gesture, movement, and presence take precedence over mere depiction.

 

Central to the exhibition will be a large platform where Liu’s and Gad’s smaller sculptures intermingle, seeking to blur the boundaries between human form, animal form, and geological matter. Liu’s works in bronze and clay—depicting a cowherd, wrestlers, and court singer—will be placed alongside Gad’s sculptures made of protective, shell-like materials such as oyster shells bound with lime mortar, porcelain forms cast from bark, and cardboard layered with paper pulp. Ebelle hopes that a juxtaposition of both artists will create a landscape of forms that seems simultaneously ancient and still-emerging.

 

For both artists, an archaeological sensibility is key. Liu Shiming’s sculptural language was shaped by his deep familiarity with ancient objects and fragments, gained through years of mastering clay and bronze reproduction and restoration. Gad draws inspiration from prehistoric art and geological formations, creating work that appears as if shaped by erosion or found at the bottom of the sea.

 

“When I look at Liu Shiming’s works,” Gad says, “I don’t see the figure first—I see the shape, gesture, and character of the sculpture itself, and then the figure might emerge.” She continues, “I am drawn to Liu Shiming’s work in the same way I am drawn to how time can erode representation—like prehistoric figurative sculptures that, over centuries of weathering, become abstract stones.”

 

While Liu’s practice honored everyday life and the traces of human presence he observed in the Chinese countryside, Gad's work seeks life within materials. Both are driven by a focus on the human impact and a “belief that the life of the work comes from the breath that remains in the material, from leaving the work in a state of becoming,” as Gad describes.

 

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