Exceptional Works: Luc Tuymans

Morning Sun, 2003

Oil on canvas
 62 x 72 inches
 157.5 x 182.9 cm

Luc Tuymans in his studio, Antwerp, 2020. Photo by Mieke Verbijlen

“Luc Tuymans first visited China in 2003, when the nation’s growth seemed unstoppable. Morning Sun (2003), a canvas of about five by six feet, marks that moment. ”

—Patricia L Lewy, art writer and curator, 2025

Presented on the occasion of Art Basel Hong Kong, Morning Sun (2003) depicts the Pudong district of Shanghai as seen from the Huangpu River waterfront. An emblem of modern China, the distant city appears here as a gleaming futuristic apparition rising above the river.

Shanghai’s Pudong skyline, 2003. Photo by Clark Parker

Tuymans’s engagement with the genre of landscape often foregrounds an evident dichotomy between the natural and the synthetic, and between growth and disintegration. Morning Sun is based on a photograph of Shanghai the artist found in the Financial Times in which the modern skyline is glimpsed through the latticework of a wrought-iron bridge.

“The view is of the Pudong district of Shanghai,” the art historians Lynne Cooke and Tommy Simoens note, “which includes the Lujiazui Finance and Trade Zone and Shanghai Stock Exchange, as seen from the waterfront. In the nineteenth century, Shanghai was opened to Western trade and became a major center of commerce; the waterfront area, known as the Bund, contains the historic foreign trading houses that remain from colonial-era concessions. The image … is shot through an opening in a wrought iron bridge connecting the two zones that echoes the spherical shapes of the landmark Oriental Pearl Tower. The stylized, unexpected point of view has a distancing effect, as if the vista is being seen through a telescope.”

Luc Tuymans, Morning Sun, 2003 (detail)

“I made [this] painting of Shanghai after my first visit. There was this feeling then, this vision of the future when you were at the Bund and you look at the new development. By now that vision of the future is already in the past. And yet one has to admit that the way China changed and the way the development went at such a specific speed is extraordinary, and fascinating as we’re dealing with a very old civilization. That picture in a way is about this element of resilience.”

—Luc Tuymans, 2024

Installation view, Luc Tuymans: The Past, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2024. “For me it’s important to do this show at this particular moment,” Tuymans commented, “because everything I feared has come true. And so in that sense you’re recuperated by reality. The new reality is actually part of the past.”

Morning Sun has been featured in major solo exhibitions of the artist’s work, including those at Tate Modern, London, and K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in 2004 and QM Gallery Al Riwaq, Doha, in 2015. Most recently, the painting was presented in the critically acclaimed solo exhibition Luc Tuymans: The Past at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, in 2024.

As Ann Binlot observes, Tuymans's historical awareness has been uniquely influential in China: “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.”

Installation view, Luc Tuymans: The Past, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2024

“To rework a photograph on newsprint into oil on canvas is to produce a multilayered simulacrum of vision.... This iterative process can never offer the experience of that first view; the painting occludes not only the initial sight but all subsequent ones. As in a mise en abyme, we are left with only fragments of a faded memory.... [In Morning Sun,] Tuymans... subverts the intention of the source photo .... In blurring the view and returning the railing’s ironwork ‘lens’ to its origins as a sign of British rule, Tuymans shrouds in doubt China’s transformation into a capitalist economy.”

—Patricia L Lewy, art writer and curator, 2025

Installation view, Luc Tuymans: Intolerance, QM Gallery Al Riwaq, Doha, 2015

“We are turning back time and history. In terms of political leadership, we are already living in the past. We no longer have a shared vision of the future. A world in which things could be better for everyone is not in sight.”

—Luc Tuymans, 2024

Installation view, Curtains: Reconstitution, FRAC Auvergne – Fonds régional d’art contemporain Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, France, 2003

The motif of Morning Sun was also used by the artist as a temporary mural for the exhibition Curtains: Reconstitution, FRAC Auvergne – Fonds régional d’art contemporain Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, France, 2003, where it was painted directly on the institution’s salmon-colored walls, which echoed the color of the Financial Times.

Luc Tuymans in his studio, Antwerp, 2020

Art Basel Hong Kong