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拍品专文
It is difficult to read the works of contemporary Chinese artists without referencing the socio-political context of modern China. Unlike his contemporaries who have moved towards the styles of Political Pop or Cynical Realism, Beijing-based painter Liu Ye's has always favored imaginery that is personally symbolic, disarmingly playful and sometimes mysterious, but his works are nonetheless not without indirect, philosophical references to his contemporary enviroment.
His greatest influences are often self-evident. He has said, 'the works by Dick Bruna of Holland and Miyazaki of Japan, I think they are as great as Da Vinci.' His father was a children's book author who secretly brought Hans Christian Anderson's stories home for Liu to read. This love of fantasy and adventure is apparent throughout his works, as is his love of cinema, of Western art history, and his meticulous attention to form, structure, and technique.
Liu returned to Beijing in the 1990s, having spent much of the decade studying and painting in Europe, and immediately his works took a more theatrical bent, with the artist expanding his tongue-in-cheek repertoire of angels, cherubs, and adventure-seeking children. In Choir, painted in 2000, Liu's group of seemingly innocent and near-identical young girls stand flush against a cerulean blue curtain, songbooks or accordion in hand, each outfitted in their school uniforms with red hair bow, ruby cheeks, and angel's wings. They are lit dramatically off-stage, a favorite technique of Liu's, evoking the compositional structure of Vermeer's interiors.
The curtained stage is an important motif for the artist and appears in some of his most important works (Fig. 1). Despite the disarming character of his compositions, his fairy tale imaginery smuggle in enigmatic and provocative philosophical dilemmas, in this case suggesting a complex and illusory relationship between truth and performance, one that is almost taken from granted for anyone who had grown up under Chinese communism. Returning to his hometown after a long absence, Liu was inspired to develop his repertoire of symbolic and compositional strategies to create mysterious tableaux that mirrored this time, as full of ambivalence as they are with enchanting adventure and possibility, a mood mirroring that of Liu's generation, at once intoxicated by and wary of the extraodinary changes taking place in their lifetime.
His greatest influences are often self-evident. He has said, 'the works by Dick Bruna of Holland and Miyazaki of Japan, I think they are as great as Da Vinci.' His father was a children's book author who secretly brought Hans Christian Anderson's stories home for Liu to read. This love of fantasy and adventure is apparent throughout his works, as is his love of cinema, of Western art history, and his meticulous attention to form, structure, and technique.
Liu returned to Beijing in the 1990s, having spent much of the decade studying and painting in Europe, and immediately his works took a more theatrical bent, with the artist expanding his tongue-in-cheek repertoire of angels, cherubs, and adventure-seeking children. In Choir, painted in 2000, Liu's group of seemingly innocent and near-identical young girls stand flush against a cerulean blue curtain, songbooks or accordion in hand, each outfitted in their school uniforms with red hair bow, ruby cheeks, and angel's wings. They are lit dramatically off-stage, a favorite technique of Liu's, evoking the compositional structure of Vermeer's interiors.
The curtained stage is an important motif for the artist and appears in some of his most important works (Fig. 1). Despite the disarming character of his compositions, his fairy tale imaginery smuggle in enigmatic and provocative philosophical dilemmas, in this case suggesting a complex and illusory relationship between truth and performance, one that is almost taken from granted for anyone who had grown up under Chinese communism. Returning to his hometown after a long absence, Liu was inspired to develop his repertoire of symbolic and compositional strategies to create mysterious tableaux that mirrored this time, as full of ambivalence as they are with enchanting adventure and possibility, a mood mirroring that of Liu's generation, at once intoxicated by and wary of the extraodinary changes taking place in their lifetime.