Liu Qiming: Art as an Expression of Thought and Spiritual Play

Fine lines and threads are the principal language of his painting. This seems to have become Liu Qiming’s distinctive approach, yet it has emerged through a succession of experiences. Two kinds of experience meet here: experience in painting and experience in life. Like nerves within the body, these lines touch life at its most sensitive points.

Leaving the institutional system to become a professional artist

Liu Qiming graduated from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 1995 and taught at universities until 2006, first at Aba Teachers College in Wenchuan County and then at Southwest University of Science and Technology in Mianyang. He later resigned, settled in Suojia Village in Beijing as it faced demolition, and chose to become a professional artist. When he resigned, well-meaning colleagues urged him to reconsider: had all those years of study not been for the sake of securing a position in an institution? Why turn himself into a laid-off worker? “I understood what they were saying, but I did not really agree. Whether one lives with dignity or without it is a crucial question. If survival does not come with human dignity, it is not the exercise of the right to live but merely scraping by. In fact, I like university teaching very much. But it is not right for me at present, because China still has no universities in the substantive sense of the term.”

Under the severe conditions of the financial crisis in the years that followed, the booming art market suddenly seemed a thing of legend. Many artists who had moved to Beijing faced harsh realities, and some struggled to make ends meet. Liu Qiming, however, was among those who weathered the danger; his paintings even continued to sell quite well. He offered no formula for this. Breaking free of the institutional system meant, in a sense, choosing to remain ready for the risk of a difficult life. In his view, an artist should be content as long as income does not impede making art. Whatever the circumstances, the most important thing is to devote oneself to the work. Difficulties will always arise; artists must make art just as farmers must cultivate the land and workers must do their jobs. “There is a saying that opportunity comes to those who are prepared. It sounds like a cliché, but there is still some truth in it.”

Recording through distant, quiet observation

Looking at Liu Qiming’s paintings can suddenly place the viewer in a suspended condition, without support or refuge. His pictorial spaces are open and desolate, still and remote. He uses subdued colours—grey-blue, grey-green or a muted, greyish pale red—to construct hazy, indistinct backgrounds. Through open compositions and visual fragments scattered across Chinese memory, he creates surreal situations and records the nightmares of introspective moments. Between the strange and the familiar, he makes us feel the painful helplessness of being “thrown” into the world.

Liu Qiming says that he “likes to record things through a kind of distant, quiet observation,” thereby magnifying solitude and evoking anxiety, bewilderment and a sense of facing “the infinite”…