Between Passion and Reflection — On Qiming Liu’s Oil Paintings

Qiming Liu’s oil paintings present a world that convulses within dreams, immerses itself in abandon, and is exiled within order. Seen across time, his works offer both a record of one artist’s development and documents of Chinese existence within a particular historical context.

In 1992, Liu entered the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, where he was fortunate to study with distinguished painters and critics including Zhang Xiaogang, Ye Yongqing, and Wang Lin. His innate artistic sensitivity, the guidance of accomplished teachers, and the institute’s open atmosphere allowed him, at the very beginning of his artistic life, to encounter a wide range of artistic possibilities. Through his teachers’ careful instruction and his own diligent practice, he honed the fundamentals of expression. From the work of historical masters he grasped art’s driving forces; through reading and discussions with teachers and friends he learned about the changes Chinese art had already undergone. In the work of Zhang Xiaogang and other prominent artists of that generation, he witnessed emerging artistic currents, recognizing the meaning of exploration and the freedom of art. All this expanded his horizons and gave him the opportunity to draw widely from different sources. During his years at the institute, Liu tried many languages and styles, transforming learning from a conventionally passive process into an active process of experiment and inquiry, and laying a substantial foundation for his later work.

Liu’s work can be divided into two periods: the first might be called expressionist, and the second conceptual and imagistic. Having seen all of his work, however, I still find good reason to regard them as two tendencies within a single artistic whole. Though different in style and successive in time, they do not proceed independently, without regard for one another. His passionate disposition inclines him toward expressionism, while his habit of reflection continually leads him to test how far concepts can penetrate images. He has consistently explored a path that joins expressionism’s expansive force with an artist’s instinctive sense of order. From the earth, the body, even a breath as fine as gossamer, he apprehends art’s truth, then uses that truth to release passion and illuminate life. In his paintings, dense modeling casts the solidity of the soil; unrestrained brushwork tears open the constriction of the chest; gentle strokes caress the wounds of history; substantial layers of color reveal the texture of life. Passing before his paintings, we come silently to understand a balance between feeling and reason, romanticism and reality.

After graduating, Liu volunteered to work at Aba Teachers College in Wenchuan County on the western Sichuan Plateau. Far from the city, he kept a distance from the art world’s clamor, gaining an opportunity to contemplate the many questions connecting life with art and art with life. He began a process of transformation, quietly reflecting and observing. Yet that process possessed an organic continuity rather than a rhythm of rupture. His works around the time of graduation consistently retain the characteristics of his early style and the directness and candor of expressionism: concern for society, personal anguish, flashes of insight. These inner factors, not yet reconciled, surged out in a discontinuous language. It is as if a mechanism inside the artist were suddenly activated and a sleeping lion leapt up with a wild roar; the stark black and white suggest a mythic lion unfurling a white mane in the night.

Although his arrival in Wenchuan marked a change from student to teacher and from a sultry mountain city to a cool plateau, his paintings remained engulfed in burning passion. For a time, his inner turmoil scarcely allowed him to select his pictorial language. Perhaps the lonely environment intensified his desire to express himself; looking around, he found few people to whom he could speak, and canvas and paint became the natural means of expression. Made on the western Sichuan Plateau, Night of October 26, 1996 has a title that is a trace of time, while its image traces the movements of emotion, recording a particular psychological state that appeared only on that night. It brings Pollock to mind. The difference is that Pollock pursued the creation of a new artistic language with a sense of mission, whereas Liu used spontaneity to release passion and resolve inner conflicts. If a “concept” shadows his images, it is not an intellectual concept about art but one melted into the elemental passion of life. Responding to the fashionable term “conceptual art,” he said that he hoped his art would be “conceptualized art.” In his images I feel the emotional heat released by this added process of transformation: it connects the origins of life with the origins of art.

The black-and-white works of his Wenchuan period—Night of October 26, 1996, White Series, and Black Series—develop this candid self-expression to the fullest. The latter two also constitute the Mask Series, within which White Series might be seen as the outward resolution of Black Series. The latter painting has an explosive dynamism, as if a mask had been torn open without warning. Seemingly unrelated visual fragments drift, their expressions fearful and ambiguous. Some seek to sink into deeper darkness; some hover in a gray zone between light and dark; some resemble the bristling hair on Warhol’s head, alternately receding from us and bearing down on the viewer. Yet in White Series all this frenzy and agitation suddenly acquire structure and become a mask: silent and reserved, but estranged from this unfamiliar world through extraordinary loneliness.

The works of Liu’s Wenchuan period frequently employ the image of the mask, bringing conceptual depth to surging passion. This is the mask an individual inevitably wears in society. Sartre said, “Hell is other people”; Liu’s paintings of this period seem instead to say, “Other people are masks.” We live in a world where masks roam everywhere. Yet however tightly fitted those masks may be, they cannot hide their inherent flaws. The artist forces color through these flaws, tearing openings in the masks that grow larger and wider, allowing desire, jealousy, and greed to disclose their secrets and destroy the moral pretensions of the so-called civilized world.

I find it difficult to imagine that, as soon as Liu stands before a blank canvas, the concept of the mask is already fully formed in his mind. The effects of his paintings make it easier to believe that the “bamboo in the eye,” the “bamboo in the hand,” and the “bamboo in the heart”—if such a process exists in his work—are as inseparable as a stream that no blade can sever. The process of painting is itself the process by which masks gather, form, and disintegrate. Here, vision and concept challenge and inform one another, eroding the hardness of the concept and leaving traces of the collision between thought, passion, and image.

The tearing and burning of masks may be regarded as a farewell ritual, marking a turn in Liu’s art. In fact, as he was about to leave his student years behind, he had already undertaken a ritual of a similar kind: his graduation solo exhibition at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, titled Views on Lightness and Weight — (Out) Radon and Tritium (In). The title looks like wordplay but contains reflections on art and on the historical condition of human beings: lightness and weight, departure and entry, inertia and change. The works themselves display striking contrasts. Some continue the surging passion of expressionism; others move toward the margins of Cynical Realism with symbolic images of self-mockery. Sharing a room, they substantiate the title’s paradox. Through this juxtaposition in space, they articulate the tension between continuity and change over time—the very secret that has allowed Liu’s artistic path to unfold into what it is today, containing a dialectic of perseverance and decision. The works bordering on Cynical Realism are represented by the Group Portraits for Remembrance series. Their figures lined up with false smiles render the complex emotions at the end of student life bitter and helpless. Beneath the joke lies a Hamlet-like self-questioning: to leave or to enter? The Eating Series has a similar conception but a different visual style: the former is dry, the latter swollen. On a subtler level, they reveal the constancy and change in Liu’s art.

In 2000, Liu left Wenchuan and returned to his hometown, Mianyang, to teach at Southwest University of Science and Technology. Before long he departed again, traveling alone to Beijing and joining the artists who had migrated there to work independently. This may have been a more complete farewell in his life. After a period of waiting, we finally had another opportunity to see a new face of his work. If profound passion necessarily rests on the fertile soil of reason, then this is precisely what I see in Liu’s art. As he grew older, the reason that balances emotion bore natural fruit. Historically informed reflection on human destiny now occupied more of his painted world. In the conventionally sized canvases of the past two years, we encounter an extraordinary memory: a collective Chinese memory long sealed away within the heart, now opened through Liu’s individual artistic means. Gray tones envelop our gaze; expansive backgrounds deepen our loneliness. Between seeing and being seen, reality and the past, forgetting and remembering, it is as if rain and mist fill the air and clouds roll around us. We cannot see clearly, yet we are forcibly swept along. In the vast cloudscape, the image of power stands isolated. Yet its stamp-like color is enough to pierce time, mock forgetfulness, and repeatedly lock our destiny in place.

Looking at these works from his Beijing period, we suddenly enter a state of suspension, feeling without support or refuge. Through expansive compositions and fragments scattered between forgetting and memory, the artist creates surreal settings and records nightmares from moments of introspection. Between the strange and the familiar, we painfully feel the helplessness of being “thrown.”

Across the distant skies and gray clouds that continue to spread through these series, dead branches, red ropes, red flags, red scarves, red underpants, and gate towers both ancient and perpetually renewed flicker indistinctly like spectral fragments of memory—as if we strive to forget yet continually remember. Floating, rolling clouds resemble grief that cannot be released, growing ever wetter and heavier. Liu says that he “likes to record through a form of quiet observation from a distance.” Yet when he opens his heart at the place where the years have passed, we see deathly stillness and emptiness suspending people and their accompanying objects. The horizon recedes, magnifying loneliness and producing sudden anxiety, bewilderment, and the despair that arises only in facing the infinite. We can no longer distinguish the past from the present, dream from reality. Yet suddenly we apprehend the destiny of all those who inhabit this land.

These works of Liu’s are oblique. Their hazy, cold gray tones, elusive forms, and shifting emptiness and substance where water ends and clouds rise give them an ineffable poetry. His paintings enfold a sharp edge and a trembling state of mind, yet evoke profound sorrow.

Liu’s diverse styles are neither disorderly nor untraceable. Grounded in a deep understanding of art history and familiarity with the visual vocabularies that have multiplied since the twentieth century, he essentially adopts an attitude of freely selecting and putting pictorial languages to his own use. For him, there is no reason to reject any language that can express passion and communicate thought. I now understand why he so admires Picasso’s remark that “art has not changed; people’s ideas have changed.” Each stylistic change signifies a change in thought, a deeper expansion of ideas. If his art has any constant beyond passion, it is his care for human dignity and his intellectual instinct for doubt and criticism.