Blood-Red Temptation — An Interview with Qiming Liu

Cao: Your recent works are very interesting, Mr. Liu. They feel distinctly Chinese and poetic, with a strong layer of melancholy. They seem quite different from the contemporary art that is popular today.

Liu: Do they? Calling them poetic means they are lyrical. So-called “contemporary art” rejects lyricism! [Laughs.]

Cao: Your work seems to focus on reflecting upon and criticizing authoritarianism.

Liu: Criticism? I wouldn’t dare! Faced with the discourse of coercive power, I simply present what they have done, in my own way, for everyone to see.

Cao: Your works do not describe events directly, yet they often give viewers a convincing sense of being there. They leave much to reflect upon. There is humor, but no flippancy. Could you tell us how your approach developed?

Liu: I would not call it humor, but I certainly cannot treat these things lightly. In my work, I prefer an apparently relaxed, distant, quietly observant way of recording, rather than directly depicting present-day life. Perhaps while living through something, we are always slow to perceive it or unable to see it clearly. I therefore tend to let some time pass before reaching back, through memory, to what I have lived.

Cao: Could we call you an artist of historical subjects? Titles such as Revolutionary Models and My 1989 seem to bear traces of historical themes.

Liu: I do not like simply recounting or describing history, because reality itself is only history reflected in different mirrors. The past and future overlap today in simple, mechanical reflections. When I choose figures, symbols, or titles marked by a particular era, there is only one purpose: to borrow their condensed symbolic and metaphorical information to communicate my understanding and judgment of life now.

Cao: What do you think most strongly influences artistic creation?

Liu: When it comes to influence, there is the old saying that “art comes from life.” Since the beginnings of so-called civilization, however, politics has had the greatest influence on life. It penetrates every aspect of our lives, like an invisible hand controlling each person’s thoughts and actions. We grow so accustomed to our lives that we neither notice nor recognize it, and cannot escape. Although it acts through specific events in everyday life, we have already learned to accept, and even identify with, it as we grow up. Politics works this way: it uses brainwashing to make you identify with and accept values that serve those in power.

So, if art comes from life and is to reflect life, it should do more than simply depict what we can see. It must investigate and express the invisible things that control our lives. I think that is what we generally mean by “depth” in art.

Cao: In an interview with Art China, I read your remark that “living in this particular political society, I feel an invisible oppression. In the works, the violent, destructive forces of tornadoes and mushroom clouds form an internal harmony with Tiananmen specific to a certain era.” I can understand that now. You also said that in your work, “a person is merely a specimen.” Does that mean the same thing?

Liu: Individuals are very small. Faced with fate, we are always controlled by those invisible, powerful forces. Of course, they also include religion, culture, and so on. In life, we often merely hang by a thread. Life and destiny are a dance on a single thread.

Cao: “A dance on a single thread” is a compelling metaphor. What connects the red flags, red scarves, and red underpants that keep appearing in your paintings?

Liu: They are all pieces of cloth! All fragments behind the sublime and behind passion. The sublime and passion always exact a price in blood; human history offers no exception. Blood symbolizes both life and violence and bloodshed. The color of blood seduces every nerve in us.

Cao: [Laughs.] If I ever have a chance to curate an exhibition for you, I will choose “A Dance on a Single Thread” or “Blood-Red Temptation” as its theme.

Liu: Good! Perhaps that day will come. [Laughs.]

Cao: I believe most viewers can sense a strong social responsibility in your work. How important is that for an artist?

Liu: It is not a question of whether it is important. I think an artist should first be an independently minded intellectual in society. Social responsibility is always a basic measure of an artist. “How to make art” is a question of method; “what kind of art to make” is a question of attitude. Social responsibility is a fundamental principle in judging whether someone who works in art is an artist.

Cao: I agree. Could you tell us about particular events that have influenced your work?

Liu: There are many. I can briefly mention a few that I experienced firsthand and that shaped my judgments about life and my choices in art. When I finished junior secondary school, for example, I was expelled from the Communist Youth League for opposing cheating by the school in the entrance examinations. In June 1989, my elder brother, who had been in the army for less than six months, told me not to join demonstrations because it would be dangerous. He was there himself.

Cao: These were all before university. What about afterward?

Liu: At university I was lucky to meet excellent teachers such as Zhang Xiaogang, Ye Yongqing—whom we called Ye Shuai—and Wang Lin. They influenced and helped me enormously. They were involved in many activities, including the China Experience exhibition and the Art Documentation exhibition. Teaching at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute was relatively open. Students who loved art often gathered to discuss it, regardless of department or year. That made possible my first solo exhibition at the institute when I graduated in 1995: the oil-painting exhibition (Out) Radon and Tritium (In). Faced with the intertwined cultural landscape and contradictions of reality and ideals, East and West, tradition and modernity, I felt extraordinarily confused and uncertain. I tried to use the awkward condition of being constrained in both “departure” and “entry” to convey my reflections on life and art during my studies.

Cao: How did your years working in the Tibetan plateau region influence what you do today?

Liu: When I graduated in 1995, I went to teach in the art department of Aba Teachers College in Wenchuan, in Sichuan’s Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture. I hoped to find a spiritual home on this Tibetan and Qiang plateau, with its strong Tibetan Buddhist traditions. I soon discovered I was wrong. The sky on the plateau was always blue, but the air was suffocating. The plateau was never the stirring landscape writers and political agendas make it out to be.

Cao: Did you try to leave?

Liu: Yes. I wrote to Feng Zhengjie, an older fellow graduate who had just started working in Beijing, about going there to become a professional painter. Soon, however, I heard that the artists at Yuanmingyuan were being evicted. I established a studio in Chengdu instead and traveled frequently between the Aba Plateau and the city on the Chengdu Plain.

Cao: That must have been exhausting.

Liu: Exhausting, but also enjoyable! I organized some activities there with support from Wang Lin. When we started the Plateau Red art studio, he wrote encouraging me to “live on the frontier, but keep the world in your heart.” Those words still encourage me today.

Cao: How did you eventually leave?

Liu: Faced with a troubling lack of religious culture and feeling powerless within institutional constraints, I spent five years applying for a transfer, but ultimately failed. I finally left Aba Teachers College by giving up all three.

Cao: What does “giving up all three” mean?

Liu: Leaving the state system. The “three” are the three fetters through which the Chinese system manages people: personnel-file affiliation, payroll affiliation, and household registration.

Cao: Did you return to Chengdu?

Liu: No, I returned to my hometown, Mianyang. A friend encouraged me to help establish a private university, the Mianyang Science and Technology City Branch of Sichuan College of Education. I hoped private education might rescue Chinese education, but eventually discovered it was a fraud. For a year or two after leaving the plateau for the city, I felt continually unsettled, as though this was not my own life. Although I moved through it every day, I could not adapt and remained an outsider. Life floated like a fallen leaf on water.

Cao: That is the feeling of the Floating series we later saw. In 2002, you began teaching at the art school of Southwest University of Science and Technology?

Liu: Yes, and I became a director there.

Cao: You could re-enter an institution despite having none of those three registrations?

Liu: Yes. That is a Chinese characteristic: everything is decided by the leadership!

Cao: As a director, could you realize your educational ideals?

Liu: It was even worse. Those years almost drove me mad. Faced with helpless realities, I taught lies against my conscience: mechanical regulations every day, rigid teaching evaluations, standardized papers, no creativity permitted. Everything had to be quantified and standardized. This so-called university art education was like erecting a chastity arch for a prostitute—a completely false life. During that period, I chose brilliant, abstract colors to disguise and escape my life, but that was another failure. Escape never solves the problem!

Cao: It seems you really were unsuited to life within the institutional system. So you came to Beijing in 2006.

Liu: Yes. It is fortunate to be able to support a family by doing what you enjoy.

Cao: You must be free now!

Liu: Does freedom refer only to restraints on the body?

Cao: What do you mean?

Liu: Take something that happened in my family last year. On April 10, 2007, my father accompanied my mother to hospital for treatment of asthma. While she was being transferred between hospitals, she suffocated because the ambulance’s oxygen cylinder was empty. Despite all the evidence, the hospital arbitrarily denied the facts. Only after extensive evidence had been gathered and many friends, including people in the media, had helped did the hospital finally have to acknowledge them. After mediation, it paid basic compensation of 45,000 yuan according to the legal compensation standard for people with rural household registration—compensation standards for urban and rural registrations differ—and that was the end of it. There was not even basic remorse. Even now, they refuse to offer our family so much as a basic apology out of humanity.

The absurd thing is that none of those at the hospital who were actually responsible received any punishment. Instead, the nurse in the ambulance was dismissed. She had twice reminded the doctor that the oxygen cylinder was empty; she eventually became a key witness, and her testimony a key piece of evidence, in the case.

Cao: That is regrettable. There are far too many such cases in China.

Liu: Yes. There is such a sense of powerlessness. This is the life and fate I have to face. That is why I am dedicating this exhibition to my mother.

Cao: Despite all these experiences, your work is not negative. Though melancholy, it gives us a sense of hope and strong vitality.

Liu: Yes. The value and meaning of life are above everything.

Cao: Will you work in other forms as well?

Liu: Yes. I am preparing to make some still-image and video works. Every art form has irreplaceable strengths and its own limitations. I am very interested in trying new things.

Cao: Good! We look forward to seeing your new work. Thank you, Mr. Liu.