Conversation with Lin Zi

Lin Zi: Qiming Liu is not your original name, is it? Why did you change it?

Qiming Liu: That is right. My original name was Liu Qi, which I had always thought was a good name. From primary school through university, I occasionally heard people say that a friend had the same name, but it felt distant and had little to do with me. Later, the internet brought people closer together, and online I discovered how many people were called Liu Qi: rapists, murderers, people who persevered despite disabilities, deputy provincial governors, directors—every kind of person! Whenever I saw a report about a Liu Qi, I would wonder whether it was about me. After 2000, people around me suddenly started calling me “mayor.” I realized that a senior official in Beijing had the same name, and that made me extremely uncomfortable. I began to think about changing my name. At the time, however, household registration rules made it very difficult. I was still teaching at a university, and a change would have caused many complications. It became a persistent concern that I could do little about. In 2006, when I left the state institution system and went to Beijing to become a professional artist, I felt as though I had been given a new life. On my very first day there, I told all my new friends that my name was Qiming Liu.

Lin Zi: If you could describe yourself in only twelve separate words or numbers, what would you choose?

Qiming Liu: Tolerant; uncompromising toward evil; narcissistic; decisive; content with my lot; adventurous; an optimist; a fatalist; a skeptic; independent in thought and action; a sense of mission; the spirit of Ah Q.

Lin Zi: Tell us about the work you are making or the exhibitions you are preparing now.

Qiming Liu: The work I am making concerns the “5·12 Incident.” I am also preparing works for two solo exhibitions in Paris and Beijing next year. The “5·12 Incident” is the other side of the May 12 earthquake. Among the hundreds of thousands killed or injured, some lives were claimed by the natural disaster, while others were lost to a human-made disaster caused by failings in the system. That is why I call it the “5·12 Incident.”

Lin Zi: Are you more interested in the story a work can tell, the distinctive or powerful visual impact of its decorative qualities, or some other significance?

Qiming Liu: I do not place much importance on a work’s narrative function, and visual novelty or shock is not what I pursue. I try to use my work effectively to express my opinions and judgments on issues in the society I live in—to engage in social criticism through art.

Lin Zi: Your style seems to keep changing. Are there particular reasons for the style you use now? Do you make your current works because you like them, because they are easy to complete, or because they appeal to collectors?

Qiming Liu: If style refers only to a work’s surface form, then I will certainly never become that kind of stylistically defined artist. Art is a way for me to engage in social criticism. I change my means of expression according to the force, angle, and approach that the criticism requires. Those changes have nothing to do with ease of execution or collecting.

Lin Zi: Do you think your private life influences the subjects of your art? Do you try to keep your work and your life separate?

Qiming Liu: It is not a question of whether there is an influence. They are completely interwoven and permeate one another. Society is made up of individual lives. No individual life can exist outside society; my private life is a microcosm of it. An individual’s fate is the fate of society and history, and vice versa.

Lin Zi: Which well-known artists have influenced your work today, and how?

Qiming Liu: In the early years, my university teachers Wang Lin, Zhang Xiaogang, and Ye Yongqing influenced me. Their unconventional teaching helped me move from spontaneous expression toward conscious expression. In recent years, Ai Weiwei’s influence has been direct. His words and actions encourage me to engage more courageously in social criticism through art, like a comrade-in-arms.

Lin Zi: Do you usually work on location, refer to photographs, work from models, or create from memory and imagination?

Qiming Liu: Memory and imagination. Through my personal memories, I try to fathom collective historical memory. Imagination is the creative method I use to construct an image.

Lin Zi: What comments about your work do you hear most often?

Qiming Liu: Hidden pain, personal historical memory, a sharp political stance and social critique, a strong humanistic concern, and so on. If pain and memory are a lifeline connecting us emotionally, and position and criticism are an attitude toward life, then concern is directed toward humanity’s ultimate fate.

Lin Zi: Do you feel people have preconceptions about artists like you? What kinds of prejudice have you encountered?

Qiming Liu: Yes. Some people think I paint outdated Cultural Revolution subjects; others say I echo Western prejudices about China. That is itself a prejudice. The idea of an “outdated subject” might make sense in commercial terms. But in my understanding, art has no subjects that are inherently current or outdated. The subject itself is not the issue. What the artist wants to express is what matters most, and it is the only reason to choose a subject.

Nor am I painting the Cultural Revolution as such. I borrow the symbolism and implications of historical events to speak about the problems of China and Chinese people today. Those problems objectively exist; if there are problems, they need to be discussed and addressed. You cannot allow narrow nationalism to lead you by the nose. Nationalism is something every country’s ideology knows how to exploit. Chinese or foreign, whatever a person’s race or beliefs, humanity’s ultimate orientation of values is the same. Different levels of development among countries or groups may produce temporary or indirect differences in their interests, but that does not negate the ultimate judgment of values.

Lin Zi: When you finish a work, do you feel a sense of loss or sadness at “letting it go”? Do you maintain any particular connection with the people who own your work?

Qiming Liu: No. Works of art carry the artist’s thought, and they are the most effective means for artists to communicate with the public. I long for exchange, so I am excited whenever a work leaves the studio: it makes communication with more people possible. I pay particular attention to how my work circulates. I would like to become friends with everyone who owns it. Appreciating, recognizing, or buying my work creates that possibility. Put simply, I believe I can find more kindred spirits through my work. How could that not be a pleasure?

Lin Zi: Before submitting work to galleries or exhibitions, or showing it to the public, do you seek advice and make changes, or follow your own feelings?

Qiming Liu: If the question concerns the relationship between the exhibition space and the dimensions of a work, I am happy to discuss adjustments. In that space, the work will engage viewers emotionally and bring ideas into collision. A thoughtful spatial arrangement and suitable work dimensions are important to making that exchange as effective as possible.

Lin Zi: Beyond exhibitions in your own country, where have you exhibited? Where do you feel people are more receptive to your work?

Qiming Liu: The United States, France, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Germany. Relatively speaking, people in France, Hong Kong, and the United States have been more receptive to my work.

Lin Zi: I have read many English-language interviews in the United States and feel that their questions and answers differ from Chinese interviews. English-language questions tend to be more straightforward, and the answers closer to everyday life, whereas Chinese interviews seem more “profound.” Do people from Eastern countries want to understand different things about artists than people in the West?

Qiming Liu: There are certainly differences. Explaining the reasons would take a long time. Put simply, different cultural traditions shape different habits of thought. Esoteric traditions and metaphysics, for example, are crystallizations of Eastern wisdom. Their cultivation relies on insight and is deeply inward. Christianity, by contrast, relies on a large body of doctrine and a series of prescriptions; it emphasizes form and is outward. Historically, feudal civilization lasted longer and was more deeply entrenched in the East than in the West. Hierarchical deference produced taboos concerning elders and those of higher standing. One moves from not daring to express something directly, to being unable to express it directly, and finally to not expressing it at all. A person’s intelligence is then measured by their ability to grasp what is implicit. What Eastern people want to express is therefore certainly not only what appears on the surface of a work; what the artist truly wants to communicate is often hidden beneath it.

Lin Zi: How do you choose an agent? What advice would you give to artists starting out?

Qiming Liu: In fact, there are not many opportunities to choose. I am not a particularly celebrated artist, and there is no rush to buy my work.

My present agent and I generally understand one another well. She has studied and traveled in the West but understands Chinese culture deeply. She understands what I am doing and respects my creative freedom. She is also working hard to build a better community of collectors, and I support her work. For a new artist choosing an agent, if these four qualities are present and the agent can communicate directly with important international curators and museums, I think that would be ideal.

Lin Zi: In the past two years, Chinese art auctions have set one record after another. How do you view the market for Chinese contemporary art and Chinese artists?

Qiming Liu: This is not an isolated phenomenon separate from the changing role China plays internationally. It corresponds to other countries’ need to understand China. It is our desire to fully exploit a forest that makes specimens of everything within it appear important and valuable. Art and artists are naturally the best specimens of a “cross-section of a country.” As specimens, their fates differ according to the depth, completeness, and representativeness of that cross-section, the amount of information it contains, whether they are discovered early or late, whether they are discovered at all, and who discovers them.

Lin Zi: Looking at well-known modern artists, how much of a work’s or an artist’s success do you think is due to luck—or to God’s blessing?

Qiming Liu: Perhaps fifty percent. Half of whether you become well known is a matter of luck.

A very well-known artist once told me that if you want a work to be shown or sold, finishing it amounts to only thirty percent of the task. You must spend seventy percent of your time and energy on promoting yourself afterward. To become well known, you need to devote still more time and energy to socializing and maintaining contacts, and even then it may not happen. According to him, good work is only the foundation; good relationships create opportunities, and good luck makes them real. The importance of an agent is therefore self-evident: the artist can gain back that seventy percent of time and energy and devote it to making work.

Lin Zi: If you could choose freely, where would you most like to live or work?

Qiming Liu: I would like to spend half of each year as a fisherman in Sicily and the other half making art in China. It makes no difference which Chinese city.

Lin Zi: When do you think you became an artist? Do you remember your first artwork? Do you have photographs of it?

Qiming Liu: Probably when I graduated from university. The work was called Light · Darkroom Technique · Heavy. It was included in the first solo exhibition of my life, which I held at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute when I graduated. I still have photographs.

Lin Zi: What do you think of art academies? Do you think they destroy artistic genius?

Qiming Liu: Art academies certainly keep destroying geniuses, but art does not need geniuses!

My advice to art academies is either to close down or to end the Party’s leadership.

Lin Zi: Which of the courses you studied was most useful to you?

Qiming Liu: None. Freedom of mind and a sound institutional environment are what matter most.

Lin Zi: How did you develop from an art-school graduate into the full-time artist you are today?

Qiming Liu: By learning to subtract, and continually transforming!

Lin Zi: If you could have another skill besides art, what would it be?

Qiming Liu: Repairing things. I enjoy repairing anything that has been damaged. Or being a taxi driver, because I have an excellent sense of direction and am very good at finding my way.

Lin Zi: In your eyes, is the world a complicated mixture, or is it very simple and uncomplicated?

Qiming Liu: It is a very simple, complicated mixture.

Lin Zi: What is the hardest thing about being a full-time artist?

Qiming Liu: The hardest things are the absence of support from art foundations and the lack of a studio that can be rented over the long term. The studios we rent now can be razed by the government at any moment.

Lin Zi: What is the greatest advantage of being a full-time artist?

Qiming Liu: Freedom of mind and independence of action.

Lin Zi: If our online readers want to buy your paintings, where can they see your work, and how can they contact you?

Qiming Liu: They can see work at the galleries I collaborate with. They can contact me through you, through a gallery or agent, or directly. Email is the best way to get in touch.

Lin Zi: Finally, do you have any advice for artists who are just starting out?

Qiming Liu: What you eat comes out the other end. Don’t rush!