Floating Clouds: A Work of the Inner Life Beyond Vision

Floating clouds: clouds suspended in the sky. Beneath different clouds lie different national borders, different countries, different politics and societies. Yet within the same country, people encounter countless different lives and experiences. These clouds drifting above look down on humanity. Their changing shapes, sizes and colors seem to want to say something.

Liu Qiming’s Floating Clouds give conceptual expression to, and record, his reflections and insights into life and society. As an artist whose work grows from nature and life and arises from the inner self, he possesses in art a distinctive language of expression; his works are traces of his thought. Drawing on his considerable command of painting, he leaves our age the imprint of a thinker and an important visual and textual record for art history.

Liu Qiming, who graduated from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 1995, has lived through the transformation of China’s social structure since the mid-1990s. Throughout this process, a social order in which the strong oppress the weak, and the experiences and conditions of vulnerable groups, have remained central sources of his work. This collective reality is something no individual can ignore or evade, particularly an artist belonging to one of society’s most sensitive groups.

Looking through Liu Qiming’s paintings, one can clearly trace the transformation of his art. In the later works, his subjects become increasingly concentrated and pared down, while his manner of expression grows more oblique and metaphorical. In the Floating Clouds series, a geometrically shaped cloud, or an uncanny cloud severed across its middle, rests against a single, weighty black ground. The language of the whole appears quiet and perceptive. It challenges viewers’ visual and aesthetic sensibilities while also leading them to break with habitual ways of thinking.

I can also sense the difficulty of this process. The artist must establish a wholly independent space on the canvas. On entering it, he has to resist the temptation of “color” and remove any scene that might connect the floating cloud to its surroundings, in order to preserve the image’s purity and singularity. The discipline of exclusion goes further: in a conceptual work with a pared-down composition, even a slight loss of delicacy can leave its language without breath, unable to communicate with the viewer. Yet if delicacy is passed over, the thought of the work may become overly complex and disturb the viewer’s visual response. The artist must therefore judge this balance with precision, giving the work its distinctive character and enabling a satisfying visual experience. Each Floating Clouds painting has a simple structure. Its visual ease also allows one to perceive a somber, far-reaching meaning emerging within the stillness. It seems, then, that this creative process has involved a new challenge and a movement beyond existing limits, in Liu Qiming’s thought and inner life alike.

Beyond this, the most important aspect of an artwork is the expression of its thought. The hardest task is to bring vision and imagery together in material form. It tests not only the artist’s command of painting but also the full range of his aesthetic understanding and psychological resources. Whether an artistic medium can successfully express the artist’s intangible consciousness and ever-changing, unbounded imagination directly affects whether viewers can enter into dialogue with the work, recognize the traces of its maker’s thought, and find resonance.

The “floating clouds” seem absurd, almost transformed into another order of things. Here, something familiar becomes strange and mysterious; nevertheless, in the end we still instinctively call them floating clouds. What the artist intends is open to different readings. I can only sense this: the clouds float in the sky, permeable and transparent, drifting away with the wind; when the wind arrives, its sharp edge can cut them across the middle. This, to me, is where Liu Qiming’s intention lies. His love and hatred, the things on which he fixes his attention—all are marked on the canvas. This is the language he has sought silently and laboriously in reality, a language steeped in the inner life.