Life Hanging by a Thread — Qiming Liu and His Paintings

No one can say exactly how long a thread is, how much weight it can string together, or how much lightness it can set in motion. Yet there is an artist who has made the thread a principal subject of his work, using a single thread to articulate his understanding of life and art. That artist is Qiming Liu.

In its basic sense, a line connects two physical particles across space. It does not in itself constitute an actual object, yet in Liu’s art it plays the important role of linking heaven and earth and bearing human life. Why does he invest this delicate, weightless line with such significance? The answer has much to do with his own experience. From secondary school onward, he seems to have borne pressures his classmates did not: he was expelled from the Communist Youth League for protesting cheating in a school examination; through the firsthand experience of his elder brother, who had enlisted, he learned something of the reality of the political turmoil of 1989. For a teenager, the ideal of pursuing progress suffered a double blow from so-called organizational principles and political reality. Just as his years at university had begun to cultivate rudimentary ways of observing and representing art and reality, his assignment upon graduation struck another blow to his artistic dream: he was sent to teach at Aba Teachers College in the Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan. The religious environment in this ethnic minority region and the scarcity of cultural information far from Chengdu filled him with loneliness and a lack of solace. He was young; he needed art, thought, and emotional exchange. He therefore established his own studio in Chengdu. In the following years, he traveled between his post at Aba Teachers College and his studio on the Chengdu Plain. The expenditure of time and energy eventually led him to resign, since only then could he paint with peace of mind and realize his artistic dream. Yet the realities of life repeatedly exposed him to falsehood, cruelty, and indifference: encouraged by a friend, he became involved in a fraud; the endless paperwork, meetings, rules, and regulations at a new teaching post left him unable to cope; his mother’s accidental death brought home the harsh reality of the divide between city and countryside.

He should have had sufficient time and energy to pursue the painting he loved, yet throughout his thirty-odd years he had been subjected to life’s cruel tricks. He might have been expected to vent this pain through impassioned imagery, since only in painting could he find human dignity and meaning in life. Yet when we look at the recent work he has made in the two years since moving to Beijing, we feel above all an elusive stillness and indifference. In the depths of shifting, densely dark clouds, a corner of a building symbolizing political power appears and disappears but can never be dispelled. Tornadoes and mushroom clouds emerge from it: an energy field of external political forces that can obscure the sky, blot out the sun and moon, and make all things wither. After many experiences, Liu has learned to look through appearances to what lies beneath. External restraints and the disturbances of real-world conflict no longer interest him as subjects for his brush. He wants to represent the answers he has sought concerning these pressures and troubles, to stand at a higher vantage point and grasp the invisible hand controlling the tangible world. He therefore chooses metaphor, combining layer upon layer of dark clouds that suggest reality’s weight with a seemingly minute architectural symbol. One is a natural phenomenon that seems insubstantial yet extends without limit; the other is a human-made object that seems lifeless yet holds tremendous energies of power. Their conjunction in painting exists only because of the existence and perplexity of Chinese people. Without this, the entire image would be empty and powerless.

The figures suspended like puppets in the foreground are the artist’s ultimate concern. They are naked except for a piece of red cloth that preserves their modesty. Above a fathomless sea of clouds that seems poised to swallow everything, they do not appear to panic. Instead, they mechanically repeat prescribed movements that outside forces long ago “dissolved into the blood and put into action.” These movements come from the model operas of the Mao era, familiar productions from the so-called years of burning passion. Yet in Liu’s eyes today, only their outward gestures remain. Times have changed; those illusory ideals have long since vanished, and no one believes in them, but the artist has retained the characters’ empty shells. We can therefore see that these dancing figures are given little individual characterization. Everything is merely suggestive, a matter of outline.

These mechanical, rigid theatrical figures are so at odds with the red ropes hanging from above that we cannot help doubting whether a rope can save these falling figures. In fact, this slender cord is only the gossamer thread of life, incapable of bearing so much historical and political weight. It is symbolic and suggestive, just like the red underpants, red scarves, and red flags that appear in some works: symbols of life’s unbearable weight, and sighs for its unbearable lightness.

The heavy gloom of the background and the light, grotesque foreground are connected by a lifeline. It is likened to the fragile thread of human life, yet it is so fine: how can it bear life’s strength and radiance? A powerful, unsettling sense of crisis therefore stirs throughout the image. Elusive but present everywhere and at all times, it is a force no one can truly escape. This is Liu’s inner sense of tragedy; at the very least, it can awaken a sense of sorrow in us as viewers.