Preserving Personal Historical Memory — On Qiming Liu’s Oil Paintings

In a society that esteems only collectivism, even the idea of putting the human being first is readily contaminated: when the “person” becomes “the people,” the individual is often excluded. In China’s feudal cultural tradition, the people stand in relation to the sovereign. As the saying goes, “The people are most important; the sovereign least; the state comes between.” The people matter because they form the basis of the sovereign’s rule. This gives us a precondition for judging whether today’s society has truly entered modernity: the degree to which the priority of individual freedom is realized in its institutions and social life. The constitution stipulates the democratic rights of every citizen, yet in everyday life we are fundamentally unable to exercise them. The present condition in which citizens’ rights exist in name alone has profoundly affected the spiritual and psychological life of Chinese people. Mainland artists’ collective amnesia about major political and historical events is one conspicuous example. Many artists use, and even overuse, cultural resources from the Mao era, yet almost no one recounts or reflects upon the historical catastrophes of that time. Since Scar Art made its tentative, short-lived foray into historical subjects, such work has remained a field wholly dominated by official ideology: a terrain where the so-called realist method that substitutes political bias for historical truth, together with the hegemony of its narratives, still runs rampant.

For precisely this reason, I was deeply moved when I saw Qiming Liu directing his work’s attention toward historical memory.

Liu approaches history through personal memory. Whether he gives a work the title of a particular year or takes historical narratives as a point of departure in works such as Revolutionary Models, Counter-Strike, and Olympic Reverie, he does not directly depict political and historical events. Instead, he always uses psychological symbolism to convey something of his response to historical memories that are disappearing. In some works from the My 1989 series, for instance, there is only a barely visible human chain suspended in the sky, or silhouettes retaining athletic poses above clouds and water. Images collectively forgotten by Chinese people in today’s society appear so tiny and unreal within these paintings. They convey both the painter’s grief for historical experiences deliberately abandoned and art’s lament for the spiritual reality of an age of consumption. Through this heartfelt grief and lament, the artist hopes to preserve personal historical memory.

This is history made poetic, and poetry made historical.

Liu’s paintings are expansive and desolate, quiet and distant. He always uses subdued colors—gray-blue, gray-green, or a grayed pale red—to form hazy, indeterminate backgrounds, sometimes constituting the entire image where clouds and water meet. There are surges of clouds and water, the halo of daylight, and, intermittently visible among them, Tiananmen, a characteristic political symbol. Appearing amid clouds and water, this classical Chinese gate tower evokes immortal mountains and celestial palaces, adding an ethereal, elusive poetry to the surreal setting the painter creates. Its political symbolism also points to the specific historical concerns of his personal narrative.

The painter depicts people from a distance, allowing their smallness in space to resonate with their disappearance in time. Whether they are walking, drifting, making athletic gestures, or hanging from branches and ropes, he deliberately uses a luminous background to render them like silhouettes: thin, minute, floating, without roots or origin, without support or refuge, without beginning or end, helpless and fatalistic. These are abandoned people, cast aside and forgotten by official power, the consciousness of power, and ideology. In contemporary China, where the market economy, the age of consumption, and a collectivist society are mixed together, the wholesale collapse of intellectuals, the pursuit of quick gains in art, and the weakness of historical consciousness are bound up with one another. Liu lives among them and feels them deeply. His paintings reveal a profound loneliness and desolation, emotions that are immediate and real. Only in this way can art act as a revelation, exposing the truth of spiritual reality through sensitive, subtle psychological responses.

Art does not have to appear in the form of confrontation or opposition to possess a critical relationship to social, spiritual, and cultural reality. As an individual’s experience of life, its critical value lies in challenging established and prescribed collective discourse through an individualized artistic language. Liu’s persistence in the individual’s inner response to, and psychological recollection of, historical events is itself a rejection of the despotic power and collective consciousness that erase historical memory. His continual, even obstinate, use of red points and lines in his paintings meets more than the formal need to direct visual attention within a cold gray palette. Red roofs, red ropes, red scarves, and red underpants are political or broadly political symbols with signifying force. He makes them strange, removing them from everyday life to construct a surreal experience. By fragmenting, individualizing, and dispersing history, he restores it to a personal, inward, lowercase history. Liu touches history with plaintive, sorrowful poetry, seeking to demonstrate that history cannot be forgotten. This statement itself contains respect for history, even for a heavy history that has inflicted immense harm. Perhaps this is precisely why his work is filled with a melancholy poetry.

Speaking of Liu’s paintings brings to mind the contemporary German painter Anselm Kiefer, whose anguished repentance and penetrating reflection have composed a monumental elegy for German history since the Second World War. I often wonder: now that Chinese painting has begun to include work such as Liu’s, softly singing and lingering over historical experience, when will an artist emerge who, like Kiefer, sounds a powerful moral voice for historical suffering?