CRITICAL WRITING
Qiming Liu: Recording History in Painting
What He Paints Is History
I first encountered Qiming Liu’s paintings on the blog of my former classmate Wu Yongqiang. Professor Wu supervises master’s students at Sichuan University’s College of Art; he is young and accomplished. After many years apart, this old classmate, always an independent spirit, impresses me even more. Back then, he and another classmate of mine, Yu Yan, were the celebrated figures of our year. I also have a link to him on my blog. Yu Yan wore a long gown; Wu Yongqiang wore a short, front-fastening Chinese jacket, seemingly with a straw cord around his waist. One tall, one short, one stout, one thin, the two appeared before everyone together, displaying the exuberant individuality of young people in the 1980s. Professor Wu is now a specialist in modern art, and his insights into modern painting have taught me a great deal. His assessment of Liu’s paintings is: “Qiming Liu’s paintings show us a world convulsed within its dreams, delicate in its abandon, exiled within its order. They offer not only a record of an artist’s development, but also documentation of Chinese people’s existence within a particular historical context.”
I do not think I could ever write words so textured and concise, so direct in reaching the essence. But I followed that lead to Qiming Liu’s blog, searched for his work online, and came to understand deeply what that assessment meant by “documentation of Chinese people’s existence within a particular historical context.”
I know nothing about painting. My understanding goes little further than whether a picture looks good and resembles its subject. A little embarrassing, really. But I especially like Van Gogh’s paintings. The pain of life and a tormented soul pour out of them, and the emotional force in their pulsing colors stays with me. Pain is something one cannot confront directly, yet Van Gogh made me understand what pain looks like. Liu’s paintings, meanwhile, have taught me the process and exhilaration of discovering the truth. In a sense, his work has brought back the emotional experience I once had looking at Van Gogh.
I am illiterate when it comes to modern art. Not long ago, a friend invited me to an exhibition of a colleague’s paintings. I returned without feeling anything. Those broad blocks of color produced a static effect. In such paintings, I felt I saw only technique, not the painter’s living soul and emotions; astonishingly, one could not feel where his heart was. I am not particularly fond of Chinese landscape painting either. Good landscapes have thought and sensibility, but their classical emotions seem too far from our lives today. Similarly, I do not lavish praise on Wang Zengqi’s writing as many people do. Attending to the present and feeling ordinary people’s pain and joy is a basic principle of my aesthetic judgment. Although I have always advocated an attitude of detachment in personal life and engagement in practical affairs, deep within me there remains a passion belonging to our age.
In the group of paintings from 2006 onward on Liu’s blog, thick white clouds appear to roll and billow. I had not imagined oil painting could have such expressive power. Those rolling clouds convey many of the painter’s insights, while the red center of gravity above them gradually exposes the truth, as though using the cinematic language of montage to show the viewer history’s real face, even if that truth is revealed only little by little. In fact, this gradual revelation gives me a feeling of intimate proximity. Living in this rapidly changing age, we find so much of life’s actual face obscured. We keep discovering it, keep being shaken by the truth. How many truths of our age lie within those hidden facts? How many bloodied lives struggle behind the truth? As parts are exposed and then the whole, I seem to see every mark of our passage, step by step. The red memory taking up more and more of the picture seems to speak of the absurdity and unknowability of memory, and of the shock that absurdity gives us. We lived through that era. Our generation grew up singing The East Is Red, once believing that the great leader could live forever—long live, long live, ten thousand times long live. His radiance once prevented us from seeing the natural sun. Now, within the billowing thick clouds, all this reveals its true face piece by piece. Is it history’s absurdity, or our maturation from youth to middle age? I do not know. In fact, knowing or not knowing is unimportant. What matters is that we experienced this history and this absurdity together. In this understanding, how much of the warmth of our memories is revealing its cold, true face?
In that group of paintings from 2000 and 2005, the colors are exaggerated to the point of tearing. Their emotional orientation is consistent with the paintings from 2006 onward. Professor Wu describes their exaggeration and distortion well. I copy a passage from his essay here: “In his pictures, closely worked modeling casts the solidity of the earth; unrestrained brushwork tears open the oppression in the chest; gentle strokes touch history’s wounds; thick layers of color reveal the texture of life… Walking past his paintings, we silently understand what it means to balance sensibility and reason, romance and reality.” Professor Wu’s language is always wonderfully expressive. He says all that needs saying about these works’ profound meaning. In writing about painting, Professor Wu is my teacher.
Liu’s paintings give us as much space as possible for emotional imagination. They are neither merely accumulations of color nor displays of technique. In fact, he expresses his reflections on history through painting. We touch a painter’s living soul and emotions in his work, and those emotions certainly belong to the multitude of ordinary people in our age. That is why he is a painter who moves us.