Liu Ye's Early Inspirations – Surrealism, Unreality and the 'Problem of Purity'

Florence is a tender and mesmerizing early touchstone of Liu Ye’s practice that speaks to nearly every important source inspiration for the artist. Tinged with the ethereal glow of dusk, the panorama of Florence is portrayed in pristine detail from an elevated vantage point from the historic Fort Belvedere. It is among the last works from the artist's German period painted just before his return to China after five years of study and travel in Europe. Created at this pivotal juncture in 1994, Florence is remarkably rare as one of Liu Ye’s few outdoor landscapes, and more importantly, the only recorded landscape depicting an actual real-life location.

Notably, Florence also features the very first recorded instance of the striped Breton shirt, here donned by the smiling girl and later appearing as part of the uniform of every one of Liu Ye’s sailor boys. Other iconic symbols abound: the angel wings, the books, the mirror, and the geometric lines that effortlessly anchor and define the rich yet perfectly balanced figurative composition.

Shedding the claustrophobic studio space of earlier works from his German period, Liu Ye here nimbly situates familiar still life objects and furniture within an outdoor stage, with the deftly woven Escher-esque architecture of the Fort Belvedere’s sprawling deck enacting an fluent dialogue between foreground and background, interior and exterior. Such a singular composition heralds later paintings that feature windows, doors and curtains that open up to reveal fantastical realms. In this special instance, it is the sweeping vista of Florence. Gazing at the magisterial Duomo bathed in a haloed horizon, with his impending return to China looming in the distance, Liu Ye’s Florence is a profound reflection of on identity, artistic history, and the essence of artistic creation itself, by one of the most accomplished Chinese contemporary painters of our generation.

Born in 1964, Liu Ye grew up in a highly artistic and literary family: his father wrote children’s fairy tales and his mother was a language teacher. During the Cultural Revolution his parents hid all their books, which Liu Ye found and read in secret, spending long quiet hours enthralled by illustrations from foreign lands. After the Cultural Revolution, Liu Ye enrolled in the vocational Beijing College of Art and Design in 1980 and then the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 1986, receiving a strict, orthodox education with a limited exposure to Western art that was nevertheless transformative. His first influences included Paul Klee and René Magritte, whose works he encountered through printed materials. In 1989, Liu Ye left for Germany where he remained until 1994, receiving an MFA from the Berlin University of the Arts. During his time in Europe, Liu Ye’s influences ranged from works from the early Renaissance, Jan van Eyck in particular, to Johannes Vermeer, Giorgio Morandi, Balthus, Giorgio de Chirico, Piet Mondrian, Klee, and Magritte, among many others. Liu Ye developed his own whimsical surrealist style, one which, as the critic Zhu Zhu put it, was uniquely positioned between a contemporary Pop aesthetic and the Flemish tradition of Stilleven – a world of equipoise and stillness. Per Zhu, Liu Ye sensed in the Flemish painters “the appeal of language that transcends temporality and regionalism.”

While Liu Ye’s earliest works in Germany reveal an almost “nightmarish mood pervad[ing] closed-off interior space, conveying schizoid tendencies in the self, plunked down in a strange land,” Zhu Zhu writes, Florence reveals a resolution of these intense feelings as the artists was on a leisurely trip to Italy knowing he was about to return home. Zhu has written of Liu Ye’s loneliness: “The intensity of solitude is such that he craves a mirror image to keep him company, like the line from a poem by Bei Dao: ‘I speak Chinese facing the mirror.’” In contrast to the twisted tortured face in The Broken Mirror, the girl in the mirror in Florence is joyous, jubilant, carefree; while the overall tableau exudes stillness and serenity. The young heroine in the present work is modelled after the childhood photograph of Liu Ye’s friend; regardless, the artist has famously declared that all images in his paintings were self-portraits at their core.

It is precisely this fairy tale quality of unreality that defines Liu Ye’s paintings and his globally acclaimed oeuvre; like no other Chinese artist before him, Liu Ye perfectly assimilated geometric abstraction into hyper-figurative representation, superlatively straddling realism and post-modern appropriation to arrive at a hybrid visual language.

Florence exemplifies to perfection Liu Ye’s unique interplay of figuration and abstraction. In the immediate foreground, there is the stark concision of the outlines of the desk. In the central portion, there is the cool rationality of the orderly lines delineating the architecture of the Fort Belvedere, which underscores the rich details of the panorama beyond.

Whether in early works that incorporated Mondrian paintings within their compositions, or in the later Bamboo and Books series where Liu Ye’s gradual exclusion of narrative foregrounded the primacy of the geometric line, Liu Ye’s consistent explorations in abstraction and enduring fidelity to representation result in a curious tension and interaction within the compositional framework. His inimitable geometric strategies lend his canvases a sense of still yet dynamic harmony and equilibrium – one that unfailingly tingles with an illuminated, weightless quality in spite of exacting details.

Elements of Mondrian’s rigorous geometric abstraction appeared in in Liu Ye’s early works, with representations of actual paintings by Mondrian inserted in the background of Liu Ye's canvases. Going one step further from direct appropriation, Liu Ye internalizes Mondrian’s emphasis on visual theories such as balance and geometrical partitioning into his non-abstract compositions, employing strict and rigorous strategies of delineation, segmentation, portioning and partitioning of space. While his works are categorically non-abstract, Liu Ye utilizes the geometric outlines of objects such as windows, tables, paintings or even limbs of figures and their shadows for use as line and form, mapping out compositions that are imbued with precise balance and correspondence. Such efforts result in a curious tension and interaction within the compositional framework, lending Liu Ye’s canvases a sense of still yet dynamic harmony and equilibrium.

Such geometrical strategies were already employed in the 1990s in compositions that featured characters such as little girls, female teachers, Miffy the bunny, etc. In the 2000s, Liu Ye made a conscious turn towards abstraction which entailed a gradual exclusion of narrative. In the artist’s own words, “The art is purified. By reducing the emotion, narrative, and story present in my earlier works, the work must rely on the inherent elements of painting, such as proportion, colour, and composition.”

In 2007, Liu Ye embarked on the series of the bamboo – a motif used often as a metaphor for the integrity of the literati in traditional Chinese art. The bamboo is thus a well-chosen motif that thematically symbolises integrity and purity whilst also visually exuding geometrical purity via the stark line of the bamboo stalk. The Bamboo series later paved the way for Liu Ye’s also iconic Book Painting series, in which the artist likewise toys with the borders of geometric abstraction through simplified and tranquil representation of books.

Coinciding with both the Bamboo series and the Books series, Specially For You (Olympic 2008) is a paradigmatic work demonstrating the core modus operandi of Liu Ye’s visual lexicon: concise geometric arrangements, flashes of rhythmic color arrangements, and an exquisite attention to detail that result in colorful, optically engaging works. The work was commissioned for a special charity event in honour of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. An iconic image, the present composition appears in editioned prints by the artist, which feature the exact same vision of a colorful gridded background and a chubby-cheeked girl, with the five colored balls in the young protagonist’s hairpiece representing the colored rings of the Olympic symbol. The cheerfully choreographed composition straddles figuration and geometric abstraction, realism and post-modern appropriation, manifesting as a superlative paradigm from Liu Ye’s oeuvre.