Liu Ye

"I grew up in a world of red: the red sun, red flags, red scarves, with green pines and sunflowers often supporting the red symbols."
Liu Ye

One of Liu Ye's most iconic images, the juxtaposition of the boy-sailor and the towering battleship in Untitled is typical of his disquieting iconography which is visually influenced by kitsch Chinese propaganda art and Western fairytale. Cowering behind a vast theatre curtain, the juvenile shipmate in generic western naval attire resembles a character from an innocent children's storybook; yet the close proximity of the aggressively confrontational warship advancing towards us, with anti-aircraft guns assembled on its deck, reminds us of the destruction of warfare, shattering the comfort of fiction and bringing us back to the realities of life. While the curtain and spot light locate us in the fictive world of the stage, as the curtain parts on the drama there is no escaping reality.

Importantly, in the present work the drama unfolds in a canvas of saturated red which is emphasised by the horizontal, cinematic format of the canvas. His primary source of inspiration, however, is the storybooks that were banned under the repressive regime of the Cultural Revolution. The artist's father was an author and illustrator of children's books and, like many intellectuals, was as a result sent to the countryside for re-education under Mao's policy of forced manual labour. Yet illicitly he kept many books whose illegality only served to excite the artist and further fuel his imagination. "It was politically dangerous to read such books in those days. However, these fantastic stories with their beautiful illustrations opened a new and wonderful world to me."

Liu Ye is exceptional in his generation for his first-hand understanding of Western art and culture. After completing his studies in Beijing's Central Academy of Fine Arts he spent prolonged periods in Europe - first studying in the Hochschule der Kunste in Berlin in 1994 and later at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in 1998. The influence of western art is discernible in his Pop style and exquisite finish, which nonetheless remains resolutely Chinese. However, most significantly, his time in Berlin took the artist out of China at a pivotal moment in its recent history, allowing his work to develop independently and to watch the events unfold from a Western perspective. While other artists were venting their frustrations at the post-1989 clamp down of civil and artistic liberties, Liu Ye was imbibing a very different draught of cultural change in a city adjusting itself to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the prevailing ideological climate change, a parallel to what was simultaneously happening back in China. As a result, Liu Ye's art does not belong to any of the schools - be it Cynical Realism or Political Pop - that evolved in the 1990s. Instead it stands alone as an individual, personal vision eloquently laced with the political environment intrinsic to his upbringing.