Liu Ye

signed in Pinyin and dated 91, framed

Galerie Taube, Berlin
Private Collection
Christie's, Hong Kong, 28 November, 2010, lot 1218

Germany, Berlin, Galerie Taube, Exhibition 131, April - June, 1993

This work is generally in good condition. This is a minor scuff at the top right corner. Having examined the work under ultraviolet light, there appears to be no evidence of restoration.
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Liu Ye
A Chinese Artist in Berlin: Three Early Paintings

The three lots on offer were painted by Liu Ye in the early 1990's, when he was a student at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin (now Berlin University of the Arts). At once self-portraits, art-historical homages, and parodies, these early works are eloquent documents of a young Chinese artist's uneasy relationship with the Western painting tradition from Renaissance to postmodernism. First exhibited in a Berlin gallery in 1992 and 1993, they are as well precious testimonies to the then-nascent international interest in Chinese contemporary art.

In the tellingly-named Competition (Lot 836), a man who looks vaguely like Picasso stands naked and with folded arms, nonchalantly eyeing a dartboard, which for some reason hangs on an easel. He seems unimpressed by his faceless companion, possibly Liu Ye himself, who points to a low-scoring zone far away from the bull's eye. The red dart is clearly a transmuted paintbrush; even more than a "competition," the figures' interaction suggests a teacher instructing a student and a patron evaluating an artist. Between them is the portrait of an infant, barely but still recognizably Chinese, who again turns out to be Liu. This, along with the Picasso-lookalike's prominent but bizarrely nondescript genitalia, puts their relationship in terms of an Oedipal struggle (When he was studying at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Liu had read and kept a thick volume of notes on Freud's Interpretations of Dreams.)1 Other Western masters are lurking in the background, too. The interior setting and illumination from a side window recall especially Northern European painters from Van Eyck to Vermeer. Rendered in primary colours, the dartboard resembles Robert Rauschenberg's famous Target. The diffuse self-references and surreal mood may well have been inspired by Magritte.

Originally called The Death of Marat after the Jacques-Louis David masterpiece, The Yellow Menace (Lot 837) has a deliberately ambiguous title that suggests both Liu Ye's challenge to his Western forebears and their debilitating influence on him. Whereas in the original Marat lies dead in a bathtub, here Liu has reposed him humorously as a nude model on a Dali-esque pedestal propping himself with his arms against walls. Nearby the artist himself appears, also on a pedestal but one that is far lower. Thus the scene at first glance resembles an awards' ceremony, with Liu playing runner-up to Marat's champion. But there is something suspicious about Liu's left hand, which receptively faces the window and may even have just opened it. The light streaming in from the right—or is it the East?—colors the entire room yellow along with Marat's supposedly white turban. Wearing sunglasses, Liu Ye seems unaffected and remains upright unlike the slumping Marat, who may just have been struck down and blind. Does the light symbolize the Western artistic tradition, which fails to inspire the insensitive Liu Ye? Or is it the titular "yellow menace," a Chinese hijacking or pollution of Western cultural heritage? Liu Ye raises these provocative questions, pertinent not only to him but to a whole generation of Chinese painters, and leaves them suggestively open.

In the slightly later Wie Gemalt (Lot 838), Liu Ye again inserts himself in an interior scene with a window but has done away with fantasy and humour. The room itself features modern plumbing and heating, and what is outside passes for a cartoonish rendition of contemporary Berlin. Art-historical reference is likewise rationalized into a reproduction of Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait lying on the windowsill. Still, anxieties about cultural authenticity and influence remain—in ways no less pressing and haunting, if not more. Basking in light in the above painting, Liu Ye is here instead dressed in black and turns to address us from a dark corner, seemingly having just studied his own reflection. If the young painter is questioning his artistic and personal identity, even in this he has been anticipated by his Western forebears like Velasquez and Rembrandt; the Arnolfini Portrait itself is particularly celebrated for a virtuosic spherical mirror that fictively "reflects" the painter and the viewer. Do Liu's barely visible features hint at a smile, and if so is this smile confident or helpless? Is he resigned to the shadows or about to emerge from it?

In Liu's works later in the 90's, Mondrian's abstract compositions will appear as explicit motifs, but their influence may already be detected in the three paintings on offer, particularly the unusual square shape of The Yellow Menace and The Competition, as well as a general attraction to rectilinear forms.2 As noted, the interior lit sideward by a window is a Northern European pictorial convention especially associated with Vermeer. All three works by Liu Ye share Vermeer's interests in dramatic contrasts between light and dark and in faithful renditions of environmental lighting conditions and their effects on local colours, but the overpowering yellow cast in The Yellow Menace exaggerates these interests to the brink of plausibility. This tendency will become even more pronounced in Liu's later scenes, which are as a rule drenched in primary colours.

Motif and style aside, the lots on offer also anticipate Liu's later output in sensibility. Concerned with transcendent human universals, Liu Ye never allows politics and current events to become explicit topics.3 Upon his return to China in 1995, the playful and irreverent tone of these paintings will prove attractive and refreshing to the Chinese audience as an alternative to the mainstream Political Pop and Cynical Realism. The whimsical iconoclasm of the toppled Marat will persist in such paintings as a rendition of Stephen Hawking wearing a Mickey Mouse suit. The sexuality of the naked Picasso and Marat, at once innocently humorous and edgily perverse, anticipates the cartoonish and dreamy depictions of topless or scantily-dressed but childlike women for which Liu Ye may be best known today.

1 Liu Ye's Artist Statment 2007, from Liu Ye website
2 "Liu Ye—Pictorial Writing in the Era of Images," Liu Ye: Red Yellow Blue, Schoeni Art Gallery, 2004
3 "Dialogue Between Liu Ye and Feng Bo Yi," in Liu Ye: Red Yellow Blue, Schoeni Art Gallery, 2004