Liu Ye

Galerie Taube, Berlin
Private Collection, Switzerland

Liu Ye has developed a distinctive artistic language that not only stands out in the context of Chinese Contemporary art, but one that can also be grasped and find personal resonance with audiences raised in the western cultural environment. Socially influenced by his upbringing during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), and visually influenced by the kitsch propaganda art it propagated, he belongs to a small group of artists who have travelled regularly between Europe (Germany, the Netherlands and England) and China - something which in his own words has enabled him to "concentrate on himself."

Painted during the artist's first extended stay in Europe whilst studying at the Hochschule der Kunste, Berlin, The First Story, as underlined by the momentous title, was viewed as a breakthrough work by Liu Ye in terms of his personal development as an artist. In it, the formative aesthetic experiences of his culturally-sheltered, artistic upbringing are combined with and contrasted against passages of painting inspired by first-hand exposure to western art and culture. There are quotations here which point directly to Magritte's Surrealism, for example the bowler-hatted cherubs that recede indefinitely into space and the prominent pipe in the outstretched hand of the figure in profile on the right side of the image. There is also a dislocated feeling to each individual element of the composition here which further enhances the Surrealist mood and empowers each object with meaning beyond its representational, mimetic form.

A powerful sense of narrative resides in the intentional ambiguities found throughout this mysterious and open-ended composition. Liu Ye's father was a children's storybook illustrator during the Cultural Revolution, and The First Story combines elements of the artist's exposure to this with an increasing awareness of the narrative techniques of Western art. Whilst other Chinese artists from his generation were venting their frustrations at the post 1989 clampdown on their civil and artistic liberties back home, Liu Ye was experiencing a similarly dramatic moment of political and social change taking place in Berlin at that time following the fall of the Wall from a uniquely Eastern perspective. Paintings like The First Story witness the exuberant, often disquieting marriage, of Western and Eastern influences. The result is his distinctively colourful, fairytale vision that does not belong to any of the schools - be it Cynical Realism or Political Pop - that emerged in China in the 1990s. Instead it stands alone with a sense of light-hearted exuberance and theatricality that is laced with the political environment intrinsic to his upbringing.