Liu Ye

Signed in Chinese and Pinyin and dated 1998-2003, framed

Private Collection, Asia

Liu Ye: Red Yellow Blue, Schoeni Art Gallery, Hong Kong, 2003, p.19
Liu Ye, Timezone 8 Ltd. and Kunstmuseum Bern, China and Germany, 2006-2007, p. 65

 

Miniscule rubbing at the top corners; scratch in the middle of the architecture; Otherwise, it is generally in good condition
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Describing his artistic vision, Liu Ye has said the following, "the set of constants that run throughmy body of work comprises of the  following: non-violence, non-Realism, rich with fantasy, teetering on the cusp of the real and the surreal, the abstract and the figurative, the modern and the traditional. My imagery is a kind of daydream. I've always liked to daydream since I was little, in my paintings I express these daydreams. From a technical perspective, two explanations can be formulated: first, my compositions are non-Realist, I form my compositions in my own mind; second, I seldom base my iconography on actual, real subjects, objects. What I am seeking to capture is what lies between the figurative and the abstract."

In Liu Ye's work, we can clearly see two threads of thought—one is his relentless investigation into possibilities of formal composition, the other is his stylized "cartoonization" of characters. Within his repository of these cartoonized characters, two further distinctions can be made: there are little boys and little girls against Surrealist settings and there are cartoonized, yet also eroticized women. It is not difficult to trace the origins of these tendencies in the artist's personal experience. Born in 1964, Liu Ye has spent his childhood in the throes of the Cultural Revolution, spanning the ten fateful years of 1966 to 1976. Cultural expression was derided and censored, for it was deemed a cursor to the degenerate nature of the bourgeoisie. Liu Ye explains, "I went to see theNationalArt Exhibition at the museum when I was young. I remember this very clearly: there was a painting of Chairman Mao and Yang Kaihui in their youth. The background was dark. Yang Kaihui was clad in all white, wearing a skirt, her chest high up...in fact, her chest was exceptionally pronounced. To me, that was veritably a pornographic picture.
Before that, I've never seen such an eroticized female figure before." That was the first time the artist truly encountered and recognized the beauty of the human body. Fortunate enough to receive the support of his parents, Liu Ye began to draw at 10 years old. In 1980, he entered the School of Arts and Crafts in Beijing and studied Industrial Design, an endeavor that would shape much of his artistic vision for years to come. It was also during this time when Dutch painter Piet Mondrian exerted his everlasting influence on the young, impressionable artist. Between 1990 and 1994, Liu Ye entered the Berlin University of the Arts and freely toyed with many new ideas. Prior to his return to the figurative, he has created up to twenty experimental works, some of which revealed the "little boys" and "little girls," but then he eventually destroyed them.

The academic training in design he had received proved to be a significant phase in Liu Ye's artistic evolution. Created over the years 1998 to 2003, The Rietveld-SchröderHouse at Nightfall (Lot 921) crystallizes the sway it has held over the artist since his youth. A canonical structure indelibly marked in the history of architecture, the house Gerrit Rietveld designed for Mrs. TruusSchröder -Schräder is one of the most famous houses in the world. Gerrit Rietveld is as much as furniture design as he is an architect and in 1918, was
inducted intoDe Stijl, amovement for whichMondrian was founder. Having apprenticed after American architect Frank LloydWright, proponents of De Stijl rendered a deep impact on European industrial design at the time. Approximately 30 when he joined De Stijl, Rietveld came up with fresh perspectives on architectural theory, concept, infrastructure and decoration, as well as new directions in geometric configurations and rearrangement of the primary colours. In the painting, Liu Ye recreates the complete façade of the
Rietveld-Schröder House—the immaculate walls, the crisp proportions, the large stretches of glass that conflate the vertical with the horizontal, culminating in a composition that defies easy comprehension. As a classical De Stijl edifice, the house bears an uncanny resemblance to a Mondrian painting. Drenched in the residual illumination and hence, layered colours of nightfall,
the house finds itself respectfully studied and lovingly reminisced by a figure on its periphery, a little girl with her back toward us. Standing austerely upright with her arms pressed against her flanks, she looks, she observes, she admires. Mondrian has become a perpetual, unvarying element in Liu Ye's imagery since the year 2000. The artist goes as far as to appropriate entire canvases by the Dutch master into his own pictures (such as Goodbye Mondrian, Mondrian in the Afternoon, Painter, Boogie Woogie, etc.) and on this, he says, "Mondrian's work appears inmy work on ametaphysical level. It is my nostalgia forModernism. So pure, the primary colours against straight, level lines, I would like to solve the problem of purity as well, a spiritual purity. My paintings are just like me, I never want to confound nor confuse my inner self. I just want to express a kind of beauty, recollect some memories, that's all." Indeed, the Mondrian scheme of basic colours, balanced composition and the pursuit of a formal aesthetic achieve a potent resonance in the art of Liu Ye.

In The Rietveld-Schröder House at Nightfall, a stark, perhaps even opulent, chromatic contrast is struck while a strictness governs the pictorial reenactment of the building. Though the act of appropriation is nothing new, this instance appears exceptional and unique in that it is Rietveld's architecture and not Mondrian's art that is being "borrowed." Upon deeper understanding of the Dutch architect's intimate connection with De Stijl, the image becomes all themore powerful and profound in its subtlety and circuitouness. In short, the
Rietveld house is a three-dimensionalization of a Mondrian painting. The sort of supreme order or infallible symmetry that Mondrian is after, his tenacious commitment to absolute simplicity in form, line and colour, an eternity and a serenity of the interior that he seeks to unearth within abstraction—these are the impulses that find a spellbound, captivated audience in Liu Ye. In The Rietveld-Schröder House at Nightfall, one experiences the same eternity and
the very serenity that the artist desires.