Liu Ye B.1964

Liu Ye first caught the attention of the art world in 1995, when he returned with a MFA from the Berlin University of the Arts. It was a time when the post-1989 avant garde movement was stereotyped by the West with Political Pop, Cynical Realism, and Gaudy Art dominating the scenario. Liu Ye's works, like a breeze, refreshed the audience with intriguing fantasies blended with reality. They are in the meanwhile deeply personal, emotional, and ironical.

"I have an equal passion towards both fairy tales and philosophy. Fairy tales are illusioned and sensational whereas philosophy is about strict and rational thinking. My paintings ramble between these two opponent spheres."

As the forty-two-year-old artist often confessed, though born two years before the Cultural Revolution started, he experienced no hardship at all. The contented happy childhood built up a solid foundation for the cheerful artist to face the world with a positive, optimistic, joyous attitude, which he skillfully transfers onto his canvases by deploying the vibrant primitive colors beautifully. The impact of Paul Klee, Mondrian, and Vemeer are obvious in Liu Ye's work, yet out of the fusion of the masters, Liu Ye is able to create his own iconography.

"Liu Ye defines 'growing up' in his own terms, simplifying a composition, rendering it with humor using notions of endless time and space. Liu Ye has found his own artistic idiom using the obvious and mixing it with an element of surprise. In the reduction of his subjects to a form of minimalism, he adheres to strict principles of form."[1]

Liu Ye painted only three pieces for the Smoke series, all in the same amazingly gigantic size, which remains a record for the artist as well. The artist houses one, a well-known Swiss collector of contemporary Chinese art owns one, this lot is the only piece on the market.


[1] Liu Ye: Red, Yellow, Blue, foreword by Manfred Schoeni (Schoeni Art Gallery, 2003), p. 3