Liu Ye

Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Taipei, Museum of Contemporary Art, Fiction. Love - Ultra New Vision in Contemporary Art, 2004
Bern, Kunstmuseum, Liu Ye, 2007, pp. 48 & 128, no. 48, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is brighter and more vibrant in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is very minor rubbing to the top left corner and a very small rub mark along the extreme upper right edge. No restoration is apparent under ultra-violet light.
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I Believe I can Fly, from 2004, belongs to an important series of monumental paintings in Liu Ye's oeuvre in which the vast red canvas is a key signifier. Here we see the young girl of fairytale - a Chinese equivalent of Alice in Wonderland - in mid flight high above the tree line which we glimpse in the bottom right corner. Like a scene from an animated martial arts film, her posture and sword are reminiscent of Ang Lee's 2000 film Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. Yet here the threat of the sword and the violence of the film are tempered by the saccharine sweet innocence of Liu Ye's mode of painting which promotes the kitsch over and above realism.

Liu Ye's primary source of inspiration 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 persecuted and sent to the countryside for re-education under Mao's policy of forced manual labour. Yet illicitly he kept a stash of many books whose illegality only served to excite the artist as a child 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" (the artist cited by Anna Sansom in 'The Beautiful and the Banned' in Whitewall, Fall 2006, p. 66).

Yet incisively Liu Ye's art goes beyond the fairytale, adopting a political dimension. As Zhu Zhu says, "In this painting, red is the main melody, nearly swallowing the entire canvas. At first glance, it seems like a new edition of the political propaganda posters of an earlier era. Red for a Chinese person who grew up in the 1960s is all too familiar... In a world of red dictatorship, there were no other colours of which to speak." (Zhu Zhu, 'An Aged Childhood' in Exhibition Catalogue, Bern, Kunstmuseum, Liu Ye, 2007, pp. 74-75). In I Believe I can Fly, the drippy red saturated background, itself a reference to the gestural application of the Abstract Expressionists, is loaded with political connotations and, as the artist explains, red is the prevailing memory of his youth in China, "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" (the artist cited by Anna Sansom in 'The Beautiful and the Banned' in Whitewall, Fall 2006, p. 66).

Liu Ye's time in Europe took him out of China at a pivotal moment in its recent history, allowing his work to develop independently of any school - 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.