Liu Ye

Private Collection, Japan
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although slightly brighter and more vibrant in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is a very faint rub mark in the lower right corner towards the edge and one towards the centre bottom edge. No restoration is apparent under ultra-violet light.
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Mondrian in the Afternoon is a stunning work which manifests Liu Ye's indebtedness to the pure abstraction of the Dutch De Stijl artist, whose idiom of rectilinear lines and palette of the three primary colours was such a powerful influence on the Chinese artist. Images of Mondrian's works rank among Liu Ye's most important and enduring motifss. He first encountered Mondrian in 1980 when he enrolled to study industrial design in Beijing Industrial Art School; later, after completing his studies in Beijing's Central Academy of Fine Arts he spent prolonged periods in Europe - first studying in the Hochschule der Kunste in Berlin in 1994 and later at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in 1998, where he encountered many of the master's works first hand.

 

In Mondrian in the Afternoon, Liu Ye pays his forebear homage. In the upper-centre of the composition Liu Ye incorporates a work by the founder of Neo-Plasticism, bathed in the intense yellow light of afternoon sun. In the foreground, a young girl, oblivious of the masterpiece above her, stares fixedly through binoculars to the right, directly into the low sun. She is typical of Liu Ye's storybook-inspired cast of childlike characters with oversized heads who hint at fairytale but possess a disquieting presence. Although she is ostensibly the subject of the painting, when we scrutinise the composition, we notice Liu Ye's formal homage to Mondrian. Everything is carefully orchestrated to Mondrian's aesthetic. The strong horizontals of the floor, echoed in the black binoculars and most importantly in the long shadow cast by the girl are offset by the verticals towards the right edge created by a black window frame and the blue, hazy shadow which encroaches in from outside the confines of the canvas. Just as the red of the Mondrian painting echoes the girl's skirt and the hint of blue picks up the band of colour to the right edge, here the powerful lines mimic the structural qualities of the Mondrian, enclosing the flatly painted expanse of the yellow background. As the critic Zhu Zhu explains, "This simplified handling of background lies somewhere between Mondrian's abstraction and the spatial composition of traditional Chinese painting" (Zhu Zhu, 'An Aged Childhood' in Exhibition Catalogue, Bern, Kunstmuseum, Liu Ye, 2007, p. 72).

 

As Bernhard Fibicher says, "In his work Liu Ye strives to combine the imagination and sensibility of the fairytale with the strictly rational thinking of philosophy, to obtain a synthesis of eastern art (in his paintings we can trace Chinese but also Japanese influences) and western role models (Mondrian, Barnett Newmann etc.) in strict and at the same time playful visual findings" (Bernhard Fibicher, 'The Squaring of the Fairytale' in Ibid, p. 13).  Mondrian in the Afternoon is the perfect synthesis of East and West, the rational and the irrational, a knowing and reverential parody of Western art in a quintessentially Chinese idiom.