Liu Renjie

signed and titled in Chinese and dated 1994 on the reverse, framed

Private Collection, China
Poly, Beijing, 04 December, 2011, lot 1345

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During an interview, Liu Ren-Jie mentioned a short poem by Gu Cheng: ‘You/Look at me for a while/Look at clouds for a while/I feel you/So far away when you look at me/So close when you look at clouds’. From the 1990s, Liu Ren-Jie has experienced remarkable success,  really living a ‘life in heaven’; his works have been selected four times for the National Art Exhibition, winning  the prize three times consecutively, as well as winning the prize at the Chinese Oil Painting Exhibition on three occasions. The present work, Summer, won an award at the National Art Exhibition in 1994. However, this glorious prize-winning experience didn’t make Liu Ren-Jie tire of the commercial environment of the art market like some; for him, it’s only by keeping in touch with the hustle and bustle of the city that he can develop an independent and peaceful point of view in his works.

In the 1990s, as part of the whole context of the transformation from traditional Western oil painting to contemporary oil painting, the artistic practice of oil painters from the Luxun Academy of Fine Arts metamorphosed into the irreplaceable ‘Lumei Phenomenon’, of which Summer is a bold exploration. This work has a realistic surface but a symbolic spiritual core. The distorted perspective and angled white round table in the centre of the painting alludes, on one hand, to Paul Cézanne’s radical practices in still life paintings, but on the other hand, to an integral internal structure set among the three persons by the roulette of fate. The solid modeling and r lines, influenced by a biting cold wind from the north, reflect the painting techniques that the artist has developed from years of observing the practices of Northern European oil painters. The robust modeling vocabulary has been deliberately enclosed in a cramped space by the foreshortening of the composition. The visual sense of oppression indicates the psychological transition from rural to urban area, as well as the spiritual confusion and crisis experienced in modern society. Liu Ren-Jie’s depiction of this room at the height of summer and his development of a visual narrative space successfully create an atmosphere of tension, and a suggestion of unlimited cognitive possibility.