Liu Qinghe
liu qinghe
Curator:Choi Chan-chan.
curator: cui cancan
Exhibition Venue:
Tang Contemporary Art, Beijing Space 1 & 2.
tang contemporary art, beijing 1st & 2nd space
Tang Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the opening of Liu Qinghe's eponymous exhibition "Liu Qinghe" on March 9 at 798 Dual Space in Beijing, which is also the most comprehensive and detailed large-scale academic exhibition of Liu Qinghe to date.
Curated by Cui Cancan, the exhibition is divided into seven sections in a multi-line narrative structure, comprehensively combing the artist's artistic development from 1979 to the present. The exhibits span 45 years and feature more than 200 works on display.
Foreword
As a leading figure in contemporary Chinese ink painting, Liu Qinghe is well known in the art world for his "new generation" and "urban ink painting". However, this exhibition does not focus on the description of this historical achievement, but attempts to draw a picture of the artist's extensive artistic experiments with grammar, theme, narrative, symbolism and metaphor over the past 40 years, in order to promote his own transformation, and always resonate with contemporary art.
The exhibition is divided into 7 parts, starting with "Masterpieces and Paintings", telling the story of Liu Qinghe's most representative multi-voice, multi-time and space narrative. The changes of time and theme in "Two Old Families" show how the artist narrates the occurrence of big history in the way of small history. After that, we focused on the core of Liu Qinghe's work: how to carry out cross-media experiments to create new stories. It was not until the advent of the "Vernacular" series that Liu Qinghe created a completely new genre, breaking the tradition of literati poetry, calligraphy, painting or realism in a half-diary, half-autobiographical, and half-spoken way.
The "New City, New Painting" section points to a more important transformation, and Liu Qinghe pioneered the transcendence of the medium of ink painting, which provided a unique feeling, accurately captured the virtual image of the city, and more essentially touched the unique "mood of the times" of that era than other media of the same period.
In more than 40 years of creation, Liu Qinghe has never stood still, and "The Alienation of Time" also presents us with the artist's continuous renewal of self, faithful to reality, but constantly using new languages and methods to capture the passing of things around him. At the end of the exhibition, we selected Liu Qinghe's old and new works to look back at the artist's worldview and outlook on life hidden behind his creations.
Over the course of his journey, we can see some of Liu Qinghe's most notable characteristics: the unique contribution of the Urban Series to the concept and language of contemporary art; Drawing nourishment from different soils and media, ink painting has always been considered as the frontline work of contemporary art; The unique personal accent uses local language to construct a new narrative structure of painting; The background of realism that has never changed, from symbolism to metaphor, from literati to modern people.
The long journey has also reaffirmed a value for us, and in the more than 40 years of creation, Liu Qinghe has always maintained a transformative and open attitude, maintaining a never-ending experimentation. In this experiment, he suspended the internal disputes of ink painting, abandoned the safe and correct zone, tried to make mistakes, chased the pioneer, and tried to use "ink" as a verb rather than a noun. Fortunately, in the past 40 years, he and his generation have really promoted the change of understanding in China from "what is ink" to "what is ink".
Thus, we find that the belief in "openness", the historical ambition of "avant-garde", is crucial in any era.
Curator: Cui Cancan
Linchi, ink on paper, 360 670cm, 2006
1. Masterpieces and paintings
Unlike previous threads, the exhibition does not retrace Liu Qinghe's artistic journey in the form of a narrative or flashback, but adopts a two-line narrative structure, starting with a comparison of the most representative monumental works since 2006 and manuscripts spanning more than 40 years.
Five huge ink paintings bring together Liu Qinghe's accumulation of years of artistic concepts and linguistic explorations, and they surround the exhibition hall. The huge scale, close to the volume of the real world, where the scenery is transformed into magnificent light, shadow and weather, and the atmosphere in the painting drives the audience's psychological feelings in a shrouded way. However, compared with the scattered perspective of traditional ink painting, its viewpoint is single and modern, and the story is unobstructed at a glance and unified under one viewpoint. Like the overlapping of multiple time and space, characters and fates in the long form, multiple voices occur in the same space, which has become a prominent feature of Liu Qinghe's huge works.
There Are Fish, ink on paper, 270 500cm, 2006
The change of perspective also brings about a change in perception. These paintings, unlike the flowing reading sensation in traditional scrolls, provide a feeling close to peeping, as if standing on a high place and seeing an open lake through the dense forest, giving the story an extra layer of encounter, changing all the time. Similarly, the "blank space" here becomes the blur of the edge of the story, and the boundary of the scene is blurred, providing a kind of blocking distance for **, and the viewer and the person in the painting seem to be in two worlds, the gaze of an intruder. Perhaps because of the top-down perspective, these figures seem more small and oppressive, like dolls in fate, and people have a sense of fate and helplessness like ants.
Different from the scenes in traditional Chinese poetry, "Chixia" has a grand mood of realism and symbolism, but in the superposition of light and shadow and the floating hot air balloon, it has a bit of dreamlike color, like a movie, like a stage. However, the characters in the painting are always confused and uneasy, and their emotions are indescribably erratic. Five huge ink paintings, in a huge space, like a drama, they reaffirm the unique charm of painting to observe reality, it is neither completely realistic, nor completely subjective freehand, it is the virtual image of reality, the magic of time and space, the vague perception, many times it is closer to the feeling of things than the reality itself.
What is it about this unique visual perception and psychological mechanism? The answer is given by the "Pictorial Spectrum" in the center of the exhibition hall, which borrows the traditional way of displaying long scrolls in contrast to the contemporaneity of the masterpieces. Nearly 100 manuscripts have laid out the path to these "masterpieces" in the accumulation of time: ** created Liu Qinghe's tradition that is different from most ink artists, the emphasis on "shaping" the plot itself, and the frequent use of "brush" and "line", which also laid the groundwork for the narrative later; The Sketch series gives us a glimpse into the artist's initial emotions, how light and shadow and modeling shape time and space; Various manuscripts and base drawings reveal the origin of the inspiration and conception of the original story of the masterpiece, and the establishment of the scene; The Copying series also leads our attention to the artist's previous journey, the resources he has inherited, and the lingering influence of traditional Chinese painting.
Wind & Water, ink on paper, 270 500cm, 2010
2. The Archives of History: Old Portraits of Two Families
In 1961, Liu Qinghe was born in a place called Shen Zhuangzi in Tianjin, and his grandfather saved the foundation of 50 houses by opening the "Qingda Grain Store". My grandfather died when my father was 7 years old, and only the old ** can distinguish the appearance. After the liberation, his father became a clerk in the "Chaoyang Cotton Shop", and in his childhood, Liu Qinghe's parents became "clerks and doctors" in the column of family origin, an old-time family composed of five brothers and sisters. His father did not judge him in his life, no matter how many injustices he experienced, but his uncle, on the contrary, always had to express some opinions. In that special era, my uncle also caused a lot of disasters because of this. This has also become two guides for the family's life, the father who has no attitude and the uncle who has an attitude. Alternatively, we can replace it with "a meaningless life" and "a meaningful life." Therefore, these portraits of the old family also entrust Liu Qinghe's comments on the past.
In the early 1990s, Liu Qinghe, who had graduated from the ** Academy of Fine Arts and stayed in school, lived in the tube building of the Wangfujing dormitory. A few years later, with the change of the city, the Academy of Fine Arts moved to Wangjing, a "suburb" at that time. "Urbanization" is changing the city and Liu Qinghe's life at an unprecedented rate, as well as changing thousands of families in China. The scenes of people gathering, the way they witness love, the variety of furniture and utensils in life redefine the meaning of the modern family. The confusion about life and the heavy fate of the family are replaced by a kind of "leisure time" and "middle-class life" that have never existed before. It was also at that time that Liu Qinghe participated in the famous "New Generation" art exhibition, depicting the meaningless daily life around him in a close-up way, and fixing the incompleteness of photography and the passing afternoon in the "family".
1931, ink on paper, 55 65cm, 2014
In this unit, we narrate the occurrence of big history in the way of small history. In these changes about the family, we can see the relationship between painting and archives, history and information, the individual and the collective. The position and sitting posture of the people in the painting, the way they take wedding photos, the costumes, hairstyles, and eyes of the characters all reveal the changes of the times. Or those old things, the water bottles, the years in the mirror: in a fleeting burst of light and shadow, there is the greatness and cruelty of the power of time, a reversal of life in the void of time.
In other words, these works achieved by time and memory are not only the charm of painting, but also a piece of archive, which traces the personal memory, has confirmed its own origin, but inadvertently draws out the distant occurrence, which has become a proof of the changes of the times, and the epitome of delicate and warm feelings in the great changes of China in the past century.
Saturday", ink on paper, 100 100cm, 1992
3. Experiments in grammar
The change of concept always leads to the experimentation of grammar. At the beginning of the exhibition hall, we chose a work by Liu Qinghe that depicts his own sketch scene. This autobiographical expression identifies the "narrator" as the "painter" in order to lead to the painter's core work: how to experiment with artistic language and grammar in order to create a new story.
Left to right: "The Leader", ink on paper, 90 75cm, 2008
New Hairstyles, ink on paper, 65-55cm, 2004
Lao Chen, ink on paper, 20-20cm, 2007
On the left-hand side of the exhibition hall, Liu Qinghe is a group of portraits from different periods, showing the differences between the works in a juxtaposition and contrast. We found that in these portraits of the same scale, there are different forms and feelings, which depend on the change of viewpoint and angle, and the techniques of shaping the facial features are also completely different, the blank and full background, and the hairstyle and posture of the characters are all exacerbating the gap in the perception of the picture. On the other wall, we have selected a set of narrative advancements, from heads to busts, from single depictions to multi-person scenes, to show Liu Qinghe's way of shaping the "story".
However, more importantly, the wood-paneled wall attempts to reveal the core elements of Liu Qinghe's work, which are multi-grammatical and intersecting time and space, and the extensive experimentation of the medium in the long creative process: drawing, line drawing, color ink, painting, sculpture, photography and installation, these vast and diverse cross-** experiments have become the key to establishing Liu Qinghe's artistic style.
Experimentation is always dangerous, it comes with possible "mistakes", and always requires a spirit of trying to get it wrong. In other words, if it is safe, Liu Qinghe will be one of the best in ink painting as long as he insists that he is an ink artist. However, when "ink" ceased to be a privilege of identity, the benefits it gave to artists disappeared. But the turning point that followed was that Liu Qinghe got rid of the avant-garde competition game within ink painting, and constantly searched for richer coordinates, and he had an ambition that was rare for ink painters, hoping to resonate with the revolution of contemporary art.
Sketch, ink on paper, 51 68cm, 2014
4. Growth and autobiography
In 1983, Liu Qinghe was admitted to the Department of the Academy of Fine Arts, and the exam question at that time was: Please write a story and edit it into no less than six scripts. He depicts the story of the great changes in life after the reform and opening up, and the protagonist is his uncle. It was also at this time that Liu Qinghe's life with footnotes began.
Before Liu Qinghe, ink painting rarely depicted a self-regressive history in a half-diary, half-autobiographical, half-oral way. The "Vernacular" series is undoubtedly a new genre, which makes ink no longer resting on its laurels in a grammar of literati poetry, calligraphy, painting, or realism, in order to re-establish the creative relationship between concept, medium, narrative, imagery and metaphor.
Youth on the Banks of the Haihe River, ink on paper, 65-55cm, 2014
How is the story told? How to understand the relationship between visuals and text? In the vernacular story, Liu Qinghe sets two clues, his own childhood and his daughter's growth. Like a multi-line narrative in a postmodern film, telling two stories that are decades apart. The indissoluble love in the memory, the sweetness and sourness of childhood that warmed people's hearts, finally converged here in Liu Qinghe and became a play within a play, a screen within a screen. In the painting, he is a son and a father, who experiences the pain of growing up and gives love to grow up.
Girls 1993, ink on paper, 65-55cm, 2014
The vernacular "extracts memories from a subtle and moving perspective, allowing the audience to perceive the unreturnable childhood, the secrets of eternal sleep, and the joy buried deep in life in those scattered documents, awards, and textbooks." In other words, it is not the story that moves us, but the unparalleled tenderness that the narrator draws from through the imagery and metaphor of painting.
The local "vernacular" has become another prominent accent in this batch of works. "Vernacular" originated in Tianjin, which is the communicative characteristic of this port city, and has also shaped Liu Qinghe's unique work path, constantly communicating with the "other". This "other" includes the local and the urban, the traditional and the modern, the first and the brush and ink, and the ink and contemporary art. Although the original attributes of ink or individual may change in this process, Liu Qinghe has not lost or deceived his own consciousness, he retains his unique accent and the characteristics of ink painting, and Liu Qinghe's works are produced in this different tension.
Tooth Extraction, ink on paper, 51 70cm, 2014
5. New city, new painting
In the 1990s, Chinese society underwent earth-shaking changes at a rate unimaginable today. For the first time, a brand new term, "urban", has entered the field of vision. Urban life is pervasive, and it shakes people's understanding of past lives, desires, sense of time, and ideals to the greatest extent.
The 1990s was also the decade of China's urbanization, which also had the disadvantages of "adolescence": mental restlessness, emotional restlessness, and confused reality. These strong social indications also bring new scenes to the creation of art: the sky above the city, the leisurely afternoon, the fleeting time, the dangerous and intoxicating night.
Mr. Wang, ink on paper, 140 120cm, 1994
It was also during this period that Liu Qinghe began to establish his own unique artistic concept and language from the "new generation", ushering in the heyday of his own creation and his reputation in art history. Smoke Cloud (1993) and Mr. Wang (1994) are masterpieces, which on the one hand sensitively capture the initial situation of China's urbanized personality, and on the other hand, it also triggers a series of cultural changes from contemporary art to ink painting.
As a representative of "urban ink", Liu Qinghe accurately fits the characteristics of ink painting with the atmosphere of the city, which not only contains the characteristics of the two forms of "urban" and "ink", but also has an independent and surprising quality. The blurred and uncertain textures of "water" and "ink" are natural flaws in realistic painting, but they shine brightly in the scenes and situations of the new city. The ambiguous edge lines are more in line with the visual characteristics of urban life, black and white and light colors become the best portrayal of the city's night scene, and the "light and shadow" and "psychological scene" created by ink and wash are appropriately in line with the essence of the new city.
Smoke and Clouds, ink on paper, 190 180cm, 1993
Different from the perspective of philosophy and sociology, these works expand the meaning of modern knowledge. It is no longer the definition of people in the modern city, but focuses on the description of scenes and situations. Liu Qinghe's use of the ancient medium of ink and wash has played a magical role in the great changes of the times, and compared with the paintings and photographs of the same period, which focused on the description of the state of the human figure, ink painting is more conducive to the expression of the situation and perception of urbanization itself, Liu Qinghe depicts a kind of "emotion" unique to modern society like an insight.
More importantly, the groundbreaking nature of Liu Qinghe's works shows the transcendence of the medium of ink painting, which provides a unique feeling, accurately captures the virtual image of the city, and more essentially touches on the unique "mood of the times" of this era. Together with Zhang Xiaogang's big family, Fang Lijun's cynicism, Yue Minjun's laughing people, and Mao Yan's depiction of confused young people, they shaped the great changes in the portrait of China in that era.
Meteor Shower, ink on paper, 220 170cm, 1999
6. Alienation of time
A group of small figures on silk occupies the left wall. Compared with the previous works, they have more clear simplicity and fashionable light, with a translucent texture. It is said to be a sketch, but its colors do not come from nature, but like the flickering fluorescent dots on the screen.
Happy Birthday", ink on silk, 75 75cm, 2023
The portrait of a sleek modern woman caught my eye, where the boundaries of flowing colors replace the lines as the silhouettes of the figures, revealing Liu Qinghe's strong sense of transformation of fashion and language. Not far away, several large-scale figures have the same transparent sense of light, bright colors and some momentary dissipation, compared to previous panoramic paintings, they only record a disappearing "point of light", a short medium or close shot, or only an incomplete part. These works, created by Liu Qinghe in recent years, represent a new turn for Liu Qinghe, from a grand social narrative and collective symptoms to a modern contemporary who has a subtle connection with the times but tries to isolate himself.
Black Dress", ink on paper, 200 200cm, 2023
In Liu Qinghe's long artistic exploration, there are few allusions to "practice makes perfect". He always keeps a distance from the familiar experiences of the past, and constantly tries to generate new possibilities, in order to maintain a rare "jerky feeling" and "sense of presence". Perhaps because he has never been fixed on a single "me", his style of works is always so diverse and ambiguous: the sketches in traditional ink painting, the fun of literati painting, the new light and shadow brought by technology, the leisure, simplicity and elegance of women, the general sense of alienation in modern society, and the magic and strangeness of imagination are repeatedly intertwined in his works.
"The alienation of time" is not only the most intuitive visual experience of these paintings, but also from the artist's continuous renewal of self, from the artist's treatment of new subjects, it comes from reality, through faces, portraits, Liu Qinghe is like a faithful observer and recorder of the times and fashions. However, these are slightly different from reality, it benefits from experience, but it always tries to refine the perceptual color with a new experience, to recapture the emotions that are passing around us, which is the meaning of the painter outside the documenter.
Don't want to", ink on silk, 75 75cm, 2023
7. Memories of recent works
At the end of the exhibition, we have selected several of Liu Qinghe's latest works and past fragments to retrace in an attempt to connect the artist's worldview and outlook on life hidden behind his artistic creations in the clues that have lasted for more than 40 years.
Created in 2008, 2015 and 2023, the four vertical works make up Liu Qinghe's unique collection of contemporary landscapes. It is said to be a landscape, but it has never been real in reality; Speaking of the context, it is not only different from the spiritual world of traditional Chinese literati landscapes, but also different from the objective images in the modern Western landscape, it is more like a mysterious and difficult place mixed with ideals and theater. It is like a kind of ritual, although its spiritual reference is not clear, we can temporarily understand it as a landscape in an illusion, an imaginary image of psychological existence.
Left to right: Tianshui, ink on paper, 300 150cm, 2015
Into the Water, ink on paper, 170-90cm, 2008
Burning Sun, ink on paper, 300 150cm, 2017
On the other side, a 1999 "Meteor Shower" and a 2017 "Burning Sun" show us two realistic postures, one is the starry sky that urbanites look up at at night in confusion to seek the eternal and insoluble fate of nature, and the other is the precarious trembling of people on the cliffs under the scorching sun, everything is unresolved. The two states point to the opposition in life, the kind of insoluble dilemma between pitching. The new work titled "Love You" seems to provide us with another explanation, starting from the conception of life, pride and shame, naïve children and clowns who are both good and evil, are always crises in our lives, and there is never an ultimate answer between choices. Until this moment, we realized that whether it is the wild lake in Liu Qinghe's masterpiece, the endless desire in the city, or the ideals and growth of children in the vernacular, they are all just the "futility" of investing in the meaning of life and the "emotion" of dooming nothingness at this moment without the other side.
Love You", ink on paper, 200 500cm, 2021
However, this empty, poetic, and psychological depiction lacks reason and deviates from the meaning that can be summarized as experience, and thus approaches the true mystery of the existence of art. At the end of the exhibition hall, a huge creation called "Zero Degree" becomes the end of the exhibition, which is neither fanatical nor indifferent, such as Liu Qinghe wrote in "Vernacular": "I am not a sound person, I am slow and out of balance in action, and my thinking is often deviated, it is difficult to go deep into a clue, and it is easy to be swayed by the illusion that appears in front of me on the surface, and I am dragged to some aimless, wandering on the trajectory of leaving the original intention." Using paintings and words to describe such a seemingly outdated way to emphasize my current nature of mind is nothing more than trying to find a suitable way to nourish myself on the road to life. Expecting proof from my dad turned out to be fruitless, which was actually expected. But what surprised me was that there is not much difference between a positive and enterprising meaningful life and a meaningless life like my father's life, which touched me deeply. ”
Curator: Cui Cancan
March 3, 2024
About the Artist
Liu QingheBorn in Tianjin in 1961, he graduated from the Folk Art Department of ** Academy of Fine Arts in 1987 and from the Department of Chinese Painting of ** Academy of Fine Arts in 1989 with a master's degree. In 1992, he was a visiting scholar at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Complu Dianse, Madrid. He is currently a professor and doctoral supervisor of the School of Chinese Painting of the Academy of Fine Arts, and the deputy director of the Academic Committee of the Academy. Deputy Director of the Chinese Painting Art Committee of the Chinese Artists Association.
He has won the Young Contemporary Artist Award at the 3rd Beijing International Art Biennale, the 8th AAC Art China Ink Artist of the Year Award, the Shanghai ** Daily Artist of the Year Award, and the Art Finance Ink Artist of the Year Award.