Liu Ye

Bleah!!

The art is comprised of figures in firm lines, with round heads, delicate shoulders, and a certain fragility entangled in aggressive reds, blues, and yellows.

Photo by Madi Ju

To a degree, art imitates the artist: Liu Ye’s demeanor is at once aggressive and childlike, as playful as all the soft vowels contained in his Beijing accent. He sucks on a cigarette—he can’t work without one in his hand, he says—and in a fleeting moment of deep exhalation, his expression becomes as thoughtful and potent as the characters he has created.

Hans Christian Andersen in the Snow (After Albert Kuchler)

“All great artists are great narcissists,” admits the 40-something whose work has fetched up to an estimated US$1.5 million at last year’s Sotheby’s sale of Contemporary Art Asia in New York. In the space of motifs frequently appearing in his work—young girls, Miffy the Bunny, and Mondrian paintings—Liu’s brand of narcissism is a bit more complex. The self-confessed neoclassicist who sees everything in the balance of circles, squares, and triangles explains his vision as “a design of basic geometric shapes to achieve a sensibility that speaks to the artist’s inner consciousness.” It is not cartoon. It is not China. It is principally about the artist. This sensibility draws inspiration from Liu’s personal life—his father who wrote children’s literature, the artists he admires, a scene from a movie that lingers—and less from the collective Chinese psyche pondered in recent avant-garde art.

A View of My Teacher’s Back

Indeed, Liu is unique in deliberately trying to distance himself from the cultural totems that have become stamps for bestsellers. Jade, dragons, and Mao he will absolutely avoid. Having grown up during the Cultural Revolution and studied art abroad, he dreads being labeled as another political artist—“too much politics were forced on my generation growing up,” he says—and praises the work of younger Chinese artists as less weighted, more pure. As for the weight in his own work, Liu explains it as non-deliberate, but perhaps revealing of his surprising pessimism. “In terms of creativity, I feel that the Chinese civilization, and to an extent, the world, is in decline.”

As for his personal journey, “I” continues to remain central in Liu’s latest works. Experimenting with still-life and landscape, the artist digs deeper into neoclassicist roots without altering his artistic statement. “To me, it’s the same whether I’m painting a girl or a table. I’m searching for the way of being.”