Fan Di'an

The development of liu Qinghe’s career in art has gained a close link to the development of Chinese contemporary art since the 1980s. What makes him so important is that he has built a road for Chinese ink painting to contract the contemporary counterpart. as a painter that received strict training in art schools, which meant that he has processed outstanding skill, how to connect the concept in art to the reality with a certain way of language, and how to avoid becoming a bore extension of a tradition or a renovation in just style,  i believe, have all been issues for liu Qinghe. on one hand, he has well with aquainted the contemporary art, which is worth of attention. Though he has never been included to any fields or genres, he keeps attention to how contemporary art reflects the times and cultural features with an integrity of concept and language. This is a very precious behavior for traditional painting artists. his continuous thoughts have even formed a close tie between himself and the contemporary art in the value and culture aspects. on the other hand, he has to solve the problems of strength and depth of expression, as he uses ink painting as his artistic language. The strength of expression refers to a manner for ink painting to preserves its unique charm under this rich and complicated image times. as for the depth of expression, it is an issue about how to let the ink painting plays its role in culture and academie while preserving its tradition. Therefore when we look at his works, two aspects need to be focused: one is that he keeps expressing the reality of today, especially the feelings and sentiments in cities. The other is that he keeps extending the sharpness and power in his ink painting. Therefore his language imbedded by ink painting has become an organic part of contemporary art.

i believe that as we study an artist, we could no longer just focus on his works. in fact we all wonder how these works were produced with what kind of sentiments or situations. i think liu is an interesting example. The name of this exhibition is “The other Bank”.  in fact the other bank is a distance: a distance to life, to all the things, including those one longs for. of course such a distance could not be expressed through numbers.  it belongs to an observation, feeling and expression, and even question and research in mental and spatial domain. Therefore in my opinion this name “The other Bank” indicates the artist perse namely his status in art world. he consciously keeps a distance to the reality, which we have all felt today, both mentally and ideally. such a close yet untouchable distance is in fact a subtle relationship between the artist and the reality. liu lives under the reality. he observes the cities, villages and the boundaries between them, and all kinds of people live inside. They belong to those common daily scenes, but they also belong to a movement of nerve endings. Therefore in the figures of his works we find the normal state and spiritual state. This could not only just be found in a single figure, but also in other scenes.  i feel that liu has shared with us this close and untouchable distance for observation and feeling. Therefore his works could not be simply treated as a reflection of the reality, but an observation, questioning and even a spiritual activity transcended the reality. liu has caught such a distance in his language of ink painting, for compared his ink painting with the traditional one and
popular new patterns, the stroke and ink skill could be found. Those experiments through ink painting could be felt. But on the other hand his ink painting is different from others. Therefore he treats ink as a sensitive language and applies it to express the sensitive reality.

sometimes i think about what we could see from his works.i think this question should be: what we could see through his works, since his works show more than that. They need us to experience those abnormal feelings together with the figures. Therefore strictly his works belong to surrealism. he keeps exploring in the spiritual world, and researching the nerve endings and antennas, so that he could point at those we have experienced more sharply. i think this is the most meaningful, tasteful part that hidden under those smooth and sentimental strokes in his works.