 iu Ye, the 42-year-old artist, has round eyes and a childish face, one that might easily fit into one of his cartoon-like oil paintings. He’s wearing a gray jacket and sitting on the sofa for an interview in his Beijing studio. But he is filled with nervous energy and seems likely to jump up and walk out any time.
“I’ve got no control over my life, no control over my art and I’ve got no idea where it’ll go,” he says. “I’m not confident.”
Could that possibly be true of an artist whose colorful, playful images have sold for as much as $400,000 at Sotheby's Hong Kong auction last spring.
 Liu paints mostly cartoon characters of large heads and small bodies with big eyes and innocent smiles against pure backgrounds. They’re small heroes roaming in a wonderland. They might be in a warship cruising the sea with airplanes flying over their heads; or they might be on a red-curtained stage or in a room overlooking a wheat field.
In one painting, the late film star Ruan Lingyu appears with a round face against a blue background. A tear drop sparkles in her eyes. You know Liu Ye is narrating adult tales with his art pieces but you see childish faces. His paintings often show pure beauty but somehow his works are laden with sadness.
Liu won acclaim in the mid 1990s when his small magical heroes began to attract attention in art circles after he returned home from Germany. Interestingly, his painting style has undergone almost no change since then and these small people who appear to come from an ideal world he has created. Stages change, curtains rise and fall and small people go on stage, one after another, telling their tales in a lonely and hard-hearted sort of way.
These tales are not concerned with reality, and that helps distinguish Liu from other artists of his generation. Absorbed in his fantasy world, Liu (who was born in the 1960s) seems immune to the times he experienced. Symbolic tokens like Mao Zedong, the Cultural Revolution or the “1989 Movement,” which are prevalent in works of many contemporary artists, are nowhere to be found in his paintings.
“Without being labeled as a ‘contemporary Chinese art’ in a collective politics, Liu’s works are recognized for their serious qualities and estranged visions and contents,” says the critic Karen Smith. Even when he talks about himself, Liu prefers to draw on his childhood photos: a boy of large head opens his eyes and stares into the distance. “My eyes are really clear,” he says.
He attempts to interpret his strong individual color all the time, but can’t make it clear. “It might have something to do with influence of my father,” Liu says.
His father is a writer of children’s literature and Liu once painted illustrations for him as early as his teenage years.
He gets nervous somehow when people say his images are like popular cartoons. “Do you know Chen Laolian from the Ming Dynasty? He painted people with large heads and small bodies. It’s not so simple, but it’s hard to explain clearly,” he says.
“Every artist might be looking for images appropriate for their inner expressions, such as Yue Minjun’s smiling faces and Zhou Tiehai’s camels. For me, it’s just these small people. It’s hard to explain why, but it’s just the case,” he says.
I. Drawing Pictures
iu Ye was born in 1964 to a family with a courtyard home in Beijing. He says he was fond of drawing from an early age and often got encouragement and praise from his teachers.
As a teenager, Liu felt that drawing pictures was one of the most pleasurable things he could do, simply stay home and draw alone for hours. At that time, picture story  books like “The Little Soldier Zhang Ga” and “The Little Hero Yulai” were all resources he copied from.
Because of his love of drawing, Liu had secretly spied Xu Beihong’s portraits of human bodies in his father’s “Fine Arts Journal,” and tore Soviet illustrations from the Russian novel “Anna Karenina” and stapled them into a picture booklet he kept.
When he was 10, Li Peige, one of his father’s friends and the author of illustrations for “The Golden Road,” spotted Liu’s graffiti by chance. Deeply impressed, Li advised him to seek formal training in painting. He then went to learn from Tan Quanshu of China Central Academy of Fine Arts and formally started his art journey, going to the tutor twice a week from age of 10 to 15. Mr. Tan was strict with him, sometimes criticizing him so severely that he almost lost confidence, he says.
“But now I believe, my painting is indebted to the basic training at that time,” Liu says.
In 1980, Liu enrolled to study industrial design in Beijing Industrial Art School, where he first discovered the works of Piet Mondrian and began to learn about two and three-dimensional formations.
Nowadays, Mondrian’s images often appear as background symbols in Liu’s works: he paints Qi Baishi reading Mondrian in the clouds; in “She Fears No Mondrian,” Liu transfers Mondrian’s beloved red color to the skirt of a Chinese girl, who is holding a pair of scissors in her hand.
“Mondrian’s elements appear in my paintings as spiritual symbols. His paintings are so simply pure: only the basic colors and vertical and horizontal lines. I’d also like to solve the problem of simplicity,” Liu says.
 In the 1980s, Liu began to illustrate his father’s children’s books. He felt increasingly at ease in creating cartoon characters.
In 1986, Liu was admitted to Mural Painting Department of China Central Academy of Fine Arts. Assigned to a studio featuring instructions on folk art, he felt very distressed because he wanted to do “smart” classical oil works all the time. He was obsessed with Freud and Nietzsche and even kept a thick diary of his thoughts after reading “Interpretation of Dreams,” but now he says he still “can’t understand it.”
The year 1989 remains in his memory more like a restless moment in adolescence. “To young students, it was exciting to have no classes and go to demonstrate in streets and talk emptily about great ideals,” he says. Afterwards, he went to paint from life in Yunnan and felt attracted to the bright colorful clothes of minority groups.
Liu got an opportunity in late 1989 to study in Germany. After answering questions like “How old are you?” “Where are you from?” and “Why do you study art?” in German learnt from a three-month accelerated course, he passed tests by Berlin Art College and went to Germany. He studied in the Department of Plastic Arts at that College, following instructions from Volker Stelzmann, a German realistic painter.
Liu’s life in Berlin was pleasant enough, he says. Supported by a scholarship, he learned German and also painted. He tried abstract painting, “neo-realistic” painting as well as realistic painting.  He also attempted, under influence of Anselm Kiefer, abstract art with heavy iron sheets and concrete materials. After his scholarship money ran out, he found a job washing dishes in a restaurant, where he often got blamed for his slow work habits and his wandering thoughts. “Actually I was thinking about the modeling and ways to make it look nice as I washed the dishes,” he says.
“Painting is very natural to me. I’ve painted all the way from childhood til today. I believe I’m an innate painter.” Liu says.
II. The Art Market
iu narrates his experiences in a calm tone, as if all success were natural and assured in his art career. And he has always been exceptionally lucky.
Liu showed his works in 1991 in an art exhibition called, “Free Berlin Art,” where all artists living in Berlin were allowed to exhibit. Afterwards, the director of the Taube Gallery met him, bought one of his paintings for about at 2,000 Deutsch Marks first, and then signed a contract with him at 1,200 Marks a month.
“That wasn’t a large gallery, maybe a third-class one. But, that was a gallery anyway,” Liu says. Then he turned immediately from the poorest man to the richest.
In 1993, the Taube Gallery held a “Solo Exhibition of Liu Ye” at about just the time when Liu’s creations of small cartoon-like characters began taking shape. All his works at that exhibition were sold out. A second solo exhibition in 1995 also sold out.
 Liu, however, doesn’t think his success results from his studies in Germany. “In fact, that deprived me of some of the visions and experiences at home. In a western country, you come too close to modern art and, on the contrary, can’t see it clearly,” he says.
From 1989 to 1994, contemporary Chinese art had undergone a process from bustling boom to silent depression. Meanwhile, Liu -- who was studying abroad -- was affected little by the art trends at home. This might help explain Liu’s estrangement from the mainstream contemporary art scene in China.
Though this estrangement gives some art critics a headache when they find it hard to assign him to a school of contemporary art, it doesn’t hinder Liu’s success in the art market. When Liu returned to Beijing in 1994, those magic small people he was painting began to attract attention. His cooperation with Wu Erlu’s Ming Jing Di Gallery from 1995 to 1997 also turned out to be a success. Wu is perhaps the first auctioneer of contemporary art works in China, and Liu feels very lucky to have met him.
“Creating contemporary art in China back then was very difficult, and I am the only one in my class to who became a painter after graduation from China Central Academy of Fine Arts,” Liu says with emotion.
Today, the market for Chinese contemporary art is in a golden age. An old factory area was transformed into the 798 arts district. But Liu recently moved his studio out of the area because it’s “too noisy there,” he says.
 Liu is shocked by the soaring art prices. “Three years ago it would be quite good to sell a painting at $1,000, he says. But now a painting can be sold for over $1 million. I’m really confused,” he says.
The top artists in the market now, he says, are those who stuck with it through the 1980s and 1990s, like Wang Guangyi and Yue Minjun. “They deserve the big gains,” he says. When speaking about himself, Liu prefers to cal his way of cooperating with art dealers “trusting things to chance and luck.” But he adds, “It’s critical to paint good works.”
He goes on: “I’m a tolerable man, and I get a tolerable price for my works. I enjoy a tolerable fame and a tolerable house …” Then, he says, quite modestly, “I’m only a painter.”
Top Image：Red、Yellow、Blue
Image1：Photography by Tomoko Kikuchi
Image2：Mondrian with youngster
Image3：Woman Reading
Image4：Chorus of Angels
Image5：She and Mondrian
Image6：Ruan Lingyu Ⅰ
Image7：kill me softly
|
