The Two Worlds of Liu Chunjie

作者: Yu Ke 来源: 日期: 2009-1-26,15:23

(Critic, Chief Editor of Contemporary Artists)

Without any knowledge of Liu Chunjie, if you look at his engravings for the first time, you may easily get deluded into thinking that the artist is aged. However, if you study his engravings carefully, you will discover your misjudgment of his age. In early days, Liu was very strict in the ways of the expression of his creations. Nevertheless, his works bear no trace of this strictness; instead, they are casual and natural, free and liberal. They provide much food for thought and readers can ponder over them for a long time. Although it seems that he prefers to leave some poetic space in his works, this purpose never emerges to surface, too implicit to be detected. Thus, for his engravings, there are always two kinds of readers: those who observe in a hurry without any ideas and those who not only observe but also stop to think, sensing some interesting power generated in these pure and simple pictures. Perhaps this deliberation will bring him/her unexpected gains. This is the common impression Liu Chunjie’s engravings exert upon readers.

However, Liu’s latest works of this year—the worship series—seems to be undergoing certain changes, which happen so violently and unexpectedly that people may feel dazzled. It seems just now we crossed an earthly garden he built, tranquil and modest with somewhat of reminiscence. Even if the garden resounds with cheers and laughter, the voices sound vague and untrue to the original. It is as if the long passage of time generates in people an auditory hallucination. Everywhere we go is simple but elegant, peaceful and pleasing, in which people often get lost in the memory of childhood. An observant person can smell the flavor of history from the neatness and childlike plainness as well as an intentional conceptualization of scenic views. These can bring people back to the 1960s and the 1970s. However, time seems capable of filtering all the clamorous passion. Sounds and acts are all transformed into serene pictures, static and solid. Only thoughts, like spirits that break away from the outward man, are the jumping musical notes in the peaceful pictures. It is purely the impression of one’s childhood—tranquil, innocent and frank— remaining in the depths of his/her memory. In this world, we often run into one or two persons, young girls dressed in red cotton-patted jacket and wearing two big braids, or smiling passersby with vague figures, walking across the woods with fresh air, luxuriant and neat trees and lovely animals.

Nevertheless, in a flash, we step into a world of farce depicts by Liu at present. It is a crazy and clamorous world without any natural scenes. There are many people sharing the same face and many sounds expressing one single meaning. They have the same body movements and the same desires. No facial details are engraved, which arouses feelings directly perceived through the senses that they have already lost the basic qualities of a thinking individual and are in a collectively unconscious inhuman state. They are a crowd of animals that has been alienated by the society and lost their souls. Though in alienation, they can hardly feel its happening. Painful as they are, they regard themselves happy. Without faith, they trust rumors and fallacies too readily. Without thoughts, they act on blind obedience. However, what interests us more is Liu’s ways of expression in his works. If we follow the perspectives that Liu observes the two worlds, we can see that he is taking different viewpoints to delineate them. In the first world, he is at the same level with people there, either walking together with them or keeping one small step behind them. As for these people, his attitude is positive. They walk under the same sky, vision identical and hearts interlinked. The relationship between Liu and these people is mirror-like. They reflect each other. From those people’s viewpoint, Liu describes the moment when the sunshine pours down upon the hidden woods in his heart and portrays the reflected image of feelings of the good old days in the heart. In this context, the descriptive angle he adopts is a first-person plural one: we. However, in the present world, we can hardly find his reflection. He stands outside the world in the Yellow High Land as a cynic who has seen through the vanity of mundaneness. Maybe in the 1960s and the 1970s, he was as collectively unconscious as other people, but now he has changed and is seeking a kind of metaphorical relation between the past and the present. Today, Liu is cynical if not detached, and endeavors to keep away from mundane fatuity if not superior to the common people. There he either ridicules and mocks or looks on coldly. He is a skeptic, a person who knows what to love and hate and whose intelligence and ability are easily shown to the full extent. In the second world, he adopts the narrative point of view of a third person plural one: they. There is a clear dividing line between him and them. Naturally his attitudes toward “we” and “they” differ obviously. His former compliment sounds implicit, objective and calm while his present criticism is explicit and severe. If we read the caption in the pictures, we can directly sense the degree of severity. The caption not only increases clamor and sharpness but also helps the critic’s idea to emerge and make the intention of the picture more straightforward. In a word, he cannot stand certain things any longer. Although at first he was a romantic and wise young man who traced down the fleeting-wave-like past meditatively, now he has a word to say. He seems to have found his own way of expression from the past memory and the old way of propaganda from the mastheads of columns similar to cartoons to serve critique, which is rapid, popular and straightforward. However, this is absolutely no direct borrowing. The biggest difference is that here Liu adopts irony. No matter whether it is of those in cartoons or of the form of cartoon itself, he hopes that his criticism to be cruel.

Therefore, the shift of descriptive perspective in Liu’s works should be understood from a deeper respect, not only from the content of description but also from how he changes the perspective. From this respect, we should see the content out of the form, the linkage between the inside and the outside of the pictures, the cross-sections of expression implied in the pictures and glittering ideas in the intervals of moving cursors of thoughts. Anyhow, what he gives us is more a inspiration to thinking and an introspection of behaviors. Nevertheless, no matter what perspective Liu takes in his two worlds, his creation seems to throb with the pulse of contemporary art unconsciously. It can identify the context of utterance in the tradition and sense the subtle and undetectable relation between contemporary art and traditional art. Moreover, it can cut off a synchronical cross-section from the historical perspective and thus let the gloomy past glow again in certain corner of contemporary context of utterance.

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