MY IMPRESSION OF LIU CHUNJIE

作者: Chao Mei 来源: 日期: 2009-2-12,13:49

In the art circle, I have a lot of young friends and Liu Chunjie is one of them. I was acquainted with Liu in the 1980s. I am 35 years older than Liu but 20 years' friendship makes us really intimate friends that can bridge significant age difference.

Liu is passionate, sincere, smart, competent, humorous and witty. He knows precisely whom or what to love or hate and detests injustice like poison. He cares about friends and possesses a high sense of personal loyalty. These can be seen in many examples. In September of 2000, the excellent engraving painter Zhou Shenghua passed away young. In Zhou's last two and half months, Liu was staying in hospital nearly all the time, helping to take care of the sick. After Zhou's passing, he was busy arranging the funeral affairs in deep grief. What he did greatly moves Zhou's wife and daughter as well as the relatives. Another impressive thing happened after Liu was transferred to Nanjing . At that time, we were not connected at all either in work or in life. However, our friendship existed as before. He often wrote me letters or called to send his regards. Compared with the contemporary pragmatism-oriented human relations, Liu respects human emotions, which not everybody can do.

Liu is the hardcore among the third generation of the Great Northern Wilderness engravers. The army reclamation of their elder generation offered Liu and his contemporaries the space to live and learn, full of hopes and expectations, and bred the intelligence of these students and the trends of their creation. What happened to the third generation is entirely different from the first and second generation who did pioneering work in the period of political disorder. From the very beginning, Liu's works are full of the childlike, dreamlike conceptions and perfectly-matched ways of expression. He is a representative and unique painter in his generation. As we have witnessed over so many years, Liu is productive and the quality of his works is stably high. When the noted periodical Jiangsu Art Monthly invited him to work, cadres of his former unit, the General Bureau of Heilongjiang Agricultural Reclamation, tried to persuade him to stay via assigning him an important post. And I also advised the relevant cadres of the Heilongjiang Bureau of Press and Publication and Heilongjiang Literature and Art Association to have Liu work in Heilongjiang Artists Association. Liu himself was hesitant at that time but finally he chose Nanjing to work in. He said that he would like to have his working and living environments changed and resume in an unknown world. Now it seems his choice is reasonable.

Liu is a wise person who thinks a lot and is able to extricate himself from a predicament. We should say that he has weighed the matter of going or staying in full objectivity. This is a crucial choice in his life and the artistic career especially. Only if he knew what is what could Liu make such a decision.

In the past twenty years, in various times, there have been many engravers in Heilongjiang , among whom many young and mid-aged ones have made significant achievement. Tens of these engravers have stepped out of Heilongjiang and can be found all over the country. However, few of them have new works presented to the public, let alone pioneering progress and accomplishments. They are just like high-grade seedlings that grow well in a nursery garden but go withered once transplanted to the wilderness or master swimmers who are helpless and powerless in the sea. Such phenomena are still under discussion. However, Liu Chunjie is an exception.

Generally speaking, there is a lot to do when we leave our hometown for a new living and working environment and sometimes our efforts cannot show the efficacy in a short time. Usually it costs people much time and energy to settle down, familiarize themselves with the new job, handle complicated human relations and adapt themselves to a different natural environment. And the situation is even harder at the beginning of cooperation with such a famous 30-year-old periodical. Liu had to attend big exhibitions organized by the press and receive visiting painters and clients. If you are fond of engaging in social activities, you can always get yourself intoxicated in this job. During that time only in the region of Nanjing , there were opening ceremonies of art exhibitions nearly every day. Liu was on the rush to attend each of them out of the needs of the job. Nevertheless, Liu never forgets his original duty as an engraver. He spared time for several engravings. Last spring, he once wrote to me about his new project-a series of works called Wild Ponderer. At that time I did not pay much attention to what he wrote or get to know about his detailed plan further. But half a year later, at the end of last year, to my surprise, I received from Liu a thick book called Wild Ponderer bound and designed by himself together with an article by He Ping, entitled "Seeking the secret of meanings in an artist's experimental samples: interpretation of Liu Chunjie's Wild Ponderer. In the attached letter, Liu revealed that he had started to create a group of large-sized engravings called the Worship Series. Recently I found that Lu Hong had written an article for this series called "In pursuit of the modernity of engravings: on Liu Chunjie's creation of engravings". He's and Lu's articles as well as Gao Zhao's published in China Art Weekly and Zhang Xinying's in Contemporary Art all give Liu's works positive remarks. I think they are telling the truth and speaking on good grounds. I do not want to quote their opinions and evidence here but to share some of my personal understanding of how and why Liu's creative work develops.

Artistic creation is a process of understanding society and real life as well as developing the artistic functions and rules. Thus, the development of artistic life is also a process of opening up and progressing. The success of an artistic depends upon his/her comprehensive accomplishment and talents. Liu likes and is good at thinking. He is a painter with compound talents, excelling in verbal expression, logical thinking and emergency-handling. As for his two new series, especially the Wild Ponderer, from its name, we can conclude that Liu's intelligence is outstanding. This book, excellent in both pictures and literary composition, unveils, illustrates and criticizes many present social problems with a sense of humor, which increases its readability and kindness. If Liu had continued to work on existed subjects concerning the old experiences and feelings with used statements, or followed Jiangsu engravers to draw rivers and lakes in south , then there would be little space for Liu to develop his creation.

Liu has a stable job, familiar and excellent human relations, a cozy family and a gifted wife. His present job, in Partioular, enlarges his vision greatly. But Liu never relaxes or stops his pursuit of fine arts. Diligence is another reason for the development of his career. Without diligence, he would fail to produce these 110 elaborate engravings after busy work; without diligence, he would never have a chance to bring his intelligence into play. He probably would be content with the present situation, allow laziness to turn opportunity into predicament and lose that little amount of capital.

The story of Liu Chunjie can be one of the examples that contemporary engravers, especially Heilongjiang engravers, had better think over in artistic practice. It does not mean that all our painters have to start all over again but to face the reality and follow the times. Instead of easily being content with their achievement, they should examine their practice seriously, identify problems, find a breakthrough and thus push forward their creation to a new phase. Liu's works are not absolutely perfect. His experience should not be copied indiscriminately. What we should learn from him is his pursuit of change, because artistic creation and practice is a process of ceaseless discovery, innovation and forever progress.

Chao Mei

1931-, Vice President of Engravers Association, President of Heilongjiang Artists Association

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