cina is modernizing: wide, paved boulevards are replacing the muddy and narrow lanes that have connected the country for thousands of years. On either side of these modern roads shabby homes give way to high-rise apartments.
After a century of shame, China’s breakneck pace of modernization is a point of national pride. But to make way for progress many of the China’s most distinguishing features are being flattened and paved over.
Anxiety over that loss motivates Liu Jiahua, an artist born in Sichuan province in 1979. Liu’s paintings take buildings with China’s ancient architectural features as their subject.
In the three painting series – New Metro, Overwhelmed Metro and Encircled Metro – the buildings are suspended aloof, standing in the sky or collapsing from the clouds.
“In each of these paintings, the buildings have multiple meanings,” Liu says. “They stand for both the vanishing architecture of ancient China and a symbol of our cultural heritage.” The images are a strong criticism of mass urbanization born of Liu’s own introspection.
Liu is a longtime lover of traditional Chinese culture. He frequently blends Chinese traditional objects with his own creations, drawing on decorative knots and other folk arts.
Cranes, a symbol of the divine and immortal in ancient literature, appear frequently in Liu’s Back to Utopia painting series. The series draws on Liu’s childhood memories, which in spite of the name were anything but an objective utopia.
“If there is a real utopia, I think it’s a spiritual world that humans can never build or paint,” Liu says.
A Solidified Moment, Liu’s latest creation, focuses less on architecture than capturing a pervasive gray that sucks the color out of modern city life.
When appreciating the paintings at first glance, viewers may think they are simply landscapes. But observing carefully, viewers can find the static scenes hide something. The Dune 2 appears to be a painting of bare stones and trees, but seen from another angle it becomes a human face. Flood Tides appears to show a violent flood sweeping away a house, but seen again it is a massive hand.
Liu is currently developing a new series called A Solidified Moment.
“This time, I feel like I am being guided by a mysterious power,” Liu says.
Like many current artists, Liu grew up with a paintbrush in his hand. “I would paint until it was midnight when I was a little boy,” Liu says. “In some way, painting took me into another planet where I could touch the timeless.”
His art teacher gave him confidence to pursue art as an actual career. Liu met the white-haired, bespectacled teacher in 1992 and at first glance assumed he was a scientist. When the teacher walked into the room, he walked up to the blackboard and wrote one sentence: “Art is a profound discipline which has endless things to teach, and you need to learn them all.”
Although the impression stuck with Liu forever, the teacher would only guide him for a semester before choosing to retire.
“But before he left, he told me I should try my best to enter a good art college,” Liu says.
He did.
Today, that teacher is one of the many people to whom Liu owes his career, as well as the Swedish art collector who was the first to buy one of Liu’s paintings in 2006.
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