ARTIST Liu Guangyun’s solo exhibition, “I Feel Good,” opening tomorrow at Minsheng Art Museum, displays three series — “Section,” “Trajectory” and “Transmigration.”

An important dimension of Liu’s contemporary art lies in the interrogation and reflection of the double predicaments of the individual and the group. While constantly experiencing the conflict between different cultures, the 52-year-old always sustains in mind a strong consciousness of predicament.

Why is this consciousness worth attention? The crucial reason is that Liu has clear vision and profound reflection on his status as an artist, his situation and the possible transmutations of his work.

He does not follow the fashionable trends to meet the need of survival, nor does he choose the frivolous strategy out of an aspiration to be recognized.

Liu knows that the slogan of “assimilation to Europe” or “return to China” makes little sense for him. In the fierce counteraction of two very different cultures, on one hand he is deeply aware of the fact that he cannot keep a so-called “safe distance” and must accept and understand the “metamorphosis” of himself; on the other hand he sees that as a spiritual drifter he could probe deep into the core of himself and the reality and realize more possibilities in art only after destroying the thought of safe distance.

The focus of the three series in this exhibition is not on the action of shooting itself, nor on the language of the creation — bullets — but on the subversive changes of the established visions brought by those trajectories.

In 1989, an artist fired a gunshot at an exhibition as a piece of performance art in Beijing. The shooting incidents in the past history of Chinese contemporary art express an individual scream in the desolate dawning of the artistic context in the 1980s — a sort of provocation and ridicule at the petrifying reality.

What Liu wants to say by his shootings of Andy Warhol’s “Marilyn Monroe,” the New Chinese-German Dictionary from the 1980s and the classical Chinese and Western paintings, would be his profound reflection on and disenchantment with the history of contemporary art, personal spiritual history, and the cultural differences between East and West.

The works of these three series constitute a “trajectory,” a visual and conceptional field that is fresh and powerful, successfully making in a personal context an organic integration of three major themes: personal spiritual struggle, the history of contemporary art, and the cultural differences between East and West.

“In the sense of space and body, everything in the scene of the exhibition is safe,” Liu says. “In the sense of thought and idea, however, the ‘safe distance’ is eliminated from the scene.”

 

Date: Through January 20, 10am-6pm

Venue: Minsheng Art Museum, Bldg F, 570 Huaihai Rd W.