Marco Nocca

Professor of Ancient Art History and Museography

Academy of Fine Arts, Rome

It is with genuine pleasure that I welcomed the invitation from the Academy of the Arts of Drawing in Florence, and from Anna Balzani, curator of Liu Youju’s exhibition Bounded and Unbounded at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome, to offer some reflections on the painting of this remarkable Chinese artist, whose international exhibition record includes a successful presence at the most recent Venice Biennale in 2024 (Stranieri ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, Cameroon Pavilion, Palazzo Donà dalle Rose).

Professor Marco Nocca attended the media conference of Liu Youju's art exhibition

Our Italian Academies of Fine Arts are increasingly sought by students from the Far East who, after an initial artistic education (generally naturalistic) in their homeland, arrive in Italy with a keen sense of curiosity for everything pertaining to our artistic tradition – assiduously studied through mimicry – while also immersing themselves in European contemporary culture. This is one of the great, positive outcomes of a globalised world: they allow us to cast a fresh gaze on what has always been ours, to revitalise, for example, the seed of figurative painting through the original and unprecedented interpretations presented in their works, inviting us to move beyond the twentieth-century crisis of representation – dismantled by the European avant-gardes – and beyond the long-standing abstract/figurative debate, towards a contemporary vision made possible by a receptive “other” culture. It is precisely this desire for dialogue, powerful and unmistakable, that I perceive in Liu Youju’s art, whether in his rarefied landscapes or his enigmatic figures immersed in ever-vibrant chromatic fields. A dialogue grounded in a profound knowledge of European artistic tradition, which has led critics to describe him as the “father of Chinese Impressionism” – an intuition seemingly confirmed by works on view here such as Morning Rhime.

Marco Noca, a professor of ancient art history and museology at the Academy of Fine Arts of Rome (first from the left), Renata Cristina Mazantini, the director of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea of Rome (second from the left), and Anna Barzani, a journalist and curator (first from the right), pose for a photo with Liu Youju.

His painting, which began with calligraphic training rooted in the value and power of the sign, composed within a rigorous formal code inherited from millennia of tradition, is animated by powerful creative impulses that find their force of action in colour. In Beyond Abstraction, a large painting presented in Florence in 2019, chromatic matter exploded – like a Pollock-style dripping – yet with highly original results, in which the artist, freed from the confines of his native context, established a dialogue with Western twentieth-century painting. This synthesis of two cultures is evident in his technique: Liu Youju often preserves the traditional use of Chinese ink and the exquisite support of rice paper, bringing them into relation with acrylic paint, a contribution of our twentieth century. Notable examples in this exhibition include Sunrise and the diptych Three Trees, where Liu Youju’s calligraphic formation underpins the composition, serving as a launchpad for a pyrotechnic chromatic display of remarkable vitality.

On October 22nd, Professor Marco Nocca attended the personal works seminar of Liu Youju at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome

Among the works selected by the curator for this exhibition are many that revisit the themes of his formation, never abandoning the philosophical inspiration of the East, linked to the Tao Te Ching and to Laozi’s theory of the creation of the Universe, emerging from the Tao like a flower bursting from its seed (Burst into bloom). This vision invites beings to contemplation, humility, and harmony with the mystery of existence. The theme of deep empathy between humanity and nature, above all, aligns with the profound philosophical and poetic sensibility of the Far East. The title of the exhibition, Bounded and Unbounded, thus alludes to the relationship between the finite world of humankind and the infinite realm of nature and the cosmos: all that exists is the outcome of the interaction between Yin (darkness, passivity, the feminine principle, the moon) and Yang (light, activity, the masculine principle, the sun), as in the striking Alternating light and shadow. Harmony is attained by following the natural flow of things: to this wise and ancient vision Liu Youju seeks to join a modern sense of responsibility before Creation, as in Ecology, whose composition seems to reconcile Nature (evoked by the animated colours of the background) and Civilization (vital in its compulsive, frenetic linework), or Thorn thicket, in which a dense bramble, through which bright, vivid colours shimmer, appears to suggest that only in respecting the wild may humankind find the possibility of a harmonious life.

《Thorn thicket》106x107CM

The relationship of the individual with the cosmos may be magical, shaped – as in classical astrological tradition – by the deciphering of the mysteries of stars and planets, of their influence on our earthly life (Untitled. Celestial script), or projected into a near future of imminent discovery of new worlds, to which modern technology carries us (Mars Project).

It is precisely the original synthesis in Liu Youju’s painting – between Ancient and Modern, Eastern and Western traditions, capable even of interpreting so intensely a “holiday season” of ours such as Christmas, with interest and curiosity (Christmas Impressions, Richard Nixon Presidential Library & Museum, Yorba Linda, California) – that makes this seventy-year-old Chinese artist a leading figure in today’s intercultural dialogue. Dialogos for the Greeks meant “conversation,” “exchange of words” (to which, for the new media of global digital culture, we might add “images”) between two or more people, between two or more civilizations. These are the only instruments capable, through visual art and the word, of silencing weapons, who’s sinister thunder still echoes at the close of the first quarter of this new millennium, in which we had placed so many hopes.