Tiziana D’Acchille

Director of the Academy of Fine Arts of Perugia

The encounter between two millennia-old figurative cultures, Eastern and Western, can today, in light of the widest circulation of images and the sharing of languages, give rise to original solutions such as those proposed by Liu Youju, who presents his recent works at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome.

Liu Youju is an artist who, though trained within the solid foundations of Chinese academies, has broadened his gaze towards the expressive forms of Western art, from the avant-gardes of the late nineteenth century to the contemporary, offering his highly personal vision of reality – one made of colour, of signs and free brushstrokes, of gestural practices connected to Abstract Expressionism, yet still bound to a visibility that rarely vanishes from his horizon.

Tiziana D’Acchille delivered a speech at the opening ceremony of Liu Youju's solo art exhibition

In analysing the works of artists such as Liu Youju, we must therefore take into account a highly complex transition: the passage from a figurative space contained and circumscribed within a microcosmic surface, as in the East, to an open space governed by perspectival laws, as in the West. Not only differing perceptions of space and reality determine the complexity of the encounter between the two cultures, but also the use and intensity of colour, which in Liu Youju’s work burst in all their spontaneous force. 

In Chinese figurative culture, indeed, the sense of space and composition assumes the characteristics of a closed and circumscribed universe, regulated by rigorous norms crystallised over time in measured harmonies, with the slightest variations of pressure in the ink-laden brush and the use of water-based colours. Introducing oil painting into this context reflects the growing openness between the two figurative cultures: if Orientalism and decorative floral motifs had already exerted a special fascination upon Western artists from the late nineteenth century, and calligraphic art had entered the wide repertoire of expressive languages in certain currents of Abstract Expressionism, a more realist perception of landscape and nature began to take hold from the moment Eastern artists, and Chinese artists in particular, turned their gaze Westward.

Tiziana D’Acchille is discussing Liu Youju's works with other guests

In Chinese painting, the artist seeks to capture essence, and in deference to Taoist thought, the spirit of nature becomes the goal to be grasped and interpreted, rather than a faithful replica of reality. The search for harmony between man and environment is the dominant aim of such an approach, which relies upon a mobile perspective inviting the viewer to immerse themselves mentally in the scene, without a predetermined focal point as in Western perspective. Light, shadow, and detail here respond to a logic internal to the composition itself, according to traditional concepts such as “horizontal distance” or “deep distance”. This millennial heritage may represent an obstacle in the bold leap towards a Western poetics, a leap rendered all the more arduous when faced with the rapid evolution of Western artistic languages in the past two centuries.

And thus, artists like Liu Youju find themselves engaging with what made Western art great and simultaneously deconstructed its rules, crossing the boundless sea of the twentieth-century avant-gardes and experimenting with an expressive freedom reflected in his joyous use of colour.

Yet mnemonic images and horizontal distances continue to pervade Liu Youju’s works: the chromatic breadths that define glimpses of landscape caught in auroral or crepuscular light are indebted to the great Western tradition of en plein air, yet at the same time retain all the emotional impact and visionary magic of a spiritual outlook.