Dialogue

Andrea Guastella

Art historian

What could ducks and hens possibly have to say to one another? Could they ever truly understand each other? In the fables of Aesop, Phaedrus, or La Fontaine, eagles and foxes speak the same tongue; quite the opposite of humankind who, though belonging to a single species, still bear the curse of Babel. Even within families, dialogue is fraught with difficulty – let alone between cultures and traditions that have followed divergent paths for centuries: the millennia-old Chinese art of painting and that of the West.

In Dialogue, Liu Youju evokes precisely this encounter of alternative values as a kind of “discussion between ducks and hens,” in which neither side seems truly able to persuade the other. An artistic challenge, one in which the artist has confessed to have spent “countless silent nights” studying and comparing Chinese and Western painting. It echoes the eternal dilemma of lost in translation, of what inevitably slips away in translation: poetry itself, according to Robert Frost.

《Dialogue》69*69cm

How, for instance, can one convey the emotions stirred by a colour if for some it signifies festivity, and for others misfortune? How can one reconcile the Western tendency to frame the universe in human terms – our art presupposes optical grids, vanishing points, and projections even when it appears to ignore them –with the Eastern vision of humankind as an undefined fragment of space? How are symbols to be understood, or indeed the very logic of reading images? The risk, not unlike that of driving through a Commonwealth country after decades of honourable practice elsewhere, is to press on resolutely in the wrong direction. And yet, it is precisely within this gap, this irreducibility, that a glimmer of possibility emerges.

If, as the old saying reminds us, “to translate is to betray”, Liu Youju betrays the expectations of both East and West in order to remain faithful only to his own vision. His act of “translation” has nothing to do with forcefully appropriating what does not belong to him, thus condemning himself to misunderstanding, but rather with resisting incomunicability, with transforming emptiness, silence and cry, a collision of dissolved and potential forms, into a free port where opposites not only coexist but are rendered both right and necessary.

Seen in this light, his entire aesthetic aligns with this postmodern assumption: the fluid, calligraphic lines of Three produced All Things resonate with ancestral echoes, with that search for harmony between man and cosmos at the heart of Taoist thought. And yet this bond is unsettled, if not disrupted, by the dramatic intrusion of elements from the Western visual grammar, where Pollock – and before him the Impressionists and Abstract artists – hold sway. The result is an erratic body of work, at times tranquil and serene, at others violent and expressive, whose very titles – The Scenario of the “Third Thinking”, Mars Project, Interspersed – suggest ceaseless movement, an exploration that ranges from the memory of the homeland (Nostalgia of Native Land) to the fantastical recreation of distant galaxies.

“Child going forth to encounter the world, and becoming it”, wrote the great Whitman of himself. Likewise, the artist seems to merge with the objects he paints and their respective qualities, whether it be a root clinging proudly to the soil (Take root in fertile soil) or the fleeting beauty of a white chrysanthemum (White chrysanthemums).

Andrea Guastella visited the exhibition of Liu Youju's works

Unlike many of his compatriots who, in relation to Euro-American art, have taken a clear stance – whether of integration or, conversely, of “cynical” and frontal critique, which is in itself a tacit acceptance of its rules – Liu Youju behaves as though history’s weight were light, and he himself nothing less than the very first (or the very last) painter upon the earth. Is he right? Is he wrong? What is certain is that we are faced with a singular interpreter of the short century, with its syncretism and its contradictions.

Whatever ducks and hens may say, to anyone seeking a standard-bearer of China within the world of art, and of the art world within China, one of the first names to emerge is Liu Youju.