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 v...

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 ...