Lui Liu

portrait

yin

yang (click pics for high rez)


Growing up in China and living in the west make Lui Liu a keen observer as both an insider and outsider of the two worlds. Through extraordinary awareness and compelling techniques, he creates a surreal world that transcends cultures, spaces and races. A note of parody is most noticeable in almost all his works.

"Modernity appears to me like a tin bucket in which every possible style has been poured and mixed and used and abused in search of self-expression. A child can express himself with crayons and doodles. But great art could not be pure self-expression; it's unfortunately the opposite. When an art piece is placed in a position of great art, it's the unselfish erasing of the painter that lets it live, as T. S. Eliot has said, "the process of creation is the process of constantly removing one's character and individuality from the work".

What's left of ME in my paintings then is the combination of other people's rules and technique and my psychological perception of reality. I don't try to be ancient or modern. I could only paint within the continuity of a tradition and with a simple mission: to paint the ever-lasting mythopoetic images of our time as they come out of the past and move into the future."

Lui Liu

It's the ambivalence, the tensions between the poles, according to Barry Callaghan, a renowned Canadian writer, that "free Lui Liu so that he can stand alone facing east or west, as he chooses".
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