February 4, 2012 |
Cute cartoon characters wander through a world lit up with the pure hues of Modern masterworks.
For example, in Liu Ye’s Hello Mondrian (the title conjuring the shade of Hello Kitty) a pint-sized Miss with pull-up socks and a bow in her hair carries a small Mondrian under her arm. Again and again, Ye pairs up boys and girls with paintings within the painting, bearing the crisp abstract geometries of Ye’s great hero.
The weird combination of these blank-faced innocents and serene colour schemes in sunny yellows, pale pinks or denim blues make Ye’s works curiously serene. It’s a recipe that has proved art-collector catnip in the past decade, with his paintings fetching record prices at auction through the art-market boom years, when contemporary Chinese artists first made a dent internationally. He has also painted the deep red favoured by both Mondrian and the flag of China’s New Culture Revolution, in which Ye was raised, but this is about as overtly political as his work gets.
Ye’s work mines his childhood memories, but rather than the oppression and cultural trauma his peers have frequently explored, he gives us the halcyon private world of a child’s imagination. No surprise that Alice In Wonderland has been a lifelong influence. He is elusive about the exact origins of his “little people”. But perhaps his preference for cartoon characters has to do with his father, a writer of children’s literature. Though foreign books were banned during Ye’s childhood, his dad’s profession meant they had a stash of Western literature at home and some of Ye’s first works as a child were inspired by illustrations in tomes such as Anna Karenina.
Legends of pop and high culture also feature in his paintings, with portraits of everyone from Mozart to Chet Baker. Miffy the rabbit, who he first discovered as artist in residence at Amsterdam’s Rijksakademie, makes frequent appearances. A stand-in for Ye himself, little Miffy makes a mournful figure pining for the great achievements of Modern artists. In Miffy and Mondrian she is submerged in funereal gloom next to one of Mondrian’s familiar blocky compositions; in Small Painter it’s as if Miffy herself has become a symbol of art’s decline – the little girl drawing her is set against a pitch-black canvas, recalling Kasi mir Malevic’s degree zero for abstract painting: Black Square.
by Skye Sherwin
