Liu Hong Wei: Drama in dream
Drama in Dream will be the fifth Liu Hong Wei’s exhibition with Kwai Fung Hin Art Gallery since 2000. The exhibition will feature 30 recent paintings by Liu and a new catalogue has been published in conjunction with the exhibition.
Born in 1965 in Beijing, Liu Hong Wei graduated from the Oil Painting Department of Hebei Teaching University in 1988 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. Since then, he has been a professor at the Academy of Arts and Crafts of Hebei University in China.
The paintings of Liu Hongwei always look like scenes from a dream.
In his works, people and objects of the real world are put into fabrications, not in accordance with the norms. Yet the depictions are fine and delicate, every scene on the canvas is fascinatingly alive. Therefore, he is drawing a world that is both distant from and close to us, in which familiar characters are playing absurd stories in a bizarre setting. His vision liberates our heart, changes our perspective and proposes infinite freedom from the known. The artist is leading the viewers to jump out of the box and to release themselves from their blind spots. He opens up a new horizon that invites us to deep introspection.
There are no kitschy Chinese symbols in Liu’s works.
There are indeed pulses of Chinese culture, but all subtly embedded. If we look more closely at his pictures, there are in fact such spontaneity and simplicity as typical of rural China everywhere on the canvas, as well as the discreet sophistication incarnated by the Chinese literati. Nor has Liu overlooked the impacts of dramatic changes on the present generation of the people in Mainland China, including their emotional flux, as well as their doubts about, or their hope in respect of, their future. In his works, there is no lacking of delicate and yet penetrating revelations and explorations on these subjects
There are no shouts of statement on contemporary issues in Liu’s works.
He does, however, accurately perceive the anxiety and solitude in modern life, and is able to deal with such serious questions with a style of amazing ease. Play-like scenes are right there to offer release from and consolation for the weary and messy reality. Liu takes root in the environment in which he grew up. Blessed with outstanding insight and the ability to generalize, while drawing inspirations from a limited temporal scope, Liu manages to build a unique artistic realm with lasting impacts.
His world is boundless.
Liu Hongwei has been living in China for his whole life up to now, yet his studies on art covers all the far horizons. He explores deep into all main schools of the Western art in modern time, with a view to find the direction for contemporary art from between the agreements and disagreements between the Chinese and the foreign cultures. In his works of the recent years, the signature characteristics of a number of Western masters are juxtaposed with his own style, whereby the household symbols are given new life and his inner world is merged with the universe further.
