Flight cabin is like a giant wound-curing place, flying slowly. A quarter moon was hanging there, bright and clear, and the cloud was like cotton, dancing outside the cabin. There seems to be singing from far, or words, noise…The shadow of London started to fade gradually.

It is so unexpected that this trip to London finally turned into an entanglement of life and death. During that week in St. George hospital, I experienced different situations, making me speechless. Those situations reminded me that my old friend Liu Yong also got sick in London, tormented and tossed to Paris. That time he got gastrorrhagia, followed by quite a dramatic trip. It is said that he also chose to go back China and changed his plan of living in western countries in the long term because of that journey. Those things are just like sighs in life.

Liu Yong and I have much more in common other than the abovementioned experiences. We got to know each other when we were little, lifelong friends. We both spent our childhood in Kunming, and almost every day together. Liu Yong is a junior in his family while I am the eldest one, so we both were deeply loved by our parents. Both of us had a separated room, in those bleak days, in the center of this city, and in such a place with quite a few ambitious young people. Liu Yong was smart and intelligent when he was very young, and learned everything so quickly, creating an icon in my heart. In those days, Liu Yong always was one of the first ones who played rock music, rode motorcycle, operated company, learned computer, drove automobile and went abroad…I still remember that Liu Yong taught me to ride bicycle. We went to the outskirt along Xi Ba River to sketch. Going through weeping willow, there were very tall eucalyptus leaves, moving back and forth in the wind. They looked green sometimes, and reflected sunshine sometimes, resembling those dreamy and innocent days: mountains and lake, girls washing clothes by the river, boatmen living in lake, fisherman casting net, youth fishing, buffalos dazing, and water birds observing everything by reeds…We caught everything in our paintings, obsessed with painting. The world outside, and the peace of monastic life all moved far away. Those shared days were the pure, clear and beautiful time in both Liu Yong’s and my life.

Liu Yong and I were admitted by Sichuan Fine Art Institute. Liu Yong majored in traditional Chinese painting for four years, and his teachers are Feng Jianwu, Lai Shenru, Huang Hairu, Li Youxing, Du Xianqing, Bai Desong and other great art masters. I still remember that Liu Yong’s graduation creation was a long roll of fine brushwork on rural lives in Sani Village, Yunnan province. His work is elegant and with both ancient style and modern artistic talent, plus accurate design, which can be regarded as a rare piece. After graduated with such excellent performance, Liu came back to Yunnan and became a teacher in Yunnan Art Institute. He was the pride in art area in Yunnan then, but at the same time, it was not so easy to talk to him since he always came and left in a hurry. In 2000, Liu Yong came back from Paris. I was in charge of Upriver Club and asked him to hold a seminar on his experience in Paris, and an exhibition at the same time. Liu agreed with great pleasure, but there was no follow-up since then. Upriver Club and Loft have been waiting for 8 years. I have managed to hold quite a few exhibitions in Kunming for friends and artists in from everywhere, but failed to do one for my old friend. This has been a great pity to me.

This spring I came back to Kunming, and Liu called to meet in Wen Hua Alley. He told me this time he was preparing for his solo exhibition, and took me to a painting mounting place to see his art creations. Liu’s new works belong to a comprehensive style of ink category between scholar painting and experiment. In addition to traditional scholar spiritual themes and methods, there were elements of contemporary structure formation and separation. Therefore, there were not only tasteful details and elegance in his painting, but also tension and conflicts. From my point of view, Liu’s newly created ink paintings are more like a game rather than an experiment. Some of Liu’s paintings were so relaxing that it’s impossible to say whether they were Chinese or western. They are free games, pleasant, inspiriting and vivid doodle and random painting, with highly competent vitality. I believe from this point on, Liu Yong’s paintings should be with more strength and moral, and with great potential. The key is that artist can maintain his mentality as ‘playing games’. Chinese painting is particular about finding relaxation and enjoyment in the arts, and mountains and lakes are places for relaxing, for travelling and for living. Mountains, rocks, forests and springs, lakes and rivers are all places for affection and spirit, and flowers and birds are also inner sustenance of personality and ambition. For example, plum, orchid, bamboo, chrysanthemum and birds are self metaphor and personal portraiture. In one word, these things are descriptions of personal inwardness.

In 2004 I went to Dacca, the capital of Bangladesh. I visited a village nearby and there was an international art workshop going on. In such a remote village, artists had to get rid of their original working habits and familiar experience, and started new adventure and exploration. Artists took advantage of local and ecological materials to do experiment: quilt, henhouse, dried branch, mud, leaves, agricultural appliance and even their bodies. All these were similar to my experience 20 years ago: I went to Lancang River in Xishuangbanna to pursue my dreams. Sometimes, a shift from familiar surroundings and experience to a far-away geographic location and a broad life experience can bring along brand-new inspirations. What indeed created the distance between what I struggled hard for and what I originally intended to? I lingered along that unknown Indian-Pakistani river for the whole evening…When I went back, what I saw shocked me again: there were three huge Kongming Lantern hovering over that dark village—the masterpiece of these artists, which shook the bottom of my heart at that moment. Those glitter, mysterious, holly golden colors rose slowly at that dark night…I burst into tears suddenly. Only art can transcend long history and short life. We tangled in such a world, following others’ steps and dancing with others’ tune, with the fear of not standing in the frontier of the time. We exerted every bit of our mental efforts, and tried all kinds of tricks, but finally what would we get? Today it is finally to be realized that we are going back to our starting point, back to our life, and back to those simple places with easy pleasure. Then we can recover, can relieve our heart, and can lighten the world…For the past few years, all these ideas have been regarded as my lifelong treasure and precious experience.

Doesn’t Liu Yong the one who practices his mind and seeks fun in his creation? The greatness of Chinese art is to combine one’s personal progress and art pursuit together. In Liu’s works we can find these characters: ‘question our heart’, ‘honored nobility of heaven’, ‘precious sincerity’…which expressed a thought and represented an idea. In fact, the difference between human beings is from different ideas. Conversely, the differences between male and female, fat and thin, beautiful and ugly, are only superficial differences. Different ideas lead to different life values and attitudes. For quite a long time, most of us have been trained to have the thought that ‘I haven’t done good enough’. We should get out of the mind state that we should become stronger and have larger ambition, and we should go back to simplicity, back to the places with happiness, and back to the position with real life and enlightenment, no matter how weak they are. I suppose there is no better expression than an ink painting or a paragraph of words.

After I finished this ‘moan in sickness’, our flight landed in Beijing. I dragged my weak body, going home. Smile was being played in the car, from Michael Jackson, who just passed away. Though I can feel my heart aching, I still keep a smile on my face…Suddenly, I thought about one sentence from Lin Xi: You are not unhappy originally—mutual encouragement for my old friend Liu Yong, and me.