Walter Schurian [Germany] Translated by Luo Tilun

　　Ⅰ

　　Viewing this painting, our eye movements become increasingly confined. They glide over it wedged in between an intimidating, bulging red cast up into the upper half of the painting and the blue-white-greyish contortions and distortions in the lower part. Yet, at the same time, high-spirited and willingly our eyes are attracted by the pull of the engorgements of colours (Energy - oil/canvas). A horizon, just hinted at and lying between two fields of colour, forms a separating line, a slit, a small opening narrowing towards the back, where searching movements of the eye slowly attain tranquillity and then dissolve, hide, disappear or withdraw in the surges of colour. Light glistens at the end of the tunnel of the seeming anxiety generated by events in primary colours. Promises between horizons.

　　The association of a turbulent, oppressively heavy formation of clouds, piled up one on top of another, with just a few distinctive glimpses of an immaculate blue sky, intrudes onto the undetermined and diagonally layered surface of the earth in a horizontal landscape marked in grey-blue shades of colour and unites it into an unusual and literally exciting eye-catcher. Freely pulsating formations of colour in vigorous arching shades of blue and red, piled up on top of each other and encased within each other, open up a free field of vision, one in which the colour invites us in, where it can sink in unimpeded, spread out endlessly and run riot synaesthetically without any limitations.

　　As in the fields, spaces and layers, impressively drifting apart, of the first free compositions of scenes of nature which consist of nothing else but colour and run the gamut from Turner and Friedrich to Gerhard Richter, the view cuts freely through, it moves around and becomes physically intoxicated facing immediate, unfiltered pure offerings of stupendously spread out and subtly transforming colour-games. The viewing itself becomes here a pure visual pleasure, one that can almost be felt physically: sensuous, stimulating and reverberating.

　　Although the artist’s original intention may have been different, for example as an invitation to a certain view of a slice of nature, or as a visible allusion to the many separate dynamics within the levels of different natural environments, or perhaps only as the optical offering of a more or less informal combination of different shades of colour, the viewing of itself entails an impressive and moving aesthetic experience. Images are offered up to the individual senses, which they synaesthetically delight, one by one or in unison. Before any thoughtful deliberations and overtones, the concrete act of viewing entails above all an emotional process, which includes a special, aesthetically developed value of its own.

　　The moment of our psychic perception of such visually exciting offerings already signifies the beginning immediacy of the artistic experience. In the case of Liu Xiuming the very act of viewing results in an aesthetic transubstantiation: the surprising and ultimately mysterious transformation of colour, experienced in a very real and psychic manner, morphs into a visible and clearly spiritual pleasure, i.e. into art. Artistic metamorphosis and aesthetic change of configuration succeed by the material transformation of one concrete perceptible status (e.g. paint on canvas) into another, into individual behaviour, feeling and interpretation.

　　Ⅱ

　　Change of scene. This time the view plunges us into piles of high, towering clouds, landing softly (Quiet moment 1 – oil/canvas). It is unexpectedly caught between the half circle of a spinning top sweepingly spread out in the wide open spaces in the upper centre of the painting and two steep walls of blue to the side, leaning against each other. Or are they doors, windows, openings from here to there The two slender, upwardly wound areas of blue are crowned on their upper edges by the softly flowing red-rose-violet glow of the last rays of a sunset. A further source of light is the shining pale white in the lower centre of the painting where the two verticals seem to combine like a hinge.

　　An appearance, an insight, an impression, a hint at a mood of something undetermined. Fields of colour, whirling currents and cascades of colour. Sensuous impressions of nothing else but a primary playing with colours. Colourfully imbedded in soft structures, in perceptible energy fields. The pure undisturbed pleasure of the eye with prismatic refractions of light in every shade and gradation. The pure infinite lustre of a radiating image of uncorrupted nature. The sublime and implicit dynamics of the spectacle of nature are only means to different ends. The offering of a sensuously perceptible immediacy of a visually tangible process, which initially seems to be self-sufficient and does not leave the viewer much room for thought.

　　Yet, is there not an abruptness frozen into a picture, a contradiction coagulated into unexpectedness and the ambiguity of unheralded and ramrod-like surfaces, pillars and cubes, drawn almost from a template These align themselves like an inner structure, an inner framework, a built-in bracing between different levels of blue in all its variations and shades, and in this way dominate every event. Foundations and at the same time lateral supports, unstable structures of the evading, the fleeing, the fragile, the erratic.

　　Surroundings formed out of spatial nuances of pure cascades of colour -they actually allow them to emerge and break the first immediate feelings of a rounded harmony and charge it in an electrifying manner. The abruptly placed contradictions create the sparks of a tense concentration of the viewer. Engaging in terms of colour, rhythmically moving, conscientiously resonating and the hard against the soft, this painting presents itself -self-confident, contemporary and sure of itself.

　　These straight constructs, the harshness within the softness, break through a first spontaneous impression of the pleasurable and attach themselves like barbs of a softly cushioned and unreflected perception to freely floating viewing. The principle of a soft instinctiveness achieves a subtly sustained and strong significance because of the seeming contradiction of its internally fastened anchors. The straight supports the round, the harsh the soft, the artificial the natural-space supports time. Opposites in the whirls of coloured streaks merge, pause, curdle and freeze by themselves.

　　As opposed to the unascertained, freely developed and the unimpeded coloured surfaces of her early works, Liu Xiuming’s new paintings are characterized by a novel enrichment. This manifests itself in their pointedness, in their focus, in their hyperbole. The straight lines and surfaces of her latest paintings are driven like stakes into the incomprehensible, soft, yielding plains and give them support and an inner structure. And meaning. The free becomes structured, confined, sustained, subdued and thus reassessed by its counterpart. The painting can be read, recognised, interpreted. The freely floating dynamics and the dissipating, spreading energy of the spatial colouring become literally viewable, accessible, something which can be experienced. The language of the image becomes legible.

　　Ⅲ

　　The creation and development of her own language of images in Liu Xiuming’s new paintings takes place artistically, mentally, technically and content wise by basically moving back and forth between these two opposing polarities. The painter succeeds convincingly in seeing, arranging, combining, interpreting and finally in presenting to the public, in a genuinely new perspective, many of the traditional ways of painting. However, the originality of this painter is not a characteristic of quality, it is not an end in itself or a fashion; on the contrary, it derives just as much from tradition as it is deeply anchored in her personality.

　　For this somewhat surprising metamorphosis between the free and the bound, between the straight and the round, between calculated order and profound arbitrariness, between the fluctuating and the stationary, between chaotic divergence and an orderly moving together -in a figurative sense between the living (natural) unfolding and the artistic (scientific) added-reflects the unusual artistic origins and the original development of the artist herself as a painter.

　　Liu Xiuming seems a migrant between worlds. Between China and Austria, between Asia and Europe, between East and West. Between home and abroad, between here and there. Actually, she is to be regarded as more than an international artist: she is a true cosmopolitan. Born in China she acquired her first artistic experience in her home country and has since maintained her links by teaching and holding exhibitions there. She was also an art student under renowned artists in Austria where she now mainly lives and works after many years of studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Liu Xiuming derives her identity from such differences as well as from a highly innate and original synthesis of both worlds-and the art of both of them.

　　She takes from different spheres the parts she considers characteristic of typical cultural insignia and diversities, of symbolic references and of the respective languages of form and image. At the same time she unites and transforms in her art some of the relevant aesthetic properties of these conflicting social and cultural spheres. Liu’s painting is the particular result of an intensive search, as well as a significant invention and the impressive transformation of fundamental traditional cultural features to completely modified and ultimately original worlds of images.

　　Depictions of nature in the Far Eastern culture group with its Buddhist, Hindu and Taoist religious influences present more an imaginary than an actually explored dimension of a kind of cosmos, of a world of predetermined harmony, of a celestial as opposed to an incomplete earthly constant, acting in accordance with immutable laws of equilibrium and balance. In the Western world the opposite is true.

　　In the West, nature is a concrete reality of naturally changing tectonic, climatic, biological and other materially given processes and developments. These can also proceed according to the laws of imbalance, but they actually happen in every case and obey determined and determinable physical, mathematical, chemical and other laws of nature. Above all nature is also the home and the environment of humans, a reality, but also a projection, but either way a form of process abiding by the laws of a scientific construct.

　　Artistic approaches to the interpretation of nature, created over time in both culture groups, differ accordingly. In the East it is symbolically and symmetrically ordered, harmonic and graceful in its expressions and artistically converted “into modules”[1], i.e. mosaic-like or holographically assembled into a whole from small coherent autonomous units. In the West nature exists mainly in its contradictions, shortcomings, dangers, ambivalences, and also its obverse, dark “other sides”.

　　Nature is consequently-and is to be reflected and reproduced as such in art-a matter of heaven, of the other world, of a higher power, i.e. of an ideal and of an intentionality, yet a reality of the earth, of the world, of sensuous feelings and concrete experience. In the first case it is artists who have to carry out a divine order intuitively and are a medium of a higher order, in the other, artists are autonomous creators, who follow their own perceptions, guidelines and inspirations, transforming these under empiric guidance into concrete art.

　　In its form and content Liu’s art unites both of these divergent concepts. Whilst the piles and bulges of colours (heaven, clouds, earth etc.) interpret the coherent, harmoniously arranged processes, which the East assigns to nature and which ultimately are based on idealistic concepts, the artificial constructs (lines, cubes, spheres etc.) are rather pointers to the querying, doubting, searching, scientifically enlightening, position of the West (which is always intervening in nature), where the individual and not nature stood – and stands – at the centre of interest.

　　In Liu’s painting the harmonious, the symmetrically ordered and the equivalence, which developed, for example, in the ancient tradition of Chinese indian ink painting, finds appropriate form, yet at the same time so do the expressive characteristics and the exaggerated, the deconstructed and the proliferating fantasy of Western provenance; this can now only too clearly be observed in the rapid development of modern China. This painting forms an impressive bridge between two shores, seemingly far apart. In such a way their contradictions and the distance between them shrink considerably. Like every important work of art which wants to be understood as contemporary does today, Liu’s painting is global in its concept.

　　Liu’s art takes place between these two poles, or, to use her own language of images: between horizons. Her paintings represent an area between proximity and distance, East and West, nature and culture, up and down, fluid and solid, air and matter, between the living and the constructed. It is, after all, at the horizon that the edges of heaven and earth touch each other-or so it seems. In reality there is of course no such area, it only seems to exist and art presents, embellishes and forms it: just as Liu Xiuming does.

　　Ⅳ

　　The completely different varieties of form and content in the worlds of painting of China and the West (in this context Central Europe), which over the course of millennia have developed in the two cultural environments, are more or less explicitly or in any case implicitly embodied in Liu’s art. On her homepage she displays her works in four different categories: landscapes, images of clouds, masks and figurative painting. In a nutshell, her painting deals with nature on the one hand and humans on the other. This painter has a special inventory of aesthetics at her disposal where the notion and the philosophy of nature, as well as the presentation and investigation of the image of man, play their essential and particular roles.

　　In her “figures” (“figurations” would be perhaps more appropriate since Liu does not really deal with figurative realistic images but with the standardized typifications of a person, of an abstract ideal human being) the characteristics deriving from the influences of her European teachers and schools are clearly visible. Whatever kind of form or content she might have acquired in her early experiences in China, for instance in traditional indian ink paintings, in Europe a new and genuine image of man has now penetrated her art, become autonomous and acquired its own form. Strange, ecstatic, bent figures of humans torn back and forth seem to predominate: individuals, pairs, groups as well as animals and mythical creatures of the European Fantastic.

　　Liu’s humans are not realistically portrayed but rather shadowy standardized coteries of figures strung together, male and female, sometimes compressed into a knot of people. An individual as such is not foreseen in Liu’s paintings, everything is form, composition and above all colour. The resemblance to the silhouettes of excitingly glaring art-deco-posters is evident. One painting (Last Waltz-oil/canvas) depicts a couple, only superficially identifiable: an elegant man and a lissomly bent woman, both intimately united and enraptured in their dancing. A mass of very similar

　　pairs behind them, in the same position and pose and in well-matched colours, like clones, dance excitedly and completely self-absorbed as if in a trance. A last tango, as it were, on a volcano. But this would be to read too much into the painting. Another statement of this painting, if at all, is rooted predominantly in the bent canon of forms and the many different shades of the colour grey-blue; the content is not apparent.

　　Liu has been affected, directly and indirectly, by the abstract and informal style, and by the fantastic style of painting, which long held sway at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where she was once a student. Moreover, Liu works under the influence of mystical, esoteric, surrealistic, and even expressionist and informal tendencies. This is noticeable in her “masks” (e.g. “Dialogue”, “Woman with masks”-oil/canvas), where the tendencies of German post-war expressionist painting can be observed: stereotypes of abstract single and grouped faces composed of thick lines and coloured surfaces and areas. Here again the typification dominates the image, an image of man composed of prefabricated and interchangeable pieces instead of a painted composition of a single human being, of an individual. What kind of human is the focus of Liu’s image of man – her imagination and depiction of a human face

　　Ⅴ

　　In fine arts the so-called image of man represents the portrayal, or just the assumption of a type of human being, one which gave an epoch its face, as a kind of subtext, and forms the spiritual basis of the superficially visible. In Europe, since the Renaissance, this type has been the single person, the individual, the one who is in the last resort no longer divisible, the (biogenetic and unmistakeably socialized) singular human, who is not defined and legitimised as before by ethnicity, blood relationship, religious affiliation, tribe, clan or other relationship but by their distinction as a single and unique individual.

　　Liu’s early painting was also dedicated to sculptural and pictorial representations of the face of such a type, predominant in the Europe of the modern era. But it is not the primary concern of this artist to give this modern human a contemporary image or to give this type the face of an individual. Rather, she reads and decodes the unmistakeable of the person by interpreting their entire physical appearance.

　　Thus, elegantly dressed and smug, slim, young gentlemen slink their way across the dance floor during a tango. In their arms languish even more elegant thin-chested ladies in flowing, draped robes with expressions of habitual coolness, frozen like masks on their faces. On account of its more or less pre-determined sequence of steps the dance becomes a parcours where posing is more important than display or enjoyment. Together with the other pairs they form a mass of dark blue-grey contours, of surfaces and traces of sparsely used colours, and of flowing elegiac movements ( “Eternal Tango”-oil/canvas).

　　Generally only the front pair in the mass of figures on the dance floor is complete in every detail. The remainder form a silhouette of similar figures, which shrink physically more and more into the background until they are no longer distinguishable. The painting has the effect of a poster-like parade of a uniform mass of people marching in step. The individual is drowned out and disappears in similarities and entanglements with others, which seems more to restrict than provide them with protection or even pleasure.

　　Liu Xiuming’s image of human beings is very particular. Their physiognomy is indistinguishably determined by the environment in which they move, act or exist. Their individuality is no longer recognisable. It seems to be cancelled out by the manifestation of an anonymous group where individuals have to adapt themselves to a standardized and socially predetermined existence and to come to terms with it whether they accept it or not. Only the mass guarantees a seeming security, one which individuals cannot find anywhere else, not even within themselves.

　　It is probably not a coincidence that these humans mutated into frozen figures, these present-day contemporaries, appear less and less in later paintings. They seem to have disappeared from the repertoire of this painter to the same extent as the spaces filled with piles of colour and the more and more refined and intricately woven constructions of lines, cubes and spaces have developed into independent, impressive and convincing designs. At first this is a somewhat pessimistic image of man, but then it also becomes a new challenge.

　　The living space is constantly unfolding and taking on new forms. This contains the possibility that one day new life can develop in it. All those disadvantaged in the past can take refuge there and accommodate themselves: for instance the mass of those dancers thrown under the spotlight of events of permanent entertainment and amusement, but who in the end are lonely and forced into line. They seem to feel more rejected by than attracted to each other and therefore would prefer to remain hidden in an unobtrusive darkness.

　　Ⅵ

　　In a new painting already referred to (In the other present-oil/canvas), which attempts convincingly to unite the two very striking opposites of round and square, of chaos and order, a summation is presented and can be deduced from the different influences and intentions of the painter among which may be counted the earliest encouragements Liu received at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts: to adopt a distinctive innate image of man. In one of Liu’s fantasy spaces, comprising walls, surfaces, openings and boundaries, which appear, thanks to refined indirect lighting, in all shades of blue, partly white, ashen and mysterious, one can suddenly and unexpectedly see a strange figure, crooked and paralysed in a fleeing and floating movement. Typification of a pose.

　　This towering androgynous figure is freely placed in the space, glides lithely along the central wall and at the same time melts into it as an integral part, the petrified arm becoming part of the wall. This odd exotic figure is composed of nothing else but thickly drawn lines that outline only its front part, whereas its upper body and head lack any rear image. A figure cut in half. It seems more like one of the new strangely minimalist display dummies, which consist only of a convex hollow front part, than a body of flesh and blood. The bare body of this hollow half of a puppet is covered only by the contour of a long green sash. That is all.

　　This ghost of a figure scurrying past – one cannot really speak of a human being-in an equally scary space produces a dramatic tension that merely emanates from this space and becomes physically perceptible the more the viewer becomes lost in this painting. And the more one believes or sees the less one understands. The painting is carried to extremes by this hermaphrodite-like figure bringing an obstinate and dynamic movement to the otherwise motionless scenery. It appears to have sprung straight out of a novel of Edgar Allan Poe or E.T. Hoffmann and to want to find its way into a scene from a neo-gothic thriller.

　　In Liu’s imagination the human being exists more as a type than as an individual or as an identifiable, incomparable, real person. This type in Liu’s art-this pictorial sum of average, standardized possible views-populates the spatial arrangements, conceived with great ingenuity and executed with virtuosity, of energetically loaded clusters of colour and of composed and illuminated pieces, thereby forming a kind of stage, where virtual action is suggested and outlined rather than executed and exemplified in real terms.

　　It is precisely in this admirably skilful merging of shape-figure-human on the one hand and space-surface-nature on the other that the parallel dual character of Liu’s art finds its expression. She usually introduces as space a nature-related scene, where both tides and earth formations present themselves. This is roughened up and enhanced by constructions of artificial components, pillars, struts and settings strung together. As a sign of life shapes in the form of figures are introduced serving as visual markers and “motion detectors”. Sometimes they fill in more than three dimensions, i.e. the fantasy of space. They give the painting its incomparably sublime inner, dark dynamics.

　　Ⅶ

　　Next to such a singularly acquired image of man created through Liu’s profound involvement in the European artistic tradition, it is, above all, the transmutation of nature in her painting that (since her early experiments with Chinese indian ink painting) is assuming an increasing importance in her work and has developed into a surprisingly novel language of images. The intricate presentation of extremely diverging views and properties of nature is becoming more and more the subject of her endeavours as a painter.

　　This reveals itself especially in a progressive and contemporary concept of nature and not in a romantically idealising backward oriented one, as can be observed all too often in modern Chinese indian ink paintings, which in their evocations of nostalgia are frequently misconceived and kitschy. For this artist nature means the indispensable habitat of humans in its many diverse surfaces and functions. Humans and nature need each other, they form a whole. One cannot exist without the other.

　　Nevertheless, or precisely for this reason, nature serves humans today as an opportunity for their multiple projections and desires; the individual can and should enjoy its perceptible views. Nature today also serves as a setting for a complex happening for strategies in the struggle for survival; its manifestations are accordingly contradictory and disproportionate.

　　These changed qualities which predominate today and views of nature are met halfway in Liu’s paintings. They portray not only a chaotically beautiful, wild and unharnessed unfolding state of affairs, but also the anchors and struts introduced by changing cultures, which actually sum up nature, restrain it and make it perceptible. Through these inner structures and supports nature is newly created as a changing habitat essential for survival and reacquired by humans, who depend more than ever on it.

　　The alignments of the one and the other, of the extensions and manifestations of nature, the complementary, unquenchable, sweeping yearning and the supportive endeavours of humans, meet on the horizon. Between the horizons there emerges a kind of vacuum, an empty space, which attracts the two energies giving birth to each other-and through an irresistibly powerful suction takes them in and tames them. This is the centre of Liu’s new paintings, the space of the most intensive aggregation, of noticeable attraction. The gaze of the viewer is trapped precisely there, they find their focus but can also pursue their own dissipated inquiries.

　　The horizon is thus a highly visible characteristic of Liu’s painting, as can already be seen from the list of titles of her works. If it is the only seemingly separating line between heaven and earth, its very appearance is an optical illusion. Humans view and employ the horizon as a distinction that does not exist in reality. Material transition areas exist between different matters, between different substantial compositions, or different atomic conditions. These distinctions are mainly based on scientific deliberations, e.g. physics. In nature they are not present in such a stringent way.

　　As Liu introduces novel lines and cubes into her new works amidst her known eruptions of explosions of primary colours, she also creates a new kind of horizon. Fan Di’an speaks in this connection of a “landscape of nature” and a “landscape of fantasy”[2]. Particularly in her earlier works these striking facts where the view, unsettled by whirls, can be calmed by trying to hold on to something. But with her physically based, geometrically balanced forms and cubic constellations the painter introduces an entirely new quality to the game.

　　The view sweeps along high rising walls, it can relax and lean onto towering pillars, it finds its footing along the endlessly extending walls, which finally disappear into infinity at the end of the painting. Towards the conclusion of his almost unending history of a quest for time really experienced or dreamt Marcel Proust pointedly remarks that “What is perceived thus on the horizon assumes a mysterious grandeur and seems the last chapter of a world we shall never see again; but as we go on it is soon we ourselves who are on the horizon for the generations behind us, the horizon continues to recede and the world which seemed finished begins again.”

　　The horizon as beginning and end, as a precarious promise. The favoured line in landscape painting indicating the horizon-according to perception psychology this is apparently necessary for recognizing and understanding-has developed in Liu’s later paintings into a whole labyrinth of forms, lines, cubes, which promise the wanderer in nature signposts and thereby assurance. This construct is not meant to disorient the walker, but on the contrary to give indications of where the journey could lead to.

　　Whichever paths the viewers decide on, in whichever direction they choose to go, whether up or down, forward or backwards, right or left- everything depends in the end on them. They come to a decision, make inquiries, pursue their ways. The cleverly encased structures in Liu Xiuming’s new paintings dealing with nature give them artistic assistance-even to move and to survive between the mounted horizons. They should know themselves how to come closer to their destinations.

　　Ⅷ

　　This is also very graphically set out in another painting of the fascinating new series of differently graded constructs of nature: (Eternal Horizon -oil/canvas). These constructs are the very general human beliefs and assumptions of how what humans have interpreted as nature since time immemorial operates and acts, but which can actually only be understood with difficulty. The constructs are based, on the one hand, on scientific investigations and results, and, on the other, on common psychological or magical, mythical and artistically imaginative presumptions. In this fascinating painting the viewers are abruptly hoisted to an elevated plain where they remain totally on their own and can only feel themselves quite lost on the brownish rough plain in a noticeably depleted ethereal atmosphere.

　　They are actually completely deserted by all the good and by the spirits offering a safe natural refuge, abandoned by trees, bushes, plants and animals as well as humans. Just as after the irreversible cataclysm of the final nuclear big bang, the earth cracks and splits up into stony fragments, it becomes chapped, without contours or colours and above all uninhabitable. No trace of life of whatsoever form can be detected far and wide.

　　From the height of such an outpost of absolute solitude and doom in deserted outer space the viewers see themselves pushed to straight, steep edges, which drop down abruptly into an abyss like smoothened ledges. In the middle, placed between the two straight lines of the ledges, the opening of a crater like a hellish gorge threatens; from its sharply jagged opening gushes a brightly glistening light, palely reflected in complementary colours by the bottom of the thickly cumulated formations of clouds that hang above it.

　　Through the irresistible power of energy fields between the clouds in the sky, the deserted rocky heights of the earth and the two smoothened edges (Which starting from both sides in an undefined distance seem to meet in a dense haze) the viewers are involved in events which appear to surpass their worst imagination and physical strength. Nevertheless-and this is the nucleus and miracle of this resonating image-the viewer does not feel lost and overcome by fear. This was evoked by this particular kind of especially sophisticated art. But at the same time it was restrained by it-and only then transposed into art.

　　These obstinate constructs of space through art, which give it a characteristic quality and thereby a specially constructed dimensionality, achieve a subtle, multi-layered climax in Liu’s set of four paintings Other Space (series 1-four parts, oil/canvas). In these paintings the two-dimensionally designed space becomes walkable; it becomes spatial in the imagination. A scenic installation for illusions and yearning. The viewer can get lost and wander around unimpeded in three, four and multidimensional designed coloured spaces, which dissipate into every direction. Only a few steep towering walls and stakes provide any bearings for the viewer in the chaotic coloured whirls. Constructs in the unordered-they strengthen the resilience of the viewing.

　　Wanderers in this Other Space are confronted paradoxically with too many impressions and too little order. The overwhelming chaos of blue-white, reddish-grey changing coloured spaces, layoured one within another, surrounds, confounds and embraces them completely. No foothold anywhere. Only a glance at their inner self is open to them in this forlornness of impressions. Access to themselves-triggered by a painting such as this.

　　Ⅸ

　　One result of the dual polarity of Liu’s world of images when viewed is reflected in a sensuously noticeable intensified tension. The paintings do not leave their viewers unmoved. They might inspire or delight them, even raise their interest; they might sometimes provoke dissent, bore them or even trigger repulsion-but they will never leave the viewer unimpressed.

　　In psychology it is a known fact that differently formed objects can provoke different emotional and cognitive reactions, particularly if the objects are picked up by hand or tested. Round, even, easily manageable and comprehensible forms are classified by the test-person as comfortable, pleasant, beautiful and likeable, whereas angular, bulky, unblunted objects tend to be perceived as unpleasant, repulsive and ugly.

　　The painter Arik Brauer, one of Liu Xiuming’s teachers at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (following in the tradition of another teacher at the Academy, Friedensreich Hundertwasser and his lifelong crusade (Los von Loos / Away with Loos) against Adolf Loos, a critical architect and passionate in his contempt of any ornamentation (“ornamentation is a crime”), as well as against the “Bauhaus” with its minimalist mentality, and above all against the “diabolic” and inhuman “straight line”) sees mainly the “round” taking off whereas the “angular” has to remain on the ground: immobile, dead, useless.

　　For both artists, as for Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy and other related esoteric concepts of thinking and acting, the “spiral” or the “round” are symbols and manifestations of an organic, vital artistic intention whereas the “straight line” and the “angular” are indications of options and conditions distant from life, nature and art. In harmony with nature, which does not know straight lines, but only vegetative grown forms and functions, art also has to follow this particular canon of forms in order to become acceptable to humans.

　　Regardless of whether such assumptions are either correct or desirable one could, for once, sort paintings according to the extent artists, in their world of images, utilise and apparently prefer rather straight, angular and pointed lines and forms as opposed to round, bent and spherical ones. This artists would not do consciously, intentionally and purposefully but rather unknowingly, artistically intended and subordinate to their actual aesthetic aims.

　　And as psychology can demonstrate (see above), such divergent forms automatically elicit different sensuous psychic reactions in the viewer-whether desired or not. In any case, the general attention is increased in its perception through such properties and an inner psychic tension is produced, which contributes to the enjoyment of the work of art, its acceptance or subsequent interpretation. It is anyway evident that formal criteria are not at the centre of art, but it is also indisputable that they contribute in different ways to its reception.

　　Liu’s paintings have to be seen in this vein. They live through their inner dynamics which are inserted in a very subtle way: by the consciously antithetic placement of singular elements which do not exclude but rather enhance each other and charge the general perception. This produces a particular aesthetic tension, which by its presentation-its self-presentation in public-transfers itself to the viewer in a reverberating manner.

　　Ⅹ

　　The viewers in their manifold engagement with art in general and with fine arts in particular are always searching for-themselves. Psychology calls the intrinsic meaning the individual viewer is consciously or unconsciously looking for self reference[3]. This is the implicit and explicit, the rational and emotional, the accidental and targeted relating of art with the incessantly persistent and lifelong inner search for oneself, the so-called personal identity, in other words, the attempt to answer the unremittingly burning question of the viewer: who or what am I

　　Next to social relations and constellations, to the acquiring and use of knowledge, to sensorial physical development, love, sexuality etc., art is an excellent way to at least approach this question, if not an attempt to answer it. Art naturally is also of use with respect to other questions, responsibilities and problems; it has philosophical, religious, metaphysical roots and references and serves not least the non-relevant relations to the world. Above all, art is naturally a subject of the artistic domain itself. Nevertheless, seen in psychological terms it is part of the vital and pragmatic concerns of the life of the individual. And one of these is aimed at the discovery of the self.

　　As such Liu’s paintings are for the viewer an ideal screen upon which they can project their desires, questions, dreams and concerns. They are free and artistically arranged views of the lands of desire and yearning where the search for self-discovery can be pursued unimpeded and pictorially stimulated. Liu’s canvasses fulfil this “purpose” exquisitely, because they are in great measure open to such additional psychic insertion by the observer.

　　Liu Xiuming’s tableaux are indeed thoroughly structured yet accessible enough for such deeper insights; their topics are determined, but they are sufficiently full of references and allusions to embrace other possibilities, they are perfect compositions of colours, but allow the viewer to bring to them their own additional shades of colours and grey tones. Liu’s painting provides for further viewing, showing, painting and searching. At first sight her pictures seem completely covered with paint but they are at the same time so opaque and so transparent as to allow the viewer enough room for further insights.

　　Liu’s painting addresses the viewer directly. It is a self-presentation, a realisation of the rendition by which the viewer feels obliged to establish a first actual connection with it. Her painting has an artistically expressed stimulating character: it provides those confronting it with an opportunity to put themselves in it. Only in this way do the different lines become clear which finally can lead to self-reference: a referring of the aesthetic to the self, to the subject of the viewing, and vice-versa.

　　Ⅺ

　　The blue hour, a nocturne. A theatre set for an imagination, motif and setting for a fantasy, landscape of a dream, view of an illusion, apparition in the dawn: (Quiet moment 2-oil/canvas). Everything is so real, just as everything seems at the same time unreal. Such and other similar clichés might at first line the path to an understanding of what is in any case a mysterious painting.One also has to become used to the coldness emanating from the steely flashing blue of the whole scene as, for instance, one does with the similarly adorned and steely blue flickering films such as the ingenious Infernal Affairs from Hong Kong; films which deal with equally undetermined, unsavoury personalities and spatial zones as does this genuinely ambivalent painting of Liu Xiu Ming.

　　In reality everything is so simple-but again so different. The image of a quiet lake, into which a straight footbridge made of wooden planks leads. The upper edge is lined with a pine forest and indirectly illuminated, ashen, in a milky white of night.No more. At the same time everything is completely different. The simplicity of the motif, as well as the directness of the execution of the picture, make the whole painting flash through the mind in such an unspectacular way that it can tilt at any time from this non-excitement to the very opposite. Where the visually presented reality refuses to shed light on particulars, one’s own fantasy in viewing begins. It turns the crank and suddenly a completely different film is unreeled before our eyes.

　　Moreover, the entire composition, so carefully calculated, is so perfectly disguised and concealed that it necessarily causes deception. The footbridge located almost exactly in the middle of the painting and its not quite coherent perspective suddenly grows into a monolith, a mysterious unidentifiable stone column. Then the viewers, intimidated and scared, circle with their eyes, like the prehistoric men in Kubrick’s 2001, a huge monstrous wand which does not seem to belong to this world but nevertheless pretends to signify something. Then, perhaps the line of the suggested horizon suddenly disappears in the white moonlight and the whole scene turns into a dream, or even a nightmare.

　　In this painting too Liu Xiuming shows her mastery in an adept and able use of diverse artistic means for a pictorial concentration and mystification. It is based on the one hand on the combination of rolling, freely undulating coloured surfaces and the sparse use of a purposefully introduced playing with a single source of light, and on the other in confronting all this with bulky, straight, unexpected cubes and curious opposing constructions.

　　But the painting can also be read in a different, very simple way. Then the eye faces the sight of a romantically inspired sensation in the tradition of Caspar David Friedrich. Then there emerges, on the basis of the occidental experience with paintings in the last two centuries, nothing other than a melancholically beautiful and pleasant feeling on the wings of a play with colour and form, and wears away in the distant twilight. One way or the other, both interpretations create an aura of tension, which transfers itself sublimely into our perceptions and puts its mark on them.

　　Ⅻ

　　Among the trends of modernism the paintings of Liu Xiuming are, with respect to their qualities, techniques and content, both exceptional and one of its best manifestations. The artist is an exception insofar as she does not join any of the popular currents or fashions. She does not play arbitrarily, superficially, jokingly, ironically or cynically with the common mannerisms of the “Zeitgeist”, such as shock, aberration, ingratiation or overstatement. The rest of the art scene owes its acceptance in the marketplace and its dependence upon the public to such fashionable instruments.

　　Compared to such shrill manifestations the surface and the direct presentation of Liu Xiuming’s paintings are mostly calm, introvert, thoughtful and deliberate. The way in which she presents herself to the public can be characterized as purposeful, unostentatious and sublime. But what happens underneath this surface is anything but unspectacular or meaningless or empty. This becomes clear when one takes in her explosions of colour, her chaotically unruly maleductus and her refined and complex laden constructive nests of boxes.

　　With all the verve of painting derived from the different foundations of two ancient cultural traditions, with a stupendously elaborated and applied use of colours and brush strokes, as well as an image of man and artistic imagination which is nurtured equally by both Occidental and genuine Far Eastern sources, Liu Xiuming disposes of an impressively rich canon of universal means of expression. This is something of an exception in today’s fast-moving art. Her paintings reach a depth where the rest of the crowd is not uncommonly lost in its breadth.

　　These paintings relate to the permanent, i.e. the immutable anthropological questions and concerns of humans of all times and all places. Her art is located close to them. This art endeavours, as any relevant art has since time immemorial, not to contribute to the solution, but at least to a solution of the questions dealing with the miracles and problems of nature, the world and above all of human beings themselves, their secrets such as love and death. Her answers are of an artistic nature; they may be unusual, astonishing, bizarre, detached and peculiar, but they are full of colour, linear and formally composed. They are not any less relevant than other attempts at approximation, such as those of science or religion.

　　In this respect Liu’s painting is not only an exception in the art scene but is in harmony with the points of departure and the intentions of other interconnected art. In contrast to the pervasive arbitrary, entertaining and fashionable event-directed art, she does not take the path of least resistance, but she looks for the contradictory, the remote, the challenging, the hidden and the cumbersome. This makes her painting significant and meaningful.

　　Liu Xiuming’s paintings can and want to be read in such a way as to be observed and scanned for legible symbols in their colour conglomerates and inner constructs, as well as in their interrelated enclosures of relevant structures, supports and manifest constructions. They are appropriate objects inviting a permanent search for the other. In this way these drifting images, at first glance so easy and uncomplicated, reveal little by little their other additional, internal subsystems of symbols and meanings.

　　These visible parts of the entire artistic process reveal to the attentive viewer the broad spheres of vision behind it, those between the horizons where the viewers can bring their own imaginations to bear. Liu’s world of painting is opaque, prismatically broken yet kept lucid and open. It virtually invites the viewer to go for a stroll, to persevere in looking and thinking.

　　Notes:

　　[1] Ledderose, L. Ten thousand things. Module and mass production in Chinese art. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2000.

　　[2] Fan Di’an. Between nature and fantasy. In: Paintings by Liu Xiuming. National Museum, Beijing, 2004.

　　[3] Schurian, W. Erfahrung von Kunst als Selbstbezug. In: Rudolf Arnheim oder die Kunst der Wahrnehmung (Hg. Allesch, Ch. u. Neumaier, O.). WUV Universit tsverlag, Wien, 2004.

作者：Walter,Schurian