In 1987 Liu Xiuming went to Austria to study and in 1993 she completed her studies with a master’s degree. She has been living in Vienna as a fulltime artist and painter ever since. Decades have gone by. During this difficult artistic development Liu Xiuming’s art has shown an ascending tendency, particularly her last works have become more and more delightful. The flying heart navigates in multilayered time zones and spaces and her style has become more and more definite.

　　In the beginning Liu Xiuming’s art was influenced by the “Vienna Fantastic Realism“. The depiction of nature was not restricted or reduced to its passive reproduction, but contained many facets of subjective images. One could say that her landscape paintings are not drawn according to nature but are an expression of her feelings. Already the originally defined form of expression indicated her future path of development. This fact proves that the subjective factors in her works came more and more to the fore. In this way her fantasy became more and more free. Imagination and fantasy, like a pair of wings, let the painter’s heart fly.

　　During the first period of her artistic activity Liu Xiuming painted the sky, the earth and the horizon-the line between sky and earth-in her landscape paintings in the conventional way. Later her view unconsciously went beyond the horizon. The entire painting is covered with distant and illusionary clouds. Liu Xiuming rarely painted the pure sky. She painted with particular pleasure thick and changing clouds, which are sometimes dark and bleak and depressing for humans, not letting them breathe. Sometimes she let them glow in red and gold. Subsequently the painter shows us even more elaborate and diverse astronomical images, in her experiment “maps of clouds” in the form of assembled parts of a painting. The mysterious and floating clouds always attract the painter, because the painter and the painted form a psychological entity. For a painter who lives abroad the floating clouds are the outer form of her inner feelings. People like her who fight for a long time abroad are always physically and mentally exhausted and have to suffer many set-backs. They miss the feelings of stability and security of being “at home“.

　　Given this psychological background the painter certainly did not want to show pure “astronomical images” but her thoughts and fantasies vis-à-vis the sky. The painter with the flying heart dreams up many unnatural images of fantasies: tied wings, wrapped clouds, sowed pieces of earth, a staircase to heaven without support, a fixed rainbow and memories of her childhood…… All these imaginations are result of a special mood. Its psychological meaning can be easily noticed.

　　In my view the exploration and the expression of these multilayered time zones and spaces rank among the most valuable and individual parts of her art. With her methods of cutting and separating she put natural spaces together again and replaces ordinary uniform spaces with multilayered spaces. The reassembling of different spaces gives her paintings a surrealistic aesthetic appeal. The unexpected appearance of spaces for humans among natural spaces seems strange, exciting and surprising for us. The viewers seem to be in a giant space, yet clearly within nature. By this free regulation of spaces, the paintings gain even stronger formal importance and greater spatial tension.

　　Aside from landscape paintings Liu Xiuming continuously concentrates on her main subject, human figures. In this area her reflectiveness is based on her experiences in life. In a masquerade she shows in her paintings the difficulties, perplexities and hidden embarrassment of women. During the last years she has painted many dancing figures, neither depictions of dance programmes on a stage nor peaceful scenes in a ballroom. In my opinion the painter compares life to a dance. What she paints is life as a dance or ideal life. In her work “Eternal Tango“ the painter describes the always enviable harmonic relation between the dancing partners in a vivid way. The delightful harmony can rarely be found in life. Therefore it can be regarded as a perfect interpretation of the ideal life. Particularly in the work “Last Waltz” the brilliant and grandiose scene in the light of the setting sun is a stunning show of people in passionate and harmonic moods. This grandiose scene of a couple dancing in harmony shows exactly what the artist expects of an ideal life, artistically and as a great narrative of life with romantic feelings.

　　Yes, Liu Xiuming is a romantic by nature. Even disappointments and difficulties, which regularly occur in life, could not inhibit the unfolding of her romantic character. One could also say, that especially because these people encounter in their life so many undesirable events, they try to create their romanticism through art. Only in art can the heart fly towards the vast sky.

作者：Jia,Fangzhou