Claudia Roche-Laurich [Austria]

　　Liu Xiuming’s painting reveals a kind of special spiritual inspiration. The feeling in her painting has few connections with the realistic world at the moment, but is searching for those things that surpass personal experiences and feelings, but which at the same time are still considered the original form of mankind's mutual feeling. The differernt concepts of Eastern and Western art are blended here.

　　After graduation from university in Hebei Province in China, Liu Xiuming successively attended the Academy for Applied Art in Vienna and the Vienna Fine Arts College. Maria Lassing and Arik Brauer, her two professors in Austria, are important representatives of Austrian contemporary art.

　　Maria Lassing integrates a new physical feeling into painting, linking the inner and outer worlds. When painting an arm, for instance, she does not paint this realistically, but instead depicts the sense of touching an arm. Using her “Perception Painting” and her unique self-portrait, Maria Lassing has become one of the major representatives of “Inderterminate Art” and expressionist painting.

　　As a painter, printmaker, stage designer, singer and poet, Arik Brauer combines the technique of fantasy expression with the detailed atmosphere of Eastern fairy tales, establishing his own art style and becoming one of the founders of the imaginative realism genre in Vienna.

　　While studying abroad in Vienna, Liu Xiuming carried out a thorough research on the skills and style of the two professors, and compared Western painting with Chinese painting. On this basis, she absorbed the brave sense of vision of Maria Lassing and created her own unique painting language, giving a new form to the intangible world and inner emotions.

　　The major emphasis of her latest works is blue and red. These two colors together, one cold, one warm, shows a sharp contrast. Perhaps the artist has used them to symbolize eternity and happiness. According to Goethe’s theory on color, pure blue represents strong energy, while red, in his view, is the essense for all colors.

　　Liu Xiuming uses a delicate skill to describe cloud scenes in many of her works. Stretching across the spacious horizon, the clouds display an unknown world. They transcend the realistic time and space, those uninhabited scenes appear as forms captured in a natural movement. The appearance is static, but not solidified, each work expressing an extremely momentary inspiration.

　　Soft colors blend and permeate with each other, creating an unfamiliar space and visual angle. The space is divided into top and bottom, the space in between usually connected with pillars. Perhaps the “bottom”is serving as the support for the “top” Or maybe the pillar is what people refer to as the “Heaven-supporting Pillar” Perhaps this is the original intangible element of nature that can communicate energy These spaces of different dimensions seem to be connected by invisible doors, the accumulated energy likely to burst out at any moment.

　　Under the clear horizon, the line of vision pierces the surface of the earth. The earth’s surface is torn, now mended with red thread, and then appears like the surging surface of the sea, displaying a huge natural energy.

　　Perhaps these are the views of the mind Or are these works, called“Another Space”by the painter herself, the maps of an emotional world Could it be that what we are seeing is an unknown world This multi-layered space, the colors flowing and transforming, opened a new sense of vision for viewers and accompanied them into a strange world.

　　Liu Xiuming is not drawing nature, but describing a hidden, intangible second nature behind the realistic world. Through the delicate and colorful appearance, people can feel the painter’s tireless pursuit of the essence of existence.

　　These landscape paintings often express formless emotions. but emotions themselves are sometimes also a kind of reality and can sometimes be more moving than the reality that we can see. What lies behind the poetry of Liu Xiuming’s works is just the record of emotions. Her works are not description but displays of another reality beyond the reality.

　　It is just this pursuit that makes Liu Xiuming’s paintings distinct from other arts of the moment. She does not follow fads of every shade and description, does not pose to please anyone, and so she surpasses the vogue. These works, which are rich in innate spiritual content, express the harmony between the painter’s soul and the state of nature.

　　The uniqueness of Liu Xiuming’s work lies in the abstraction of feeling and the visualization of the spiritual world. She uses her special painting language to give form to the spiritual world, and she continuously draws energy from the natural world. Her paintings embody a universal spirit that can be accepted by both Western and Eastern culture.

作者：Claudia,Roche-Laurich