Liu Ye: Catalogue Raisonné: 1991－2015

Liu Ye: Catalogue Raisonné is a complete collection of Liu Ye’s paintings, including provenance, exhibition list, and literature records from the early 1990s to today, it is the first catalogue raisonné featuring the sensitive works by Liu Ye provides an overview of his creative output from 1991 to 2015.

This comprehensive and vibrant catalogue raisonné, compiled with the full participation of the artist Liu Ye, presents his diverse body of work and provides an overview of the paintings created between 1991 and 2015. The artist’s distinct style plays with viewers’ visual expectations and catches them unaware with surprising pictorial compositions. His paintings, which touch on a broad range of themes——inspired, for instance, by the Old Masters, Piet Mondrian, and Dick Bruna’s Miffy——often integrate elements borrowed from these sources. Also featured are his portrayals of innocent yet challenging female characters.

-First catalogue raisonné ever published on a Chinese contemporary artist.

-A lavishly produced 400-page volume presenting Liu Ye’s diverse body of works of nearly 300 paintings.

-Featuring essays by Paul Moorhouse, the 20th Century Curator of the National Portrait Gallery in London; Philip Tinari, Ullens Center of Contemporary Art director; and award-winning art critic Zhu Zhu.

Contents

Introduction  7

Only one gram  15

Encrypted self: the art of Liu Ye  35

Accidents of art and life  43

Selected works  53

Conspectus  251

Appendix  355

Chinese texts  365

About Liu Ye

Liu Ye was born in 1964 in Beijing, currently lives and works in Beijing. After studying at the School of Arts and Crafts and the Central Academy of Fine Arts in his hometown Beijing between 1984 and 1989, Liu Ye went to Berlin and received a degree of MFA Bildende Kunst from Universität der Künste, Berlin (University of Fine Arts in Berlin), in 1994. He later attended two artist-in-residence programs at the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam and the Delfina Studios in London.  

Liu Ye’s diverse imagery has ranged from a compendium of references to Western artists (such as Mondriaan), to invented tableaus involving children, and beyond these, to visual situations featuring cartoon and fairly-tale characters, celebrities and still-life subjects since 1990’s. His paintings combine these disparate elements, the formation of the image underpinned by observation, memory, imagination and art history as dynamic forces. While it is tempting to read his work as self-revelatory, the nature of his imagery nevertheless resists any such straightforward interpretation. Throughout his artistic development, the questions of what to paint and how to paint have been twin imperatives, and at various moments these respective issues have assumed different degrees of emphasis.

Liu Ye’s compositions are of representation and abstraction points to a dance of formative energies, at the same time, it reflects the course that he has gradually charted for himself between two traditions. Unlike most acclaimed Chinese contemporary art in his generation, Liu Ye’s works have little political implications. Instead, he prefers to use a universal language to depict his inner world.

Photo by Feng Zhiyin

Image and Text: the shop, ©Authors, the shop, 2019