Only One Gram is a case study of poet and art critic Zhu Zhu on painter Liu Ye. The book consists of four parts, including “the world of text”, “fairy tale, symbol and memory”, “banned book” and “the internalization of abstraction”. With the poetic language, broad theoretical prospective and the comprehension towards literature, the book sketches the contours of painter’s the history of ideas. The light little book is not just a verdict. On the contrary, it is filled with understandings, not only the understandings from an art critic to his painter friend, but from a more fundamental significance, the concerns and comprehensions from one to the fate and all the possibilities of the other person.
The World of Text 1
Fairy Tale, Symbol and Memory 19
Banned Book 43
The Internalization of Abstraction 71
Liu Ye once said, “I hope every painting of mine weighs only one gram”, which is associated with that the Italian writer Italo Calvino has regarded the Lightness as the most perpetual and wonderful quality of art in Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Calvino said that writing is all about reducing the sense of heaviness: the heaviness of humans, of celestial bodies, of cities, of the story structures and of languages. In other words, when body and destiny are subjected to the threat by reality, the soul should manage to find the secret toward happiness in order to survive in a relatively complete way.
In 1991, beneath the sky of Berlin, a Chinese boy carried a pile of his large paintings from the student apartment and threw it to the dustbin with the purpose of bidding farewell to the Kiefer’s expressionism.
The reason that prompts Liu Ye to do so is because, between the Flemish tradition and the Pop movement, he dreamt a possible self: the former one is the “Stilleben” (German, means a peaceful, motionless and silent world), while the latter one is the revolution led by Andy Warhol across the Atlantic Ocean, which has unprecedentedly legalized the “transformation” of the ready-made products. This concept was paraphrased by a German classmate of Liu, that “Now everything can be drawn into the paintings.”
According to Nabokov, “Every time the reader closes one of my books, I hope there would be such a feeling: the world in the book recedes gradually, stops somewhere, and hangs itself faraway just like a painting inside a painting”. This is actually evoking a mysterious, wordless and profound emotion that appears in the end of writing or vision. Compared with the “Lolita” style of expression, the Banned Book of Liu Ye is more approached to the reading expectation of Nabokov. However, the two are not distinct clues. The Banned Book that appears later embodies his improved aesthetic consciousness and greater spiritual longing, which are certainly “the eternal woman leads us up to soar”. Nevertheless, his subject matters, just as Balthus put it, have been increasingly driven by “the necessity of form”, transforming into the inquiry to the abstract inner order, that “every painting that created with emotions is the self-portrait of the painter rather than the portrait of model. The model is just an occasionally temporary object. Instead of the model that he revealed on the colorful painting, what was revealed is the painter himself. ” To some extent, the paintings of Liu Ye are just written below this sentence of Wilde.
The Forking Paths
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Design: Cao Qian
Publisher: Henan University Press
ISBN: 9787564928124
Language: Chinese
Dimensions: 21.6×12.2cm
Pages: 102
Year: 2017