Introduction
Star Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Liu Haichen's solo exhibition “A Lifelong Moment: Paintings of Liu Haichen” on April 28, 2018. This exhibition will present his latest canvases, drawings and aquatints.
Artist’s Statement
In the beginning, my work had a lot to do with my childhood in North China. I still had a complex about the railways and stations there when I grew up. In 2011, I did a number of works in relation to the railway scenes in my memory as a consolation. They were then succeeded by a series of paintings with the subject of fire. My interest in the sense of unreality in real life was the trigger for this series. The later works of mine dealt with the wilds, the rivers, ice and snow, which came from the bottom of my consciousness. My intention was to reveal the dreariness with powerful sensory stimuli.
I tried to explore all the possibilities of expression in my paintings, therefore they are not only visual, but also olfactory and tactile. I was willing to reconstruct a physical experience, or rather, the sense of pain, like being burnt by boiling water – it is something that you couldn’t deny or lie about. I then concealed the intensity and definitiveness so as to create a lingering effect. “Looking back to the bleak place where I had been, I found only peace in it, neither stormy nor sunny”, says Su Shi in his poem. Making art is an tangible act rather than the application of an idea. Indeed, the viewers will always be able to see the creator of it in a great piece of art.
