Love the subject
Updated: 2012-02-10 11:00
By Zhang Zixuan (China Daily)
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The 51-year-old artist Liu Yigang believes the most romantic story is love at first sight.
In his stylish black-and-white sweater, with a black cap and white corduroy pants, Liu looks much younger than his age. His home is crammed with all kinds of bizarrely shaped furniture brought back from overseas, and various handicrafts he made himself.
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Liu Yigang's Love Letter oil painting series features four well-known figures, including Steve Jobs (top) and writer Eileen Chang (above). Provided to China Daily |
Liu and his wife Luo Youwei immediately fell for each other at one of his exhibitions in 1986. One year later, they married and have been living happily together ever since.
His experience has found expression in his most recent painting series Love Letter, which coincides with Valentine's Day.
"Love at first sight is human instinct," Liu says.
The four oil paintings from the Love Letter series feature four well-known figures and their first-sight love stories. They are even more special because of the experimental integration between portraiture and handwritten Chinese characters that Liu has formed.
"Every painting of mine contains Chinese characters, which I believe will dominate art worldwide soon," Liu says.
The first painting is about Wang Luobin (1913-1996), a renowned songwriter, whose works were inspired by the music of ethnic groups in West China.
During a movie project in 1939, Wang fell in love with a 17-year-old Tibetan girl named Droma. The love match didn't lead to marriage, but Wang created the widely popular love song In That Place Wholly Faraway.
Liu portrays the latter-day look of Wang, with his cowboy hat and sunglasses.
In that love song Wang wrote: Her pink smiling face is like the sun and her beautiful eyes are like the moon. In the work, reflected in one eyeglass is the sun and the other reflects the moon.
The highlights and shadows of Wang's face have been filled in with colored handwritten lyrics from the song, both in Chinese and English.
The second painting in the series is about Chinese writer Eileen Chang (1920-1995). On her face her famous quotations are arranged like the hues of a rainbow. Behind her, vaguely, appears the face of Hu Lancheng, the man who had a lifelong relationship with Chang.
Taiwan writer Sanmao (1943-1991) is the Part-Three main role. The painting's background is filled with love letters Sanmao wrote to her beloved Spanish husband Jose Maria Quero Y Ruiz. Her well-known poem Olive Tree appears on her face in a tree shape.
"I gave Chang and Sanmao's portraits decorative frames to make them seem like old black-and-white photos, with artificial colors," Liu explains.
Steve Jobs (1955-2011) is the only foreigner in Liu's Love Letter series. In the artwork, Jobs is painted in apple green. He holds a rose and wears a pair of apple-shaped sunglasses. The highlights of his face are filled with lines from the love letter he wrote to his wife Laurene Powell Jobs for their 20th wedding anniversary. The shadow part of the face has lines from the letter's Chinese version.
"The Jobs work sort of stands for the future, which gives some hope to the younger generation to believe in true love," Liu explains.
"Every Chinese character is a two-dimensional language, which holds a specific meaning while presenting a figurative image itself. In Liu's paintings, Chinese characters have transferred into very powerful instruments when expressing the touching subject of love," says professor Zou Wen, at the Academy of Art and Design, Tsinghua University.
"Combining writing and images is like adding modern Pop Art elements to old photos," Yi Hong, an independent curator, says. "It creates an unexpected sense of time travel."
Liu says he will continue to work on this series, since love is an eternal subject.
"Love is one of the most touching elements of humanity, expressing what art is all about," the artist says.