Form and Theme: Interpretation of Liu Yonggang’s Art

Deng Pingxiang (Vice President of Hunan Artists Association, famous critic of fine arts)　　The modernist movement is, in a certain sense, a formalist movement. The formalist evolution was self-governed; that is, it advanced in accordance with the logic of form itself. That was art’s return to art itself. Modern artists share one credo: what matters is not what to paint, but how to paint. A review of the history of modern art will show that was true of all successful artists. 　　Liu Yonggang is undoubtedly one of the modern artists, but he cares much about thematic meaning. He considers thematic value as important as formal value. Moreover, theme and form are inextricably linked in his art; they are completely blended. 　　As an artist, Liu is sensitive to and passionate about form. Signs of that began to show in one of his earlier works, Shepherdess of Northern Sala. Painted in 1987, the second year after his graduation from Oil Painting Department of Central Art Academy, that oil painting established his fame. It is a prize-winning work in the first national exhibition of oil paintings. Twenty years later, we still find it mature and special in the way of expression. That goes without saying. However, from the perspective of art itself, the most interesting thing about the work is that it indicates the artist’s superb talent in the expression and creation of form. That work was not only the first sign of his gift, but it also suggests the tendency of his art—emphasis on manner, but not at the expense of spiritual meaning. 　　During his over ten years’ stay in Germany, he made a careful study of German works from classicism to expressionism, and from that to neo-expressionism. He delved deeper than the level of language expression; he penetrated to the spirit, culture and abstract thinking beneath the surface. At that level, it was only natural that he found the relations between two cultures that transcend their differences, and from that he began to develop a new perception of Chinese culture. 　　Of course, that perception was first and foremost formal. He found that ‘each of the characters invented by our ancestors is a picture, and the invention of each new character was an artistic creation.’ Moreover, ‘If contents are left out, form itself constitutes an independent beauty of characters. I took that beauty and raised it to a higher level by means of artistic re-creation. The re-created beauty not only inherits the traditional Chinese culture, but it is also innovation.’　　The use of Chinese characters as resource of artistic creation is a brilliant spectacle among modern and contemporary Chinese artists. In terms of aesthetics, two theoretical points about the phenomenon can be raised: one, the expansion of creation on the level of form; two, the thinking and deepening of traditional culture. Compared with other artists’ creation with characters as its elements, Liu’s creation again embodies his style—the blending of form and theme and the same importance attached to both. 　　Liu has a strong humanistic concern, which leads to a deep understanding of the universal values of mankind, the essence of life, and love, as well as a drive to express them. All these are embodied in the theme of his Embrace of Love. 　　The theme of Embrace of Love is composed by a series of paintings on easels and a series of sculptures. The two ways of expression indicate his different ways of interpreting the theme—one two-dimensional, the other three-dimensional. In the paintings, he stresses emotional expression, in which the love at the ‘id’ level is fully conveyed; the power of colors, in particular, accentuates the theme. In the sculptures, he stresses rational expression. The symbolic nature of the ‘images of characters’ lends the power of thinking to the expression; the spatial dimension of the material gives the work a sense of eternity. In terms of the expression and interpretation of the theme, it was only after Liu created both the paintings and the sculptures that he attained the adequate, complete expression of the theme. The two types of works are mutually complementary and irreplaceable. 　　For Liu Yonggang, whose cultural background includes both Chinese culture and German culture, there may be some historical significance about the theme of Embrace of Love. The Chinese and the German, both having great cultural traditions, experienced shocking, lamentable, and evil deviation from human love, because of political and ideological reasons. In fact, from the perspective of transcending historical reason, the Cultural Revolution and Nazism derived from the same origin. The Cultural Revolution broke out because class struggle was made an absolute rule of life; Nazism sprung from racism. Both preached love, but that was based on discrimination, and the binary opposition between love and hate. One could only love ‘proletariat brothers’ or ‘Germanic brothers’; anyone else was to be hated. Hatred developed into ‘struggles’ and massacres. The theme of Embrace of Love is not only about love and sex, but it is also about the universal love of mankind. 　　For the expression of love in the narrow sense, one may see in his work that ‘love is fire and sex is flame’ (D. H. Lawrence). 　　For the expression of love in the broad sense, one may feel in his work that ‘since time immemorial love has been the manifesto of humanism, and the manifesto of the equality of all men and women’ (Vasilev).