The Art of Liu Hejiao

When Liu Hejiao in January 2017 returned to Kunming after a trip to Beijing that had lasted more than half a year, he had come in doubt about his way of painting. He wanted to abandoned the techniques he was familiar with, but he wasn’t sure how to start on the new path. Day in and day out he kept hesitating and as a way of diverting himself from his endless gloomy and anxious moods, he started painting background colours on an empty canvas. As he repeated this movement again and again, the contours of one layer of paint after another started to pile up like the creases of Time. In the process he let go of his worries, his mood became calm and he found the confidence to go on with painting. After bridging the cleft between geopolitics and minds at his 2018 “North and South” individual exhibition at the Moss Gallery, he started afresh on the road of his heart.

“Emerald Temple – Individual Exhibition by Liu Hejiao” displays how Liu Hejiao has continued pushing ahead after “North and South”. The paintings continues the technique of accumulating layers of paint, and then, on the top, drawing figures and shapes, creating a scene of lines and colours intertwined over and over. The Emerald Temple isn’t an actual temple. It is rather a metaphor for using art to explore the heavens and earth and to understand one self. He once told me: “The Emerald Temple isn’t the name of any concrete Buddhist temple, it is a realm of rectifying one self, of modeling and discovering one self.” 

The subject matter of Liu Hejiao’s art usually draws on landscapes and persons and whether they are sketches of real landscapes or characters grabbed from movies and television, they all have a feeling of viewing from far away. As if watch we a are seeing is not a present scene, but a sight that has undergone a prolonged filtering before we see it. Another interesting aspect is that the scenes in the paintings often are seen from the perspective of a silent watcher whom we again can peep at: These works have a character of being paintings inside paintings. It is as if us who are looking at the painting from the outside embody the painter himself. In all the paintings green is the main colour. It has the function of guiding os through the paintings by creating a keynote temperament. It corresponds to the artist’s state of mind. Green is the colour of the growth of life and of the exuberant forces of life. At the same time it symbolizes Liu Hejiao’s contented, unhurried way of dealing with things and mirrors his distinctive way of treating people.

In “Bamboo”, a youngster appears in of a green and blue background. His young body is naked and his hand grasps a bamboo cane. His calm yet searching eyes gazes at the world outside the painting, as is his sight wants to reach a place far far away. This painting is the artist’s portrayal of of his own aspiration and ideal reality: A youthful heart. I hope he forever maintains the fearlessness of youth. 

In another group of works, a series of pagoda-like shapes, we see the inheritance from Liu Hejiao’s carpenter father: The technique of creating Chinese lacquer with bare hands. Chinese lacquer is the traditional Chinese art of applying lacquer to wooden articles. It originated over 7000 years ago in the neolithic Hemudu culture, whose people took the natural lacquer from the lacquer tree, and applied it to wooden objects in a complicated process, that had to be repeated more than ten times before the lacquering was done. The ancient bare-handed technique now only survives in north-eastern Yunnan and the adjacent parts of Guizhou. The process of applying lacquer with bare hands is both painful and arduous, resulting in itching and skin allergies, and the artists has to stay patient through the protracted process that lasts for months. When it is finally finished, the processed wooden object appears completely changed, its texture fine and smooth, natural, unadorned and clear. The lacquerer’s spirit and soul have merged with the piece.

In this exhibition, the pagodas are more than simple utensils: they symbolize the spirit. In the dialogue between his hands, the lacquer and wood, Liu Hejiao is in his heart constructing a pagoda of the spirit. These pagodas are exquisite yet plain and they are solemn and quiet, as if the endless history they have witnessed and the long process of grinding and polishing they gone through have remade them and filled them with wisdom. This grinding and polishing is also a process through which the artist tempers himself. The pagodas seen together with Liu Hejiao’s mild paintings makes whole the metaphor of the artists spiritual path.

He Libin

2020.12.18