The rapid development of Chinese contemporary art provides sufficient possibilities for art with social concerns. More and more artworks emphasize a specificity of location and are full of expression of cultural interactions and struggles. Under such circumstances, the pure beauty of art and works concerned primarily with form have been ignored. Rethinking the issue of beauty and form with a historical perspective is an urgent task that faces us.
Liu Jianhua’s newest series exhibited in his solo show at Beijing Commune responds to the above task with his own attitude and style. Liu Jianhua continuously explores new directions of his art. His works (installations and sculptures) have been collected by art museums and prestigious collections. He has participated in many important exhibitions in China and overseas, including the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003.
In this exhibition, Liu Jianhua again uses his favored medium, porcelain, but with a perspective very different from that seen in his earlier works. The works minimize the features of traditional Chinese porcelain wares and figurative profiles and formalizes them into abstract forms. With this approach, the characteristics of “form” and “shade” are highlighted. In using the color, technique, and style of Song dynasty celadon, the works evoke the elegant and simple beauty which was highly valued and pursued in traditional Chinese aesthetics. The audience can neither expect to find any complex concepts in the works, as in most contemporary art works, nor can they sense any visual shock. Instead, the traditional Chinese literati’s simple and pure taste is all that remains to experience. With such simple and pure forms, Liu Jianhua attempts to break the engagement between politics, society and art. The conception-ness and mode of narration of art which is popularly pursued now are abandoned by the artist here. The artist returns to the pure form and aesthetic feeling as the origin of his art. The simplicity and straightforwardness of the works are what the artist recovered from history. They are his strong reaction to social and political visual fatigue. In pure aesthetic forms, this series of artworks clearly presents the artist’s anti-content, anti-relation and anti-social-engagement attitude and position.
