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Qiheng Liu

刘启恒

Recoding

Reality

“What you see is what is going to be,” Oil on canvas
25 x 35 cm, 2015

Purity and precision are evident in the paintings of the artist Qi-
heng Liu. He is a visionary and a superb technician. The clarity
of his style in his latest series of paintings displays the influence
of the portraiture of Hans Holbein the Younger. Liu doesn’t
paint portraits, though. He takes pleasure in dismantling the idea
of a portrait and reconstructing it, using his own code of images
to invite the viewer into a secret sphere where playfulness and
power balance each other as art comes into being.

The paintings we might at first perceive as portraits are for the
most part labeled “Untitled.” When there is a title, it is refer-
ence to the placement of dissonant elements in the composi-
tion, such as “White Cube” or “Black Square.” These disso-
nances work in the same way a jazz musician riffs far from the
melody before returning to a recognizable tune.

The faces, though, are unmistakably drawn from reality; from
the artist’s circle of friends, in fact. By leaving the works unti-
tled, rather than using the names of real people, or by referring
to shapes (square, cube) that must be forced into reality since
they do not exist in the natural world, he eschews the commer-
cial nature of portraiture.

This is a resounding theme that surprises again and again. He
can depict faces without debt to names or language. In this way,
a face is another way of focusing, a study that allows the artist
to expand his vision until there is no hierarchy of imagery. The
face of a man or woman is no greater or lesser than one of his
paintings of a crumpled sheet of paper.
The painter quite obviously takes pleasure in capturing certain
exact elements from what is known as reality and then explor-
ing the freedom that comes of placing them in a composition
that challenges the known or the familiar. This is the approach
of a truly original mind.
“Here I Am,” Oil on canvas, 9” x 13”, 2016

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