The primary concern of Liu Ren’s works is not so much with society, politics and history on a grand scale, but rather it revolves around her own emotional life. The abstracted and surreal virtual spaces of her images forcefully conjure up dreamscapes. At the same time, however, Liu Ren’s works are not at all unrelated to her socio-cultural background. It is very important to her to generate a feeling of time and history, often conflated into one abstracted space. Her nods to classical Chinese painting are reflected in the recurring round image format imitating traditional fan painting. Similarly, ancient architecture features in her works repeatedly. But, she stresses, she only uses these tools when it is relevant to express the main subject of her work: her inner world.[i]
Liu Ren remembers her youth as carefree, dreamy and leisurely. She still vividly remembers the after-school hours spent daydreaming while the gentle breeze would rush white clouds along the bright-blue sky of her seaside hometown. Liu Ren first completed a BA in industrial design and then worked in a design company for several years. But she felt this work was too stifling for her dreamy character and thus started to contemplate life as an artist. The then newly opened department for photography at the prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing took her on as an MA student in 2004. Liu Ren specialized in digital photography and it is through this media that the artist describes and records her experiences of every-day life, her feelings, dreams and impressions. “Life is the creator of art, while I am the one recording her.”
The first series of works by Liu Ren, completed during the initial year of her MA studies, is entitled Memory (2005). The images resonate with loss and melancholy and, according to the artist, record her feelings of lament and distress about her waning youth. This distress is not located in her physical but rather in her emotional ageing – the loss of a child’s carefree attitude and capacity to dream. The shipwreck in Memory – 2 intimates a passage taken, a person having arrived at the other shore and moved on. It is only Liu Ren’s memory - giant eyeballs strewn all over the sandy bank – that has remained in this now desolate place.
Liu Ren’s series Someday Somewhere, also completed in 2005, consists of 12 images. While some of the images are somber, even apocalyptic, others reflect a happy playfulness and as well as the artist’s penchant towards daydreaming. “The inspiration for most of my works has come from my randomly following my own thoughts all day.” Someday Somewhere – 2 shows Liu Ren lounging on a couch in her electronically well equipped apartment. The viewer gets the feeling of catching her in the creative act. It is a sunny winter afternoon; the dozing figure has just turned off the TV and is contemplating her life as a goldfish. Both the symbolism of the goldfish and the round format of the picture – imitating traditional fans as well as entry ways into the inner chambers that by tradition are associated with the female and thus reclusive members of the family – push the viewer, who is linked into the picture by the second glass of tea on the coffee table, into the position of a voyeur.
With time, the works of Liu Ren seem to move out of the deeply private into more general yet still personalized spheres of imagination. Clouds Floating in front of my Eyes (2007) is as much a sentimental ode to the ungraspable passage of time and events as a personal lament about things in her life she could not hold on to – in this case her experiences and thoughts on love. “There are only a few lucky people that can capture love for their whole lifetime. But mostly love is sorrowful. Although it has been sad for me, it still is the most beautiful thing I know.” It is this optimism and romanticism that radiates from Clouds Floating yet the pictorial vocabulary clearly documents the dual nature of love such as in the mythological Chang E, living in the moon, forever separated from her husband Hou Yi and the two white horses, united in their purity and love, grazing on the banks of the other shore.
Animals and water are recurring elements in Liu Ren’s artworks. They do not merely serve symbolic functions but are a direct link to the artist herself. It is in the seaside town of her youth that Liu Ren’s sensibilities matured and it is in animals that she feels she can find and reflect the true essence of people’s character. Her works are thus often multi-layered and there are also those instances where an artwork turns out to be much more critical than Liu Ren originally intended. Sleepwalker – Great Hall of the People (2007) is such a case. This is a subversively funny image yet the artist admits that she only saw the work in that light after a viewer asked her about the political implications. “Actually,” she said, “it was just a recording of a crazy dream I had.”
[i] All quotes from a personal interview with the artist on April 15th, 2008
