Liú Yung-jen: Cruising Alone in Painting
Added: (Fri Nov 18 2022)
Pressbox (Press Release) -
Powen Gallery is pleased to present "Liú Yung-jen: Cruising Alone in Painting?", a solo exhibition featuring the artist Liú Yung-jen's recent paintings. The show runs from November 19 to December 18.
The work of Liú Yung-jen often arouses passionate debate between the figurative and the abstract. But this contention is ensued from a misunderstanding of abstraction and figuration as opposites rather than complementary, and a failure to understand the complex relationship between painting and the world it seeks to represent.
We can venture a hypothesis that Liú Yung-jen's artistic practice goes through the mental processes of 'Einfühlung' (Empathy) and 'Fernbild' (the distant form of vision). He attempts to 'feel himself' in his works but never is he strayed from the realm of visual re-presentation, only that the re-presentation of the external world is not his intent, but rather, the unification of form on the canvas.
But Liú does not paint in monochrome. He always opens up gaps at the edges or in the centre of his paintings and embeds distinctive forms, such as the series of works developed in the 2010s from the lotus or haystack and evolved in 2021 where the rectangle is formed by the interlacing of half-orange and half-yellow triangles emerged from the black. The form resembles a living organism that changes constantly and recurs in different paintings. Its size and composition, its totality and fragmentation, suggest shifts in perspective.