Storytelling features 30 paintings by Chinese artist Liu Ye at the Prada-restored mansion Rong Zhai in Shanghai. For the last few years, Prada has been carefully restoring Rong Zhai, a historical residence built in 1918 in Shanghai’s Jing’an District that fuses together European and Chinese architectural details that reopened in October 2017. During Shanghai Art Week, the Italian fashion house opened an exhibition of Chinese painter Liu Ye that’s on view until January 20, 1919.
The exhibition, titled Storytelling, features a selection of 30 paintings by the 54-year-old artist that were created from 1992 to the present. The whimsical and humor-filled paintings fuse together both Asian and European influences, bringing visitors inside the painter’s vivid imagination. The artist himself says that “every work is my self-portrait,” showing different aspects of his mind. “I experienced his paintings as sensitive pictorial messages relayed between two worlds that are often viewed as contradictory: Western cultures versus Asian cultures. Even back then, Liu Ye’s paintings struck me as manifesting a dialectical constellation, for his work is not only interwoven in many ways with China’s manifold cultural developments; it also bears witness to a profound knowledge of the history of European culture and painting,” said Udo Kittelmann, the German curator behind the show. “His pictures are grounded equally in traditional Eastern and Western intellectual and artistic trends, conjoining the strengths of the past and the future.”