What is it that threads together van Eyck, the Bauhaus and Mao, not just within the space where the artist works and reads, but within the context of his oeuvre? Before my visit to Liu Ye’s studio in Beijing, he messaged me to ask if I was afraid of dogs: “No one else is home so I have to take care of the little dog today”. I bet he has one of those teddy-bear-like poodles, I thought to myself. The little dog, however, turns out to be a giant white Akita-inu, who in fact looks a bit too large for Liu’s studio. Unlike the majority of painters in Beijing, who take up factory warehouses for their vast floorspace and high ceilings, Liu opted for a modern residential flat as his workplace. His studio is relatively small and kept astonishingly neat and true to its modernist decor. There are only a few paintings on the wall, all under tabloid size. One is of the facade of the Gropius-designed Bauhaus Dessau. I had seen a picture of the painting before, but only in that living room, standing next to the dog and Liu’s collection of Bauhaus chairs, did I realise how small the painting actually is.
The studio itself reveals the artist’s aesthetic inclinations: the minimal decor, midcentury modern furniture, vintage toys in trichromatic colours; fitting oddly among them is a porcelain figurine of Chairman Mao by the kitchen. Over at the dining table, Liu has been reading a catalogue of Jan van Eyck’s complete works. The Chinese artist has repeatedly returned to the Early Northern Renaissance painter for inspiration over the last three decades. He points out a painting in the catalogue that catalysed a perception shift for him, the experience of which he still remembers vividly. Liu saw his first van Eyck in person at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin during the early 1990s, prior to which he had only seen images on poorly printed artbooks back in China, which neither delivered a sense of scale nor triggered much interest on the part of the young artist. Measuring only 29 × 20 cm, Portrait of a Man (Giovanni Arnolfini?) (c. 1440) nevertheless dominated the entire room at the Gemäldegalerie, at least in the eyes of the young painter (then in his mid-twenties). And van Eyck has been one of Liu’s favourite painters ever since. What is it that threads together van Eyck, the Bauhaus and Mao, not just within the space where the artist works and reads, but within the context of his oeuvre? Liu’s early works, from the 1990s, took a more explicit approach to combining disparate cultural elements – from his experimentation with postmodern compositions (Atelier, 1991) to the famous Baishi knew Mondrian (1996). But Liu is not so interested in a cultural reading of the subjects he had distinctively chosen to put in his paintings. Political Pop was all the rage in Chinese contemporary art when he returned to China from Germany during the mid-1990s. And critics have made direct links between Liu’s frequent deployment of the colour red and his Chinese background. But this is something the artist himself vehemently denies, along with any projection of political meaning onto his work. As far as he is concerned, he consciously steers clear of overtly political symbols within his painting. And there is something undeniably liberating in the straightforward approach: in stating that red is just red; that the red associated with Mao’s politics is essentially no different than the red associated with Mondrian’s paintings; and that a little red book is just a little red book.