Liu Ye

Liu Ye’s work combines direct references to the history of art and oblique political connotations to create a charged personal iconography that draws on real and imagined works of art, childhood memories and reallife figures. The often bright colours add a deceptively lighthearted quality. A young boy dressed in a sailor suit, for example, recurred as a poetic stand-in for the artist. Yet, the boy himself combined contradictory attributes: cherub wings found in Western renaissance paintings and, in reference to Chinese politics, tinted spectacles with circular glasses. In particular, the recurring depictions of works in the style of the Dutch abstract painter Piet Mondrian evoke the history of abstraction, a topic Liu Ye has explored since 2007 in his series of Bamboo paintings, among others. These works combine the specific art historical associations with a plant depicted in Chinese ink drawings with compositions reminiscent of Western 20^th century abstraction.