showcase your art to thousands
of visitors every day

SOUNDLESS POWERFUL TALK
Perceiving Artist Liu Zuorui’s Paintings

Zhang Xiaojun
Possibly in this age of too much noise and clamor, soundlessness turns out to be powerful. Artist Liu Zuorui names her first individual exhibition Soundlessness, obviously an identification of her own spiritual power and a clarification of her own spiritual guidance. As a professional artist, she is contending with obscurity and compromise. As a woman artist, she is bringing out her powerful figure veiled with tenderness.
Liu Zuorui’s paintings talk quite clearly and intensely through the graphic language. For instance, the significant figure of the naked woman, the unfathomable lips of flower shape, the terrifying background of the paintings all display a kind of paradox, offbeat, fantasy and vigor. People feel quivering facing such grave shock.
Evidently Liu Zuorui directs her attacks at those common civilizations, especially those usually taken for granted. Evidences can be found from her mutually chained three pictures with pre-designed backgrounds. First, the montage combination between the revived figure from Michelangelo’s ceiling painting style and high-tech aircraft presents a nightmare of contemporary civilization. Second, the signifying use of tomb engravings implies the fatalistic oriental antinomy and a new meditation between nature and humanity. Third, violent transformation and grotesque design of tall and towering buildings, beauties and festooned vehicles ridicule the weakness of vogue and uselessness of modern city civilization. It is also the above three pre-designed human backgrounds that place us in a vaster historical space without our consciousness and set a more macroscopic mental horizon.
Just as we can see in Liu Zuorui’s paintings, the portrayal of the mouth which intends to speak but says nothing and the confrontation between two colors red and green are two fairly striking verbal symbols. The red lips of flower shape sometimes look like flowers in full blossom, sometimes like dirty mopping cloth. Here, the painter spares no trouble highlighting and stressing them. Clearly they are not digressions but witching and prophetic metaphysics. Likewise, the confrontation between the dominant color of blackish red in paintings and the green main figure puts the theme of paintings all the time in scorching and brutal atmosphere and create an air of conflicting wrestles. Instead of any air that play to the gallery and for hypocritical recreation, what you feel in these paintings are rude aesthetics, suspicious eyesight, disobedient attitude; the painter’s open and forthright position and personality. In fact, the outbreak in restraint and the restraint during outbreak make Artist Liu Zuorui’s paintings unique.
As a representative figure of contemporary Two Mars, Adorno ever exhorted us: art, only by opposing civilized industry and freeing from enchantment of social hypocritical demand, can become a symbol of freedom with its pure existence through disobeying current social conventions and despising so-called social utility. In this aspect, between the paintings of Liu Zuorui and ‘denying aesthetics’ of Adorno, there is a kind of spiritual coincidence, a converse extension of soul and self-reflection of humanity. If they are already revealed in writings of Kafka, Joyce, Jiamiu, Beckman, then what infiltrates through Liu Zuorui’s paintings are those contemporary elements: keen intellect in which tenderness defeats staunchness, decaying wild passion, unconventional and historical sentiments which we call new historism or new humanism for the time being.
In the author’s opinion, with the virtual lose of historical significance, the contemporary artistic atmosphere becomes too much thickened with obsequiousness and womanliness, seeks too much the style of ease and comfort as well as nobility, cater too much for taste of social conventions by appearing cute. Liu Zuorui just expresses her dissatisfaction and rebellion towards contemporary art in her painting. If Liu’s paintings are in the whole development of contemporary art for survey, then their sensitivity and contemporary significance can be discovered; to be specific, what lies in Liu’s paintings is a completely new tendency in contemporary artistic trend. It is no longer a technical copy of mass utterance, nor a popular way only for pastime or decay of petty bourgeois sentiment. On the contrary, it is a powerful and profound spiritual speech; a cold and incisive light of soul, an undisguised and frank spell; a shout from a fighter and a brave person.
Liu Zuorui’s paintings are glistening with new emerging force.

wall series --06

2003
180x180cm

wall series--01

2003
oil on canvas
100x80cm

wall series--05

2002
oil on canvas
195x130cm

green series--01

2003
oil on canvas
195x130cm

green series--10

2003
oil on canvas
80×116cm

fashion series--02

2004
oil on canvas
195×130cm

fashion series--04

2004
oil on canvas
195×130cm

fashion series--07

2004
oil on canvas
195×130cm

fashion series--05

2004
oil on canvas
195×130cm

singing-02

2005
oil on canvas
130×195cm

singing-06

2005
oil on canvas
130×195cm

singing-08

2004
oil on canvas
81cmX122cm

singing-03

2005
oil on canvas
81cmX122cm

singing-05

2005
oil on canvas
130×195cm

singing-05

2005
oil on canvas
130×195cm

home-

2008
oil on canvas
130×195cm

home-3

2008
oil on canvas
81cmX116cm

home-4

2008
oil on canvas
100cmX80cm