In Praise of Blandness

Liu was born in Nanjing, China, in 1964. Melding motions of light with air where ‘light’ brings out its depth and ’air’ helps disperse the ‘light’ to every corner of the piece, the artwork’s symbolic blue-greyish colour is fundamental to Liu’s signature style. Up close, the brushstrokes are chaotic and fragmented, yet from a distance these brushstrokes gather to form a poetic tranquility. Liu’s abstract calligraphic-style, with deliberately illegible markings, overlap in tens of layers to create a fragile texture, reassembling dreams and illusions, smoke and water. He masterfully combines mystics of eastern aesthetics with influences of western modern art such as impressionism and abstract expressionism to create a sort of blandness that encapsulates, in the artist’s own words, ‘elegance, sophistication, aftertaste and eternity’.