Liu Weijian likes to idle about, drive around, hike in the countryside, etc. Around 2018, he had a number of "landscape sketching" paintings of highways[1] - if we have to name these paintings. The Winter Rain is Cold (2021) is one such painting. The sky is overcast, and it is unclear whether it’s dusk or dawn. The ground is wet and the road reaches from the horizon to the front. On the right side, the yellow shrubs of the green belt brighten the picture, and a few curved branches come out and reach upward, wearing white skirts in unison, which are white sulfur compounds brushed on to prevent freezing. To the left, a car approaches from the distance. The flashing headlights left a long reflection on the ground. The reflection was too long, like a nail of light chiseled into the ground. Correspondingly, there was a straight streetlight that lit up the sky without leaving a single reflection on the ground.

Upon closer inspection, viewers who categorize this painting as a "landscape sketch" will be confused. In reality, there is no such extended reflection of car headlights, nor is there disappeared reflection of streetlights. The shape of the branches is too flat; the fading leaves on them are painted in a manner reminiscent of the dotted ink spots in Ni Zan's Six Gentlemen's plan. There's no need to say that, like most landscape paintings, this is a deliberate artifact [2]. This type of genre has been repeatedly depicted by Liu Weijian in recent years and is the direction he chose after consideration and refinement. The question is, after more than a decade of creation, how did he deliberately and implicitly bring the component of subjective transformation of the picture - i.e., "illogicity"[3] - down to something close to "sketching" and why he did so.

Upon closer inspection, viewers who categorize this painting as a "landscape sketch" will be confused. In reality, there is no such extended reflection of car headlights, nor is there disappeared reflection of streetlights. The shape of the branches is too flat; the fading leaves on them are painted in a manner reminiscent of the dotted ink spots in Ni Zan's Six Gentlemen's plan. There's no need to say that, like most landscape paintings, this is a deliberate artifact [2]. This type of genre has been repeatedly depicted by Liu Weijian in recent years and is the direction he chose after consideration and refinement. The question is, after more than a decade of creation, how did he deliberately and implicitly bring the component of subjective transformation of the picture - i.e., "illogicity"[3] - down to something close to "sketching" and why he did so.

Far Away reveals Liu Weijian's attempt to show the contradictory boundaries in painting - the imaginary and the realistic, the visible and the invisible - and to frame them in an ever-changing state. Liu, who is keen to poems, quotes the Tang Dynasty poet Wang Wei's Farewell poem. It reads, "You said that you will return to the edge of southern mountains to live in seclusion because you are not satisfied with your life", and he refers to this skillful balancing act as "Returning to the Edge to View the Image", which means "returning to the edge of something to see the thing clear". The structure of Tang poetry that the artist is looking at contributes to his realization of "Returning to the Edge to View the Image". I would like to emphasize that he is a Chinese painter born in the early 1980s, who came from the countryside to reside in Shanghai and witnessed the great changes and development of the reform and opening-up society - the high density of human moving, the inexhaustible renewal of technology, and the fabulous future ahead ordering people to catch up. In his opinion, in ancient poetry, "objects express one's will" or "scenery express one's emotions", in which "objects" and "scenery" always take up most of the space, while the "will" and "emotions" are often attachments. In front of the vast nature and society, life is small. No matter a person is happy or sad, the landscape is still the landscape, and the world is still the world. The scenery and the world are neither warm nor indifferent. All a painter can do is to project his warmth or indifference to the painting and then give it to the viewer. This is the provision and care between people.

Liu Weijian's painting method in recent years, which is close to "sketching", results from this. When he realizes that "scenery" is always greater than "emotion" through his own life experiences, his painting method cannot be expressive, but shifts to restoring the appearance of reality, while giving it a romantic filter. In How You Doing? (2018), a tin shack is surrounded by barren grass, and the sinking sun sets away from it, leaving it among the shadows. The background is colorful and tends to be warm, with fleeting, almost trembling cloud formations; in stark contrast, the buildings and vehicles in the foreground are in cold tone and straight line. The sunset passes, and the temporary shack will be dismantled at any time. The title of the painting silently suggests that the emotions stirred up by the temporary imagery may be related to the people in the past he remembers, whom he might have met briefly and parted in a hurry.

At times, the "illogical" imagery of earlier years returns to Liu Weijian's paintings around 2018, and the edge of viewing things is pushed to the subjective side. In Intersection of Spirituality and Reality (2018), two cranes stand in front of two modern high buildings, forming a quantitative connection. On the building nearer to the viewer, a festive "Two Cranes Flying Together" poster hangs, again annotating the rhetorical origin of the crane imagery. Liu Weijian tries to dissolve the viewer's sense of dismay at the images by mirrored correspondences. In other words, the two cranes seen in the "spirit" are the product of the accumulation of classical poems and folk customs in the "reality"[4], instead of only serving the structure or the fulfillment of the story. Imagination cannot come out of nowhere, but needs to be supported by resources outside the subjective world in order for the two to intersect, which then can be told and shared.

However, in the series Grandmother's Hand created in 2019, Liu Weijian is no longer satisfied with the "weak intervention" approach of simplifying images and transforming colors, but has begun to create images. He piles everyday objects related to his grandmother from his memories, forming an indescribable mixture. Due to the medium of watercolor, these paintings on paper are brightly colored, full of shapes, and with surprising brushwork directions, all creating a vibrant life force. Like deities, arms and legs stretch out from the chaos, echoing the title's setting of "Portrait of a Loved One".

Rather than a reaction to Liu Weijian's "landscape sketching" paintings, this group of obscure works provides a more relevant way of interpreting the latter. When we claim that a thing is "recognizable," we often derive our strength from the "grip" that provides the basis for such confirmation, i.e., a consensus on what a certain thing should look like. When the artist faces these extremely familiar and intimate feeling, such as the memory of his own grandmother, the consensus no longer works. The artist can only use the same intensity of intimate visual language to depict such feelings. Consensus is the universal language that people speak and that we need to learn in order to recognize what it refers to. The learning process of childhood has now been forgotten by adults. They have also forgotten that consensus, the idea that "what a certain thing should look like", was originally alien to their nature. They also hardly realize that the consensus they know so well is continuously narrowing their cognition. Grandmother's Hand calls the audience back to being a child [5], viewing the world alone with eyes untainted by the language of consensus. Walking in the faraway place where consensus is deeply rooted, people cannot live like children, but only occasionally looking back in solitude - this is "Returning to the Edge to View the Image".


[1]. Liu Weijian's 2018 exhibition "On The Way" at the Barn Contemporary Art Space, Shenzhen.
[2]. In Landscape and Western Art, British scholar Malcolm Andrews begins the first chapter by writing that so-called "landscapes", whether deliberately sculpted or wild, are in fact artifacts before they become the subject of an artwork.
[3]. The term was coined by Wei Jingjing in her article "Walking Pictorial Journal - About Liu Weijian".
[4]. In an interview with Liu Weijian, the artist revealed that in order to prepare for this painting, he listed as many descriptions of cranes as possible in Tang and Song poems, in order to examine the symbolism of the imagery.
[5]. Nietzsche said in Also Sprach Zarathustra that a child is oblivion, a new beginning.