Louis Vuitton proudly presents the latest exhibition at Hong Kong Louis Vuitton Gallery with a young Chinese artist Liu Weijian: Farewell My Country.
Of all the young Chinese contemporary artists who are starting to make o mark on the local and international art scene, Liu Weijian is the one painter whose paintings look least Chinese. His paintings depict a strange end bleak part of the planet that is immediately recognisable as international urban desolation. He records the sprawl of modem industrial life with a palette and technique that is perfectly attuned the soulless spirit of these generic places.
As a Chinese painter in China he is perfectly placed to record these scenes of functional banality because in China the spread of urbanization has been faster and more comprehensive than anywhere else. In China, even young people can remember what it was like before the factories, industrial estates, freeways blighted the landscape. Many of them have themselves travelled from the provinces to the cities in order to become a part of the process. Liu Weijian was born in 1981 in Hunan Province, in 2006. He has had three further solo exhibitions in Shanghai in 2007, 2009 and 2010. "Farewell my Country° is his first solo exhibition in Hong Kong.
In his paintings and drawings he expresses his experiences of past years and of life in China, and experiences of education, work and of travelling workers. If we leave a place, time passes and the landscape changes, and when we return to it, is it really the place we left? As we grow older, and our experiences in the real world expose us to more of life's hardships and injustices, we may look back with fond nostalgia to the past. Rather than looking forward to a better life, to an idealized utopian future, nostalgia locates that better life in the past. Nostalgia may be a longing for a life we fondly imagine to be more satisfying or complete, or a life when things were simpler and we were all better off. But for artists nostalgia may also constitute a more critical stance as a form of critique of the present and be tinged with a melancholy sadness for things that might have been or never were.
When looking at Liu Weijian's work, we are aware that under the beauty of the image are a number of dull, boring, everyday life themes. This imbalance causes a disturbing pressure as the work brings us to another level of thinking. His paintings and his themes speak to the anguish of modern man. There is something unsettling and uncanny in the paintings. They suggest that there is much more at stake than that which is visible to the eye. He elaborates on the notion of space, both interior and exterior, and how such spaces seem to construct their own intriguing narrative. The places he points include new industrial buildings and run-down generic habitats and all are laden with anonymity and vastness.
Liu Weijian's works seem touched by these melancholy feelings. Many are painted in cool and dark colours and represent things that are the same time cold and poignant, strange and close, for away and familiar. LP Hartley's novel "The Go-Between" opens with the words "The past is foreign country; they do things differently there". So it is with all our travels. Every journey we make takes place in both space and time so that we can never fully re-trace our steps. With his cold touch, Liu Weijian's work deals with many of the current issues he and his contemporaries think about daily and creates a feeling of constant movement and of un-finished business.
