WORKS ELABORATION:
“Your body is not itself”. I want to make visible a sense of absurdity that comes from reality, to express a tragic awareness of life. It is not the world that is absurd. Absurdity is the product of the confrontation between the irrationality of the world and the attachment of human, and it is the silence of the world when facing the call of man.
TUTOR COMMENT:
Liu Qiang’s work “Paradise Lost” series expresses a sense of absurdity derived from reality and a tragic understanding of life through the bodies with their faces covered. He attempts to show a dream-like illusion that transcends the surreal and makes his own artistic response to confront the living body and its corporeality from an artist’s perspective, projecting his real experience of life into his painting. It is as if he is admiring the philosophers and craftsmen who lived in the Middle Ages, immersing himself in the spiritual world of the ancient painters, wandering and watching, absorbing the techniques and smells of the ancient painters into his own body, and then injects his flowing blood into the images he creates, presenting us with a picture that explores the dilemmas and struggles of the human’s inner world.
-- Li Xiaolin