Liang Yuanwei

Sometimes I am puzzled by what seems to me a great contrast between the art I see and what the artist says about it. Consider Liang Yuanwei, a Chinese, Beijing-based artist born in 1977.

She paints canvases covered with flowers, and canvases that are meticulous copies of bolts of antique silk, and I find them rather attractive in a mild-mannered sort of way.

But when she talk to people about her work she says things like

In my own creative practice I imitate the world, thereby understanding the world, in order to create the world. In the process of creating this body of work, the end product remains unrealized, only when the painting is finished can one comprehend its final state.

Or

Liang says she has always been something of a rebel, living ‘in the margins’ in a rock and roll culture.

Which is amusing in that there can't possibly be anything more mainstream than rock and roll.

And as for the artists who have influenced her the most,

During our conversation Liang refers to artists who have been of great significance to her, such as the pioneering sculptor Eva Hesse, Mark Rothko, and also Wolfgang Tillmans, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter. The most profound influence, however, which I immediately identify and understand when I see her recent minimalist and beautiful installation pieces, was the German artist Joseph Beuys. 

Beuys was part of the ‘Fluxus’ group, a cadre of experimental artists in the 60s who did things like this:

In the basement of the floor of the Rene Block Gallery in Berlin, Beuys positioned himself on the floor wrapped in a large felt blanket. Emerging from either end of the blanket were two dead hares, often seen in his performances. Around him was an instillation of copper rod, felt and fat. Inside a blanket he held a microphone and for a period of eight hours grunted into the microphone as viewers watched from the doorway. The grunts are compared to those of a stag, as the stag is a symbol of something like a chief. The performance directly relates and even includes elements of the Fluxus movement that Beuys was a part of. The grunting is seen in part of a composition as a reflection of suffering. Being wrapped in a felt blanket mirrors the story of his suffering and rescue by the Tartars after his plane crashed in the war. (The Chief, 1965)

I have to say that the connection between Liang Yuanwei's delicate canvases and the sort of Happenings where artists rolled around on the floor wrapped in felt escapes me. But perhaps the genius who tossed off this description of her new show could explain it to us:

The title of the exhibition, The Tension between a Bow and an Elephant elicits Liang Yuanwei’s profound preoccupation with the constants and variables of creative production and the pressures that these exert on the artist. Like a hunter armed with a bow and arrow ready to target his or her prey, Liang views the process of painting as intensely pressure-fueled, highly contingent on both governable and ungovernable forces, conscious decisions and natural phenomena.

Yes, it's hard to write about art. But really.