Writing 02: Liu Kang Exhibition

We visited the Liu Kang exhibition, partially as to give us AEP students some inspiration for the Liu Kang project we were tasked with, as many of us had artists' block and could not decide what to do or feel inspired. Our education on Liu Kang then was rather limited with the repetition of the usual paintings we saw during lesson, which was usually consisting of:

Artist and Model (1954)

Life by the River (1975)

By visiting the exhibition, we were presented with a wider range of artworks in which we could see what sort of style of Liu Kang we wanted to emulate, instead of a having a flat and 2-dimensional view of the artists and his works, which would give us a biased view of Liu Kang's works. This would only result in a boring project for us. 
The exhibition truly gave us a deeper understanding and more in-depth view about Liu Kang. For example, Liu Kang also had done a negative version of Life by the River.

 This provoked my thoughts: Playing with the colours of the work could also be a possibility. I also was rather fascinated with this work as it due to the use of the negative space, looked very much like a night scene, and I liked this stark contrast of the lighting between the original painting and this adaptation of it. Also since I could finally get up and close to the original painting, I decided to take the liberty of analysing it in close range. 

I looked at the way Liu Kang had painted the figures in simplistic form, using mostly contour lines to form their body shapes, in contrast to the angular shapes of the surrounding areas, like in the first picture where the figures are standing on a bridge, near the kampong houses which are painted with straight lines. He also used the colours very wisely, in the sense that he had strategically used the bold bright colours of the clothes of the figures to highlight the human figures in contrast to the duller background that made use of muted tones.
Offerings, 1957, oil on canvas, 131 x 98 cm

Souri, 1953, oil on canvas, 120 x 70 cm 

Next, I looked at his other iconic paintings of Balinese women, one being Offerings and the other being of a Balinese dancer named Souri. I really liked the colours in these paintings as they were rather bold and bright, and I also felt that the juxtaposition of the complementary colours in either paintings had truly brought out one another and were very effective in showing the exotic-cultural theme of the paintings. These were two of his more detailed paintings in which the the figures were being painted with a more 3-dimensional effect through the use of shadows and highlights. Nonetheless, Liu Kang still stayed true to his style in which he continued to use outlines to delineate the figures and to outline some of the forms in the paintings. Much I liked these paintings, they were not the most inspirational for me.

Near Elizabeth Walk (present Esplanade site), 1979, oil on canvas, 127 x 203 cm

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 Durian Vendors, 1957, oil on canvas

 National Day, 1967, oil on canvas, 98 x 126 cm

These four paintings contained Liu Kang's distinctive Fauvist-inspired painting style - simplistic blocks of colours to represent forms and the use of single lines to outline the forms. This style of Liu Kang, I found, was rather unique due to it's cartoon-like features, 2-dimensional and flat. He also played with the type of lines he used, in the sense that in some of his paintings, the line were angular and somewhat jarring, but in others, his lines were contoured, bringing a sense of softness and smoothness into the paintings. The lines really brought a very different feel to the individual paintings.

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These two paintings, similarly, had illustrated my point about the lines. When we were first introduced by our "guide" to the first painting, I remember that he said that the lines were created by a palette knife (if I'm not wrong) and this was a foreign method to me as the things I recognised as art tools were usually just the brushes and paint, and I thought it was rather interesting making use of such an object. this reminded me abut how even my own art should not be constricted just to a brush and a canvas, but rather, I should explore different usage of materials and tools. 

After the exhibition, I started to roam around, and I found that I in the museum itself, there were quite a bit of cultural elements I could pick off from, and I started to look at patterns, but I still did not feel very inspired by them, but after the trip and looking at Liu Kang's paintings, I truly felt that I had benefited as I could now appreciate Liu Kang's works from more angles, and I was now more sure of what exactly to do, even though I still had to develop my underlying concept. 

More pictures of the drain and the bench at the SAM...