Author: LIU FENGZHI 刘锋植

Size: 260×100cm×4

Signed and dated: Painted in 2003

Estimate:

Final Price: RMB 2,100,000

signed in Chinese and dated 2003
Liu Fengzhi is a pioneer to be reckoned with in the history of contemporary Chinese art. He also has an Van Gogh-style frustrated career. Liu Fengzhi regarded expressionism as his creative endeavor early in his artistic life. After the millennium, Liu Fengzhi changed in his creative themes and style, shifted his focus from well-known historical buildings to common objects in daily life such as dragonflies, kites, and clouds. In the works, he retains the expression of feelings in the “Tiananmen” series, but without the strong symbolism. The clean and concise paintings with bizarre imagination reveal the spiritual dilemma of modern people in the way of allegories.
Cloud created in 2003 is a representative work of Liu Fengzhi in the transition period of style. The work dispenses with the structural logic of traditional realistic paintings, without objectively describing real life, and abandoning the nature of story and the detailed plot. In the open space in the Cloud, various buildings, cultural symbols and characters are freely arranged, and floating clouds are interspersed among them at random. The character floating in the air on the upper left side has the wings of a butterfly, like an angel looking down at all living creatures. It corresponds to the cross on the lower right. Overlapping with this diagonal line is a faintly discernible line of kite, and the insignificant person on the lower left is flying a gigantic kite, implying the real distressed life and the remote ideals. In the painting, on the far right is a collage of several petty images, the figures are covered by the masks and the stairs lead to the darkness. A vague figure shouting a Scream-style shout on the dull coast in the lower right corner adds to the melancholy mood of the work. The dominant tone of black, white and gray combined with a touch of red and green, coupled with the immature graffiti-like brushwork, outlines the indifferent urban landscape. The artist uses this fantastic and complicated painting structure to symbolize the deep absurd and irrational modern urban life, mirrors a solitary, confused, and contradictory inner world.