Liu Jiu Tong

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Art Director's Advice
Art Gallery III Millennium

The exhibited works are the result of the work of the artist Liu Jiu Tong. He was born on 1977 in the town of Suide in Shaanxi a region in the heart of China, in the north, a place so far away and isolated from urban areas of the plain. The nature is predominant in these places and landscapes are suggestive.

Liu Jiu-Tong went to Beijing to study art. Although he uses the oil colours and the canvas, unknown materials in the past when they used india-ink and paper or silk, his style is accurate and light and recalls the painting of China from the dark ages, from the 620 after Christ. That ancient kind of painting not intended to faithfully represent the landscape but to instill in the viewer a feeling of harmony and balance that is proper of the living world.

It is the Shan Shui painting or the painting of "mountain waters". A graphic style that comes from calligraphy but that has is development and becomes a way to represent and idealization of reality. The Shan Shui is charming and instills satisfaction, security, firmness, strength, because it is created to represent the magnificence of the immortals who, as the taoism says, live in the mountains, sacred places. Among Taoists values there is also that of the recognition of the smallness of humanity compared to the vastness of the cosmos and perhaps it is here that Liu Jiu-Tong is tied.

The chinese painting from the ancient times, since 600 a.C. had introduced the perspective representation and the work of Zhǎn Zǐqián reproduces some mountains in perspective. The Shan Shiu works have perspective and isometric visions of landscapes too. Liu Jiu-Tong he abstracts from ancient realism and distills the Shan Shui sense keeping the deeper meaning of this kind of art. He abandons the solemnity and the order of nature to maintain proportions with the human and convey a sense of the immensity of the world.

These canvas, in my opinion, have the aim to give to the public the sense of this boundless immensity that arounds us from the infinitely small to the infinitely big. The structures that are represented can be some kind of development of organized matter in the microscopic world or some macroscopic cosmic structures that overlooking whatever our ability to understand that our ability to orientation. Overall, the small, insignificant human being has the only role to testify and protect such shocking and sacred mystery.