From the Revolutionary Era to the Flawed Mode of Consumer Society,

　　 Regarding Liu Liguo’s Sculpture

　　 Written by: ZHU QI

　　 Liu Liguo’s sculptures display a kind of Chinese mode of selfhood that spans the revolutionary period through consumer society. This kind of mode manifests primarily as a bizarre mixture of elements of modern Chinese indigenous culture, religion, folk culture, consumption, and images of Mao Zedong. The vulgar, the mass, and the folksy are the visual characteristics that Liu Liguo consciously emphasizes in his sculptures. These characteristics are also loaded with memories of revolution, desire for progress, as well as the modern form of quasi-religion, a kind of spirituality invested in the society’s growth from revolution to consumer society.

　　 In terms of form, Liu Liguo has devoted himself to finding variation from within traditional Chinese sculpture. This method first emerged in his 1990s ceramic “Butt” series. This series showed the vulgarity of culture following the rise of 90s consumer society, its transformational energy and the duality of this paradox. As Liu Liguo sees things, he wants to satirize the forced and artificial behavior of progress in China. “I want to make something today that will have an effect tomorrow,” he says. For this reason, his works display this kind of inclination, “narrow nationalists, the peasant mentality, rebellion, challenges and provocations” and other characteristics of modern selfhood formed over the past several hundred years.

　　 In the context of ceramic culture, the actual significance of a “butt” inlaid into the ceramic does not lie in achieving a form that subverts and satirizes the traditional essence of fine ceramics. For Liu Liguo, instead, what mattered were the self-expressiveness of elements of contemporary Chinese “flaws,” the folksy qualities and popular cultural characteristics of folk statues and their vulgar, coarse and earthy modernity. After this series, Liu Liguo did not actually undertake any more subversive remaking of traditional ceramics, but rather devoted himself to experimentation with traditional and modern variations on folk statues. Prior to the 19th century, with the exception of the ceramics that belonged to traditional Chinese elite culture, the main tradition in Chinese sculpture was folk art, such as statues of the Buddha and images from other local folkways. In the middle of the 20th century, this folk art tradition included likenesses of Mao Zedong and other revolutionary images. By integrating images of Mao Zedong and the Buddhist figure Pusa, Liu Liguo’s experiments in his artistic language made a breakthrough, with pieces such as “Buddha’s Scepter in Hand,” “With Kids, Wearing a Military Cap,” etc. These works. Expressed a Buddha-fica-tion of Mao’s lmage,” or a Mao-ification of the Pusa Buddha. In these series ,Mao’s face and the big-belly of Guan-yin, or the Maitreya Buddha, are combined into one figure. Mao’s face is not entirely his own, and the features of his face are also similar to those of the Buddha, possessing a kind of ambiguous portraiture, and yet possessing a kind of familial character to the portrait as well.

　　 In comparison to the series in which Mao wears pop attire, Liu Liguo’s modification is no longer the sort of merger that involves forcing clothes onto the exterior of the image. Rather ,it involves the use of religious and modern ideologies of the Buddha and the Mao statue, and employs the intrinsic relationship between the symbolic imagery and formal resemblances of traditional and modern likenesses. The Buddha-fication of Mao revealed a kind of specific ideological quality to Mao statues in the Maoist era, namely, the way in which, after 1949, Mao placed great stress on the remaking of folk art images into political tools in the service of a kind of modern idol worship and ideological religion. This is especially the case with idol worship. Although the folk art ceramic figures of Mao during the revolutionary period did not explicitly proclaim a religious form, in reality, they already possessed the quality of religious idols.

　　 This is clear from the folk ceramics of Mao and folksy Guan-yin Buddha. traditional and modern ideologies have no impassable boundaries, especially in the realms of mass and folk society. The game played with physical characteristics of the bodies of folk statues of Mao and Buddhist idols, allowed Liu Liguo to find a more implicit and veiled, as well as ontological, artistic language for ideological critique. In his later works, “Picking the leader’s Ears,” “Blowing the Horn,” and other such pieces, he used a method of fictional transcendent situationism, and not merely just the method of physical variation on the folk idol. “Picking the Leader’s Ears” involves a small child standing on Mao’s giant should, cleaning the inside of Mao’s right ear. This kind of fictional situation series has already cast off the art language characteristics satirizing Mao and consumer society, and has entered into a kind of different, Polysemous and ambiguous expressive language.

　　 From the perspective of form and style, Liu Liguo attempts to remake the form of folk statues into something that can express China’s cultural self-formation. This form primarily expresses China’s characteristics of modernity. Going a step further, this kind of modernity is, in reality, a kind of flawed modernity, but at the same time, it has the power to transform China. Consequently, critique and satire are still of major significance in this flawed and yet forceful display of modernity. More important still, is the task of presenting its truth in entirety, and the self-identification that we must accept, without which China’s mode of selfhood characteristic of the 20th century will be lost. On this point, Liu Liguo’s work expresses a kind of fatalism.

　　 This kind of fatalism is also reflected in the fact that its presentation can only be sought in that which is authentic, indigenously propagated, and belonging to the modernform of its own symbolic characteristics. In the face of a culture that is refined, but excessively Westernized at its base, and that fact that China has no genuine forcefulness, Liu Liguo prefers to remake folk statues that are as flawed as China-those crude and vulgar, folksy idols and statues, that were finally transformed from revolutionary forms into forms of flawed consumer society. Under these basic preconditions, this choice has in fact accomplished the transformation in his artistic language from the folksy to the avant-garde.

　　刘力国的经典系列以陶瓷华丽脆弱的特性，向我们展示了他对于狂欢、流行、本能、恶俗和商业的曳慈肭钟，他将艺术看作是一种对于末法时代的一种短兵相接的游戏和自我救赎的方式。他欣赏的一种活法，用他自己的话叫做不一定是做得很艺术，但是一定要很辉煌。

　　 摘自《末法》 作者：朱其 （2004年）

　　Liu Liguo’s “classical” series uses the characteristic flamboyant fragility of ceramic, laying bare for our exhibit his attitude toward revelry, popularity, instinct, and resistance to the invasion of objectionable custom and commerce. He regards art as a mode of hand-to-hand combat and a way towards personal redemption in tnis era of degenerate dharma. He admires a particular way of living, which he describe in his own words thus: ‘it may not be very artistic, but it is certainly is glorious.’

　　 《Degenerate Dharma》

　　by: Zhu Qi （2004）

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