Liu Ye’s father was a writer of children’s literature. Born in the 1960s, Liu Ye was baptized by a Red Wave during his early childhood years. The collective memory of the Cultural Revolution propaganda art and social movements in those years formed the red imagery in Liu Ye’s earlier works. After graduating from the Berlin University of the Arts in 1994, Liu Ye returned to Beijing, and built his reputation within the Chinese art market with the Little Navy series. In Sunrise, the little navy characters stand with their backs straight at the tip of the ocean wave, creating a typical propaganda art in a cartooned version. Liu Ye grew up in a world covered by the symbolic Red – the red sun, red flag, red scarf… this imagery from his childhood memories eventually became his emblem, and an important artistic language for Liu Ye in the 1990s. The influence of family memories and social movements contributed significantly to Liu Ye’s unique and discernable artistic style.

Art critic Zhu Zhu comments, “Liu Ye’s paintings are not designed to express the reality of this era. Compared with the younger artists from the later Age of Anime, Liu Ye’s art is a result of solitude and self-consciousness, instead of a sure acceptance of the objective conditions. ” Liu Ye once said, “I hope every one of my paintings weighs exactly just one gram. “In a rare interview, he shared his views on the impact of politics, “it is insignificant next to the universe, and insignificant next to the most ordinary human emotion.” The lightness and limpidity found in Liu Ye’s fairy tale-like art creates a contrast to the state of China in the later half of the 20th century.

(Edited by Lijie Wang & Miao Zijin, 2019)