Central Academy of Fine Arts, Oil Painting Department: Liu Mingcái's Master's Journey

Author: Gong Liuzhao
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-03-01
Features: Things did not turn out as I had imagined. Starting my work at a middle school marked a brand-new beginning. First was the adjustment of mindset, transitioning from being a student to a teacher—naturally, the state is different, and the responsibility of being a role model is self-evident. Second was how to balance regular work with personal professional development: although school education in this area was still weak, the school leadership was very decisive, establishing art classes and calligraphy classes, with a correspondingly relaxed working environment. Outside of regular teaching and school activities, I dedicated all my free time to professional learning. In the first year, I spent a lot of time visiting art museums and galleries, looking at everything, trying to actively experience both what I liked and what I didn’t. My horizons broadened, and my thoughts became more active. That year, I completed the work Spiritual Light in my spare time, which was selected for the 8th National Art Exhibition. Compared to my graduation project, I felt I had made some progress, but when I saw my paintings in the exhibition hall, I clearly noticed that the images were dull and thin, so later I painted a series of sketches with high color purity and slight distortion. I even tried painting some abstract works at one point. In these exaggerated and rough works, I made an effort to experiment with the division of lines and dots, the arrangement of color blocks, and the intensity created by exaggerated distortion and vibrant colors. Of course, during this period, I also visited large-scale exhibitions of French painter Soulage and the retrospective exhibition of Russian Chagall, which were also among the reasons for this intuitive learning. Although my work was superficial, I did gain some insights. Next, I painted a large number of full-body oil paintings in a sketch-like style, mostly on weekends and holidays, completing them in one go. On a one-meter scale, I painted dozens of works, which I would arrange in the studio for some self-entertainment. With this preliminary preparation, in 1995, I completed Green Schoolbag with students as models, which was later selected for the Centennial Portrait Exhibition of Chinese Oil Painting. During this time, I also moved various plants from the school’s greenhouse to my studio and painted a series of fourteen sisal works titled Flowers That Are Not Flowers, as well as multiple works of agave, banana plants, and more. These works had fewer constraints on form, and I felt very relaxed while painting them. At the same time, I also painted many landscapes, all scenes I observed from the comfort of my window. Due to my obsession with the midday sun, the shade of trees, and the afterglow of the sunset, as well as my limited time and energy as an ordinary middle school art teacher, I naturally focused my attention on the people, scenery, and objects around me. These scenes, along with the lively and vivid figures within them, gradually attracted me to move forward.
The art practice at the beginning of the second grade took me far. We traveled from Gansu to Xinjiang. At every stop, there were things that moved me. Although I grew up in the north, I had never before focused so genuinely on the artistic relics of the ancestors on this land—not only their artistic creations but also the landscapes and people along the way, which were enough to make me, who had been away from Northwest China for a long time, feel refreshingly new. As the train approached Dunhuang, the scenery was vastly different from that of the interior. Vast desert stretches lay silent and mysterious, the sky covered in dark, dense clouds, yet occasionally, small gaps seemed to tear through them, casting dazzling and enigmatic blue light, as if foretelling the journey ahead.