Awakened Memories

Understanding Liang Qun’s Urban Series

　　Everybody always keeps some things related to survival in his heart. However big the changes in the outer world are, the memories in our hearts still remain. As time passes, these sleeping memories become a kind of sentimental “complex”, a stubborn interest, they start to control peoples’ thinking and dominate their behaviour. Liang Qun’s oil painting works Urban Series are the product of this kind of sentimental emotions.

街道 / Street Scene 2003

夜雨 / Night Rain 1999

　　Liang Qun’s Urban Series are using her hometown Dalian as material, but what she is painting is not the contemporary Dalian. Nowadays’ Dalian is a concrete forest made out of skyscrapers. Facing these lofty flocks of buildings, Liang Qun basically oversees them, she is got no feeling for them, and even less the desire of expression, as she cannot find the warmth of past times within those cold buildings. Dalian used to be a quiet coastal city, with houses spread along the mountain ridges, some of them high, some of them low, with old-style foreign two- to three-storey houses on both sides of the roads. For historical reasons, it is one of China’s cities with a foreign touch. Liang Qun was born here, has grown up here, and is familiar with every corner of it. Since the eighties, skyscrapers and tall buildings have been shooting out of the ground like mushrooms, a new Dalian with the objective of becoming a “Northern Hongkong” made the Dalian in Liang Qun’s heart, the one of bygone days, become something like a spoilt dream. She misses childhood’s feelings, and wants to bring them back – that is the impression Liang Qun’s Urban Series have given me.

老街 / The Old Street 2000

　　Among the almost twenty oil paintings of the Urban Series, there are almost no new buildings depicted, there are Old Homes, Old Streets, Old Areas, Dilapidated Buildings etc. There is one picture of a Convention Centre – although this is a new building, but the tone of it is gloomy and dreary, so there is nothing “new” about it, whereas those old homes, streets and areas look warm and brilliant. Those awakened memories are beautiful, they are full of the painter’s stories, experiences and things that are touching the soul, which let her put all of herself and all of her passion into the paintings. And this is where the charm of her paintings is. And it is this emotional input that leads the viewer into a kind of sentimental mood.

　　When we say that Liang Qun’s Urban Series are filled with the traces of memories and flavours of past times, this doesn’t mean that those areas can’t be found in nowadays’ Dalian. It is to say that Liang Qun’s urban landscapes are not only different from the bustling modern cities full of heavy traffic, they are also different from the areas that have retained their original features. This is because she’s not merely depicting, she is painting history, and not reality – it is in past tense, not in present tense. There are no persons in the paintings, and rarely any moving things. Strictly spoken, the meaning of her paintings is not about urban landscapes, but about the experience of existence. Looking at these pictures one by one is like browsing a sealed diary: They silently appear, increase the distance with the viewer and the distance with earthly life, and emerge a kind of extraordinary eternal beauty.

　　This series of landscape oil paintings is also very special in its artistic expression. As the main subjects are buildings, the geometrical relations occupy a leading role. As the painter does not emphasize the depth of space, plane segmentation seems even more important. The painter’s mastery in this respect can be seen in pictures like Spring, Watchtower, Frame, Dilapidated Building, Twilight, etc. Even Fishbone, a picture that seems like a still life, also has this architectural feeling. But the painter does not just inflexibly and rationally sketch geometrical shapes, she often paints very relaxed with a strong expressionist feeling. Representative paintings like Old Home, Old Area, Parasol, Night Rain, City, etc. All tend to be deep, satiated and imposing in their use of colours, showing an inherent quality of oil paintings. The painter’s personal language is still not very pronounced. If she can gradually find a kind of personal oil painting language, then she should soon be able to establish a personal style.

　　June 2000