An Attempt to Approach the Painting of Liang Fu

Everything Liang Fu does when he depicts people on a canvas after he has photographed them breaks with the expectations and ideas we generally connect with portraits. He is neither concerned with immersing himself in the soul of his counterpart, nor with the momentum of similarity, with recognizability, authenticity, characterization, or typecasting. The curiosity that he fosters for his models also does not stem from him wanting to find out more about them. He is equally unconcerned with recovering the lost memory of a particular moment, in which a facial expression was revealed to him that, in his eyes, embodies the essence of a person. With a model in a studio, the gaze of the painter on the subject of his regard influences their self-representation and plays a role in how they present themselves, pose, gesticulate, act, and behave. In contrast, when viewing the paintings of the Parisianby-choice, who was born in 1993 in Chengdu (Sichuan province), one has the impression that the person being portrayed imagines themselves to be unobserved, left to their own devices and completely alone. They appear as if engrossed in themself, perhaps startled, or lost in thought. Yet all this, which we think we see, is already an excess of interpretation and more a fantasy of our own projections.

Occasionally, in place of the portrait, the upper body of a figure without a head appears. Then, at the latest, it becomes evident, that Liang Fu - who completed his Master of Fine Arts degree at the National Fine Arts School of Nantes – is not interested in a suspension of time, but rather in movement.

In contrast to a photographic portrait, which bears witness to the presence of someone absent lest we forget, the people in his portraits appear to be fluid beings, who emerge out of nothing and disappear again as if torn out of a movement. Indeed, these portraits are not the expression of a captured moment, but rather, surprising images of transition.

We see human figures without characteristics, of whom we could not say whether they are male or female. Faces are so veiled in translucent fabrics that we can only guess at their features, eyes, eyebrows, mouth, nose, and ears underneath, and everything is fragmented and riddled with gaps. Bodies painted blue have no density, but rather appear transparent, like the negatives of a photograph. Possibly, Liang Fu wants to place a mysterious veil over the visage of a person, in order to protect them from being captured by us, named, or pinned down on something. Essentially, it has to do with anonymized or better said nameless countenances, which can not be assigned to anyone in particular. They represent the portrait itself. The subject is not the person being portrayed, but rather, the question of what a portrait is, as well as the path from a picture to painting.

While photography is intent on preserving the visible that is threatened with disappearance, this painting, concentrated on the subtle interplay of colors and shapes, light and darkness and matteness and transparency, aims, on the one hand, to bring itself to bear. On the other hand, it allows the strength of the spiritual to appear instead of the aura of the incarnate.

So, like Fu Liang softly glides between abstraction and figuration, what is depicted oscillates between real and not real. This in between, which enables a contemplative atmosphere to develop, attests to the tension between emptiness and fullness, as we know it from traditional Chinese painting. When the subject of what emptiness means to him is broached, Liang Fu brings up a picture - informed by stillness and changing between ochre and brown tones - by the artist Mǎ Yuǎn from the Song Dynasty, who was active between 1190 and 1230. It shows a lonely, bearded man, crouching on a little wooden boat with a fishing rod, who is looking at the wave-tossed water of the river full of expectation. This scene, sketched with a few strokes, appears as if lost in the monochrome emptiness of water and sky spreading out around it. These two merge into each other in such a way that the line of the horizon is tangible as a threshold, although it is barely visible. It is the gaps and the spaces in between, which are of considerable significance for the painting of Liang Fu, and which he also appreciates in the still lifes of Giorgio Morandi, for whom the space between the things is more important than the jugs, vases and cups depicted.

In the paintings of Liang Fu, emptiness proves itself to be the place where something apparently dissolves into nothing and gains presence precisely through that. This affinity to transition also expresses itself in the fact that, with him, shapes never solidify and the fluid always triumphs over the solid. For everything is in a state of flux, and the idea of permanence is just a construct put over reality. In order to illustrate his understanding of time, Liang Fu cites a passage from the work “Water and Dreams” by the Frenchman Gaston Bachelard. For the poet and the philosopher,the drop of water is a second and the flowing of a river is an allegory of eternal dying.

The constant back and forth between presence and absence, which constitute the intensity of this painting, can be understood as an analogy of the nature of memory, which comes and goes like a wave.

(Translated from the German by Alexandra Skwara)