Liu Huiting

My creative experience, most of which has been the exploration of recollection, is the scenery of past life and always rests on my emotions. Moving from a small town to a city and now to a metropolis has had an important influence on my thought processes. Strolling in the cities, seeing things quite familiar, my memories from the past are woken up. I often shuttle back and forth between concepts of ‘site’ and ‘memory’. That unexpected place where reality and imagination meet becomes my primary source of inspiration.

 

I experimented with a wide range of medium in painting, acrylic, metal and flocking. Through the contrast relationship among materials - soft and hard, natural and artificial, liquid and solid as well as adding layers and scraping paint from the work to deconstruct the language of space and layers of memory in the different texture. Meanwhile, I make sculptures in using ceramics, which is divorced from the function of container. As its character of uncertain progress of the fire and the quality of difficult to control, I paint on clay as I paint on canvas, and it feeds me back an unexpected result. Like life always encounter unexpected things, whatever get or loss, they all turned into memories.

 

In the green series, the paintings have imagery of water and wall as the carriers of memory. Walls are rebuilt or repainted over and over again. Thickening the texture just like those memories that we still remember accumulate over time. Water is different; it has no trace, but its significance is in the flow, silently eroding everything. Just like memory that is on the verge of being forgotten, yet they impact subtly. I grow the memory in water of my childhood, and then I grow as my memories pile up. The river of memory is dyed green by time, which is the colour that time leaves, representing the continuation of life. Or, as Sugimoto named his book Until it grows moss.

 

In the series fear, loneliness, pain, the norms of traditional ceramics are challenged - each work in this series is composed by several individual ceramic pieces assembled after the fire. The inspiration for this approach comes from the plastic insert toys, which can be randomly assembled into different shapes. My works can be taken apart and also be re-assembled forming various sculptures each time, but because of the materiality of ceramics, the assembling process becomes quite adventurous - they may fall and break at any time because of imbalance. The difference between the plastic toys and my work can be seen as the distance between the ‘ideal’ of child and the ‘real’ of adult.