August 4 – 31, 2020
Back Chase Contemporary is pleased to announce Between Colors and a Hard Place , an exhibition of new paintings by Chinese artist Liu Shuishi. This presentation, featuring gestural and richly textured oil paintings, examines the artist's own philosophies about identity and the tension between existence and selfhood. On view at the gallery's 23rd street location, the show marks the artist's second solo exhibition at Chase Contemporary. Every encounter with Liu Shuishi's paintings is one with a philosophical mind at work. Ideas are made concrete, conveyed by highly expressive yet controlled marks of paint on canvas. Flowing from a combination of figurative illusions and textual references given by the allusive titles, each title unveils a philosophical concept. For instance, Can't Identify alludes to a kind of self-portrait where the subject is squeezed between two masses of color. The figure is thin and elongated like a Giacometti figure, which the artist first saw in Paris. Like Giacometti, Shuishi is squeezed between two cultures to his native one and his adopted one- the Eastern and the Western, feeling the pressure and also the sense of liberation he shares with every émigré artist who has preceded him. Liu is quiet, meditative, and a voracious consumer of philosophy. Following the prompting of emotion, he brings his innermost thoughts and feelings outwards in painting. Liu follows in the tradition of revealing the journey of man alone, thrown into existence, bound by passionate human emotion. In the painting Kafka , the cover of a book is part of the painting, superimposed together with a brush as an object trouvé. The book is a short story by Franz Kafka, The Great Wall of China. In that short story Kafka describes the building of the Great Wall in many sections far away from one another, instead of as a continuous wall. It is impossible to produce a unified work; we always hopelessly work in fragments, piece after piece, dreaming of the wholeness that lies ahead. The triangle and the circle are recurring symbols in Liu Shuishi's paintings. The former indicates a sense of stabilization, the latter a sense of the unknown. Shuishi's ideas