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Curator: Leo Li Chen

‘The antiquated makes an attempt to re-establish and maintain itself within the newly achieved form.’ Artist Liu Yefu’s recent works expand from such a core idea. Liu visited the border region of Shaanxi, Shanxi, and Inner Mongolia many times and filmed the life of his protagonist, Liu Huiqing. Despite his dire circumstances, the old man Liu Huiqing continued to practice traditional painting, calligraphy and writing about local vernacular culture. What his preservation of traditional Chinese society and culture represents is particularly contradictory to the current trend of seeking novelty with new benefits. In Liu Yefu’s video work, Fool’s Paradise, Liu Huiqing’s old-fashioned way and Elon Musk’s space exploration become two sides of the same coin that are the essentially the same: whether it is global, scientific, evolutionary and radical, or local, secular, ancient and conservative, how do we define ‘new’? In his works, Liu Yefu probes the imagined interior and exterior with a highly charged visual language and insists on responding to the division of the contemporary world below secular life in this land. In this solo exhibition, Liu Yefu will present an eponymous video and a series of pottery and ink drawings.