The window has an enduring presence in art history; as early as 1435 Leon Battista Alberti famously stated: “First of all, on the surface which I am going to paint, I draw a rectangle of whatever size I want, which I regard as an open window through which the subject to be painted is seen”. A metaphorical portal into liminal spaces, the image of the window presents instantaneous drama, romance, fantasy and longing, and has oft been employed to invoke a dialogue between perceptual and intellectual vision, and between the realistic world and the imagined or ‘painted’ realms. An utterly exquisite and entrancing gem of a painting, Liu Ye’s charming The Window fully embodies and epitomizes the trope of painting as window. The borders of the canvas functions simultaneously as the frame of a depicted window, which is rendered in straight-on perspective in severe, clinically executed lines. The pristine geometry of the window opens into a backyard blooming with lush trees – notably, this is the view from the artist’s studio, featuring the pointed rooftop present in other works featuring a similar view. The young protagonist, a subtle self-portrait, is positioned almost completely out of sight – only a sliver of the side of his face, one arm, and the ubiquitous black binoculars are in view. Presented on a diminutively sized canvas, Liu Ye’s bold composition of a frame within a frame speaks volumes, diffracting multiple views of conceptual and imagined reality, and exuding a rich aura of fantasy and theatrical power.

Liu Ye has painted windows since his early days in Germany. In Atelier from 1991, the first work included in the artist’s catalogue raisonee, light from the outside pours through tall windows to illuminate the eccentric interior scene; in The Broken Mirror from 1992, the elegant angles and cascading lines of opened windows occupy half of the painting’s entire composition. Gradually these windows became substituted by paintings by Mondrian, whose stark geometry aligned perfectly with Liu Ye’s modus operandi. For the first and only t.mes , The Window sees Liu Ye employing the entire pictorial space for the motif, with the meticulously delineated window enclosing the expanse of the canvas, setting the foundation for the unique perspectival view. Imbued with mystery and ambiguity, The Window pays homage not only to Mondrian but a multitude of art historical and cultural references; amongst many others, there are echoes of Barnett Newman in the vertical cut through the center of the painting. Bernhard Fibicher observes: “In his work Liu Ye strives to combine the imagination and sensibility of the fairytale with the strictly rational thinking of philosophy, to obtain a synthesis of eastern art (in his paintings we can trace Chinese but also Japanese influences) and western role models (Mondrian, Barnett Newman etc.) in strict and at the same t.mes playful visual findings”. A sublime synthesis of East and West, tradition and contemporaneity, The Window manifests as a quietly theatrical conceptual prism, drawing our worldly vision into fantastical realms of fairytales and dreams.

Born in 1964, Liu Ye grew up in a highly artistic and literary family: his father wrote children’s fairy tales and his mother was a language teacher. During the Cultural Revolution his parents hid all their books, which Liu Ye found and read in secret, spending long quiet hours enthralled by illustrations from foreign lands. After the Cultural Revolution, Liu Ye enrolled in the vocational Beijing College of Art and Design in 1980 and then the Central Academy of Replica Handbags s (CAFA) in Beijing in 1986, receiving a strict, orthodox education with a limited exposure to Western art that was nevertheless transformative. His first influences included Paul Klee and René Magritte, whose works he encountered through printed materials. In 1989, Liu Ye left for Germany where he remained until 1994, receiving an MFA from the Berlin University of the Arts. During his t.mes in Europe, Liu Ye’s influences ranged from works from the early Renaissance, Jan van Eyck in particular, to Johannes Vermeer, Giorgio Morandi, Balthus, Giorgio de Chirico, Piet Mondrian, Klee, and Magritte. Digesting a plethora of styles and techniques, Liu Ye developed his own whimsical surrealist style, one which, as the critic Zhu Zhu put it, was uniquely positioned between a contemporary Pop aesthetic and the Flemish tradition of Stilleven – a world of equipoise and stillness. Per Zhu, Liu Ye sensed in the Flemish painters “the appeal of language that transcends temporality and regionalism”.

Contemplating the long tradition of painting and artistic creation and his journey to find his own path and position, Liu Ye once said: “I don’t want to become an artist who represents reality, to revert to the early Renaissance. I’m not the realist type. My interest lies in post-modernism, so my images contain a bit of surrealism, of un-reality”. It is precisely this fairytale quality of ‘un-reality’ that defines Liu Ye’s paintings and his globally acclaimed oeuvre; like no other Chinese artist before him, Liu Ye perfectly assimilated geometric abstraction into hyper-figurative representation, superlatively straddling realism and post-modern appropriation to arrive at a hybrid visual language. Whether in early works that incorporated Mondrian paintings within their compositions, or in the later Bamboo and Books series where Liu Ye’s gradual exclusion of narrative foregrounded the primacy of the geometric line, Liu Ye’s consistent explorations in abstraction and enduring fidelity to representation result in a curious tension and interaction within the compositional framework. His inimitable geometric strategies lend his canvases a sense of still yet dynamic harmony and equilibrium – one that unfailingly tingles with an illuminated, weightless quality in spite of exacting details. A very special and extraordinarily advanced work, The Window invites us to peer into a new space of possibility within the fraught boundary line of abstraction and representation.

窗，在古往今來的藝術作品中頻頻出現。早於1435年，萊昂・巴蒂斯塔・阿伯提（Leon Battista Alberti）就留下一句名言：「我首先在畫面上勾勒出一個大小適中的四邊形，然後把它視為是一扇敞開的窗戶，我們就透過這扇窗戶觀察繪畫的對象。」窗戶富含隱喻意味，是一個通往過渡空間的入口，它呈現了某個瞬間的戲劇場景、或浪漫或奇幻的氛圍、以及渴望之情，而且經常用來引發客觀與主觀視角、真實與想像或筆下世界之間的對話。本作《窗》精緻動人，將窗戶這一主題發揮得淋漓盡致。畫布邊緣就是窗框，畫家以精準冷硬的直線，刻畫出直視中的玻璃窗。窗戶的幾何結構乾淨利落，窗外的院落栽滿蔥鬱的樹木——這是從劉野的工作室向外眺望的景致，在他的一些作品中也可以看到類似的三角屋頂。左下角的人物是劉野低調的自畫像，他幾乎不為人所注意，只稍微露出側臉和一條手臂，手中舉著一個普通的黑色望遠鏡。本作尺寸精巧，然而劉野在畫框裡畫上窗框的大膽構圖，卻彷彿打開了無盡可能，折射出多個構思及想像中的圖景，展示出充滿敘事感染力的奇幻氛圍。

早在負笈德國的歲月裡，窗戶已經成為劉野畫中的常客。例如收錄於其專題目錄的第一幅作品、1991年的《畫室》中，陽光透過高高的窗戶傾瀉而下，照亮室內的擺設；1992年的《破鏡》中，半掩的窗戶線條層層疊疊，優雅的夾角佔據了半個畫面。隨著時間推移，劉野作品中的窗戶逐漸被蒙德里安的畫取代，蒙氏作品中犀利的幾何圖案與劉野一貫的表現手法有著異曲同工之妙。《窗》是劉野第一次、也是唯一一次把窗戶與整個畫面重合，借助仔細勾勒的窗框把畫面鑲起來，為獨特的視角設下框架。本作流露出一種神秘莫測的感覺，它不僅向蒙德里安致敬，而且還暗藏了不少藝術及文化符號；其中畫面中央的垂直線就投射了巴奈特・紐曼的典型手法。伯恩哈德・費比查（Bernhard Fibicher）觀察道：「劉野在創作中將童話的想像和感性、與哲學純粹的理性思考互相結合，錘煉出吸收東方藝術（他的畫有中國和日本的影響）與西方大師（蒙德里安、巴奈特・紐曼等）精髓的綜合體，得出的視覺效果思慮周詳，但同時充滿玩味。」本作糅合東方與西方、傳統與當代，猶如安靜地折射出內心意念的棱鏡，把我們身處的凡塵俗世牽扯進充滿童話色彩的夢幻王國中。

劉野1964年生於書香世家，父親從事童話寫作，母親是語文教師。文化大革命期間，他的父母藏起家中所有書卷，劉野發現後偷偷躲起來閱讀，長時間沉迷於外國著作的插圖裡。文化大革命結束後，劉野在1980及1986年先後考入以職業導向的北京工藝美術學校及中央美術學院，接受嚴格的傳統訓練，接觸的西方藝術有限，但仍獲益良多；保羅・克利和雷內・馬格利特畫作的印刷品是他的啓蒙課。1989年，劉野遠赴德國，入讀柏林藝術大學並取得碩士學位，1994年學成歸國。他在留歐的日子裡深受歷代藝術名家啓發，遠至文藝復興早期，尤其是揚・凡・埃克，近至約翰尼斯・維梅爾、喬治・莫蘭迪、巴爾蒂斯、喬治・德・基里科、皮耶・蒙德里安、保羅・克利及雷內・馬格利特等。他努力消化各種風格和技法，並一路發展出自成一格的超現實美學，如評論家朱朱所言，就是落在當代普普藝術和法蘭德斯傳統靜物畫「Stilleven」中平衡與安靜的世界之間的風格。朱朱形容，劉野從佛蘭芒畫家的作品中感受到「超越時間和地域的語言魅力」。

劉野在思考繪畫藝術的淵博傳統及回顧年輕時尋找自我的旅程時說：「我不想回到文藝復興初期，當一個描畫現實的藝術家。我不是寫實派。我喜歡後現代主義，因此我的圖像帶有一點超現實主義、非寫實的色彩。」正是這種童話般的「非現實感」定義了劉野的畫作，使他蜚聲國際。他把幾何抽象和超具象融會貫通，跨越現實主義和後現代挪用的藩籬，淬煉出一套博采眾長的視覺語彙，在中國藝術界獨創新風。無論是糅合蒙德里安特色的早期作品，還是後來逐步抽離敘事以突顯幾何線條的《竹子》和《書本》系列，劉野對抽象藝術和具象表現手法的探求始終如一，兩者共同為作品注入一股難以言喻的張力和生機。他的幾何構圖方式令畫面具備一種靜止而又蠢蠢欲動的協諧和均衡，即使細節處理得一絲不苟，整幅畫面依然瑩瑩生輝，浮現出輕逸的無重感。今次上拍的作品雖然小巧玲瓏，但卻是一幅非凡的臻熟之作，在搖搖欲墜的抽象和具象分野中，開闢出一片新天。