Liu was born and brought up in Harbin in northern China, a place much influenced by Russian culture. She started to learn Western painting when she was little and has enjoyed widening recognition in China’s art circles since she was 20-something. Her notable early work focused on rendering China’s northern landscape in oil, but after the 1990s, her accumulated life experience moved her attention to that most generous muse, the human condition. Mirrors and cosmetics – two important props in women’s daily lives, are often deployed as major elements in her compositions. The Ordinary Life series presents images of middle-aged women before their vanity cases with masks obscuring their faces. The models were mainly her well-educated friends and herself, and reflect their thoughts about the worlds they inhabit.

    Ordinary Life consists of 17 oil paintings depicting the family lives that revolve around the artist and her friends. Five paintings comment on her relationship with her immediate family. The series uses quotidian scenes of home life, each dominated by the reflection of a woman in a mirror wearing a blank or absent look. No. 4 of the series portrays her in a bath robe wearing a lonely and helpless expression, and her son wearing a pair of tinted glasses while playing in the tub. No. 14 is composed of three parts: the upper left part is a bird in a cage; the upper right shows water running out of a faucet, and in the lower middle a woman wears a white mask, her lips swollen and eyes rimmed in dark red.

    Some critics comment that the Ordinary Life series is an unflinchingly honest look at the inner lives of women (and more to the point, women artists), constituting a serious commentary on contemporary society. Mirrors, it suggests, are like another pair of eyes for women, and art itself is the artist’s means of reflecting on society. Through them, a woman and an artist not only looks at and improves herself, but also observes and judges others.

    Gao Qian’s Modern Classics

    Gao Qian (born in 1973) gained overnight fame for her fine brushwork painting Duality. Her works do not fall easily into categories like landscape, bird-and-flower or figure painting, nor are they equivalent to Western still life paintings – a genre depicting inanimate subject matter. A still life by Gao is often animated by colorful butterflies.

    Gao grew up in Nanjing and studied traditional Chinese painting at the Nanjing Arts Institute for seven years. This formal education and her thorough study of the paintings of the Song Dynasty laid down a solid foundation for her classical literati painting technique. The canvases often feature a free and natural style, well-knit lines, and a wider panorama than a classic still life. On top of that, her works are imbued with women’s distinctive sweetness and grace. Many of her works incorporate an ancient Chinese vase disgorging flowers in full bloom, around which frolic butterflies and dragonflies. The still and the motion are perfectly married.

    Her works sometimes suggest a subtle eroticism. In Flowers with Shoe, a spray of pear blossom, delicate and elegant, is set quietly beside a woman’s high heel. Gao perfectly combines and interprets the classical within the modern, the West within the East, and contrast within harmony. Both her technique and novel conceptualization form a style that is distinct in contemporary Chinese art.