In ancient Egypt, the term “sculptor” originally referred to a person who makes people immortal. To the ancient Egyptians, sculptures of human figures were just equivalent to human, both being spiritual life existences; and the Pharaohs had sculptors make their statues with hard granite, as they believed, by virtue of which they could live forever. A famous story Roman Mythology even goes that a statue indeed came to life. Roman poet Ovidius, narrated in his Metamorphoses that Pygmalion, king of Cyprus, with his virtuosity, carved a ivory portrait of Venus, who was so lifelike and of such matchless fairness that he could not help falling in love with her. His pious prayers eventually moved Venus, the goddess of love and beauty, who gave the portrait a soul to be living. Finally the king got his wish and married Galatea, the belle that came out of the portrait. From the old-age ideas and the legendary tale, we can draw that sculptor is a sacred and mysterious profession, whose works symbolize life and eternity, and crystallize love and beauty.

　　It is exactly such a profession that Liu Yonggang is engaged in. His works have chosen life as theme and also carried a moral of love.

　　In February 2007, Liu Yonggang had a sculpture and painting exhibit Standing Characters at the National Art Museum of China. This exhibit received great attention from the artistic and educational communities because Liu transformed two-dimensional Chinese characters into three-dimensional stone carvings and named his Character Carving Art series after Embrace of Love. Sculpture like this is truly an unprecedented creation. The first time I set my eyes on these carvings, I became fascinated by the unique creativity and the novelty designs, then I made comment with a article titled Conjunction and Fission of Shape and Meaning - Interpretation of Liu Yonggang's Character Carving Art (contained in the first half of June 2007 issue of the magazine Oriental Art - Masters). Now, another year passed, when I met again Liu Yonggang and his new works, I was surprised to find that his Character Carving Art have adopted some new changes.

　　Liu Yonggang's Character Carving Art benefit from the revelation of Chinese characters, though, they are no imitations but structures similar to the characters. I ever summarized the characteristics of his works with the remark “standing characters, walking human; pictographic words, symbolic meaning”. In fact, the reason why Liu named the works after “Embrace of Love” is that the sculptures are all couples embracing, holding hands and advancing side by side. When all these works came together for display or exhibition, it seemed to us a magnificent and most loving mass wedding, even with Wagner’s solemn and jubilant Wedding March in our ears.

　　Since 1999 when Liu Yonggang started his Character Carving Art of Embrace of Love Series, he has accomplished 2 groups of over 200 pieces. Compared with the previous first 102 pieces exhibited, the second batch of 110 pieces Liu finished in 2007 did not take another theme, meaning that Embrace of love has remained to be his persistent subject. However, in expressions of the unaltered theme, Liu’s new works have refreshingly varied in many aspects.

　　First, organic life. The base of Liu’s Character Carving Art is personified reform of the structures of Chinese characters. But in the new works, Liu has abandoned this adhesion and inclined more to do the body shapes. In my view, Liu’ works have changed from “notional figures” to “substantive portraits”. Or we say Liu has shifted the targets of his expression from pictographic notions to organic life.

　　Second, abundant shapes. For his first batch of Character Carving Art, Liu employed the style of seal character. Each stroke constituting the works is a quadruple prism with same thickness, suggesting sculptures of Western modern minimalism and imposing strong coldness of rationalism. While in the second batch, strokes of the body and limbs of portraits have become irregular and the mode of neat quadruple prisms has also been smashed and replaced with a shaping method that fits human body structure better.

　　Third, dynamic structures. Each piece of Liu’s first batch, when viewed from the side - be it complex or simplified when viewed head-on - shows an image of Chinese character “人” (meaning “people” or “human”), thus, if aligned, they would form a neat walking queue. But we can see that many of his new works have breached that homogeneous style and presented rich forms. Standing, walking, looking at each other face to face, holding hands back to back, these lovers display various poses and relationships, and even there are trios.

　　Fourth, multidimensional space. Chinese characters are the parent of Liu Yonggang's Character Carving Art and also its shackles, as we could notice in his early works, he was somewhat constrained by the two-dimensional planarity of Chinese characters. Despite all his efforts to highlight the three-dimensional nature of sculptures with the figures' movement, slight monotony and rigidity just would not leave these works. In his second batch, Liu paid more attention to build the multidimensional spatial sense, and for this time, he took comprehensive spatial orientations into consideration, including horizontal, vertical directions and also interior and exterior spaces. The occupation of multidimensional space has spiced up Liu's Character Carving Art with a care-free, lively and flexible aesthetic form.

　　Fifth, complex feelings. The first batch conveys to us similarity in styling and singleness in connotations and feelings as well. In comparison to the happy and spirited tone of Liu’s early Character Carving Art, in his new works, we feel some mild yet lingering sadness beyond the joyous atmosphere. Such a change serves as an indication of Liu's remarkable progress in revealing the complexity of human nature.

　　Liu Yonggang's introduction of Chinese characters into sculptures originated from his application of the characters in painting. As far back as 1985, Liu had adopted Chinese characters in an oil painting Memory of the Rock. That is usually symbolic, depicting a global map on the background of a rock bestrewn with mosses whose territories are stitched together by a set of oracles. In 1989, Liu utilized Mongolian to complete a series of paintings, Mongolia. From 1997, Liu began the mass use of characters in his paintings and the characters even become the main content, with which, Liu created a unique landscape painting type of abstract expressionism. With his deepening study, Liu Yonggang managed to feel the three-dimensionality of Chinese characters and the idea of letting the characters “standing up” arose in him. As for the emergence of Embrace of Love, such a love theme, it was closely related to the appearance of Liu' true love in his life in 1999. The intimacy of strolling, embracing and kissing of his lover sparked his inspiration. From then on, the couple pattern has been established stably in his works of Character Carving Art. Besides his personal experience, Liu always carries a mini digital camera each time he goes out to capture a variety of intimate behaviors of both old and young couples in the streets and lanes. Yet certainly, the love represented by Liu's Embrace of Love is not limited to the love between men and women, which exactly, in my opinion, is a combination of Yin and Yang, symbolizing the universal and eternal law of Yin-Yang complementarity and inter-promotion of contradictions.

　　Being half Mongolian, Liu has in his blood the rough and uninhibited nature of this nation on horseback. He favors magnificent arts rather than those delicate. It is to admire and pursue the vigorous and powerful features of Qin and Han dynasties that he used seal character for the Character Carving Art. A long-time living and learning experience in Germany also cultivated his modern cultural outlook and cosmopolitanism, and his art forms and themes are both products of cosmopolitan awareness and the spirit of the times. Liu said, “the Terra Cotta Warriors of Qinshihuang Mausoleum, stone carvings of Han Dynasty and Genghis Khan Mausoleum all have power and dominance, but that is the power of swords and confrontation, what I wish is to conquer hearts with the power of love.” That is why Liu's works of Character Carving Art have delivered tenderness of love in the bold momentum.

　　The materials Liu Yonggang used for his Character Carving Art come from Zhengmao Town, Xinle city of Hebei province, where locates a well-known marble factory of Taihang Mountain, specializing in manufacturing a wide array of practical marble products. Liu Yonggang has made a massif of Nine Fairies Peak into over 200 pieces large stone carvings. We have to say that, these stones are really fortunate as they have escaped the fate of becoming paving stones and turned into works of arts as expressions of love and indeed into spiritual lives. Each stone Liu used weighed up to 30 tons, and 15 tons when finished, measuring 3.4m(height)*2.2m(length)* 1.5m(width). At first, Liu tried black, white and red marbles, and the black jades were chosen for their deep solemnity. There is no doubt that it was a mammoth and amazingly laborious project.

　　Liu Yonggang's Character Carving Art has not merely succeeded in the modern transformation of traditional culture, but also broken new ground in blending Chinese and Western arts, bringing us aesthetic experience and provoking our rational thinking. In the colorful temporary Chinese art world, Liu Yonggang's Character Carving Art has demonstrated its unique charm. Being an artist that explores untiringly, Liu Yonggang is not going to cease his progress, so in what way will his Standing Words stride into the future? We are expecting optimistically.

　　Wang Duanting:

　　Researcher of Art Institute, Chinese National Academy of Arts