As many artists being abroad for many years, Liu Yonggang is a familiar and unfamiliar name in the circle of painting. After graduating from Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1986, he successively won prizes in the national exhibitions to become a well known up-and-coming star in the art world. But during more than ten years of further studying abroad and residing in Germany, he was gradually forgotten by people. Last year, he returned to China to realize his grand art conception, i.e., the large scale group sculptures with the theme of “embrace of love”, the symbolic language of Chinese characters and the materials of stone. The group sculptures are composed of one hundred sculptures, some of which are still in the process of manufacturing, but they have become important components of Liu Yonggang’s first exhibition after he returned to China. “Standing Characters”, the theme of the exhibition just come from this.

　　During his ten years in Germany, Liu Yonggang mainly engaged in the easel painting. During the first few years abroad, his creation still continued the subject matter of the domestic life in grasslands, but his technique of expression was obvious affected by Durer, a great German master in the Renaissance, since Nuremberg where he lived and studied is just the hometown of Durer. During his years of studying for a master’s degree at Nuremberg College of Fine Arts, he put more energy into the training of art language and the research of art noumenon. In the subsequent abstract oil paintings, it is not difficult for us to observe the influence of German expressionism and new expressionism on him. As an overseas student, it is inevitable for him to experience such absorption and learning process. Liu Yonggang’s real turning point in the art started from his reflection on Chinese local culture. After many years’ learning and training in the West, he found that no matter who he was affected by, his cultural background still played a role, which urged him to consciously turn his viewpoint to the re-assessment on his own culture.

　　Reflecting on the East from the view of the West brought clearer perspective and definite consciousness to Liu Yonggang. As he discovered, “the characters invented by the ancestors have special vitality, especially the oracle bone inscriptions (inscriptions on bones or tortoise shells of the Shang Dynasty), nearly each character is just a painting and the invention of each character is just an art creation. Then I started to conduct research on Chinese characters of each historical period, evolution of characters, combination of characters, including combination of traditional “dragon-phoenix character” and combination of Chinese characters and Mongolian characters, as well as changes of character forms. Take the reverse write for example. After a series of exploration, I discovered that isolated from the demand on the content, the form becomes an independent beauty for the characters. I captured and artistically recreated the beauty to sublimate it. In my opinion, the recreated beauty carries forward the traditional culture and is the innovation on the existing basis as well.”

　　It seems that in the traditional Chinese culture, the most representative symbol is nothing but characters. The Chinese character, as the carrier of Chinese culture, is unique, irreplaceable and unparallel. The relevant comments are too numerous to mention one by one. A Japanese Kanji scholar said that “each Chinese character is an integrated circuit;” a Chinese poet said that “a Chinese character, just like a clear well, is used by the ancestors to flash; a critic said that if a traveler visited China a hundred years ago, he would not see a sculpture of a victor on horseback but would see Chinese characters everywhere.” For the inscriptional record of the previous dynasties, the horizontal inscribed board of memorial archway, couplet on pillar of pavilions, signboard of firm, wine flag and wall inscription of scenic spots, their images are not as real as the characters; an artist said that the Chinese people believed that the Chinese characters were generated according to the structure of the universe. When Cang Jie with four eyes created Chinese characters, the grain like rain dropped from the skies and ghosts cried in the night. In turn, they also used the structure of characters to comprehend the order of the universe. Anyone who masters the characters will master everything. The artist also said that China was not a country composed of small European style states. In the history, China would definitely combine after long separation and the Chinese character, as the uniform written language, was an important factor. Another artist even thought that the Chinese people “thought” by using “the Chinese characters” and took “the Chinese characters” as their “belief”. He said that “the life of the Chinese people was closely connected with the matrix of the Chinese characters. China has five thousand years’ history. The Chinese character was the way of the Chinese people for self-examination, self-discipline and behaving, was the magic figure for the Chinese people to pray and was the totem for the Chinese people to carry on the mission of the heaven and earth. All generations of the Chinese people should face their characters”. “The world of the Chinese characters contains everything and is a world greater than cognition and is a code with significant results of human thinking. Its profound wisdom, smart function and outstanding concept have significance on opening the door to the human wisdom forever. The Chinese character is not only the foundation stone of Chinese culture but also the source of Chinese poems. It is a treasury of wisdom necessary for the human to develop the future.”

　　Based on the recognition, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts held an exhibition in 1999 with the name of “The Power of Characters”. Also based on the recognition, many famous Chinese contemporary artists continuously explore the enormous potential of the Chinese characters in their works. Because the Chinese characters are characterized by reflecting on the nature, the “character images” corresponding to everything show their unique value in the sense of thinking and the incomparable advantage that the words composing of phonetic alphabet such as “abc” without specific “character image” do not have. The so called “character image” is the individual characteristic of each pictograph and their structure and modeling. The words composed of letters do not have such individual characteristic and model value that formed independently.

　　Therefore, the visual artists are definitely sensitive to such characters. In the past few years, various art forms were extended from the pronunciation of the Chinese characters, literal meaning, character pattern and image by the Chinese artists from different perspectives to convey their art concepts, among whom Xu Bing, Gu Wenda Wu Shanzhuan and Shi Hu are the outstanding artists.

　　Unlike the above artists, Liu Yonggang completely explained the Chinese characters from the perspective of modeling. In thousands of years, the Chinese characters evolved from oracle bone inscriptions, seal character and official character to regular script and running script to different writing styles during the process of writing, to form the history of writing and develop an independent art category (i.e. calligraphy) as well. The calligraphy is the style of writing; various “scripts” and “chirographies” evolve from “writing” which also has profound influence on the painting. In the traditional Chinese painting, the concept of “writing” has special meaning that the theory of the western painting does not have. The so called “common origin of calligraphy and painting” derived from “writing”. Liu Yonggang’s exploration on characters also started from writing. But, he did not end with the two-dimensional writing and even not end with the calligraphy level of the characters, while he put more energy into comprehending “character form” and “character image” to discover the potential component factors and visual strength of the form of characters. Then, he began attempting to change the independent characters structurally and introduce them into the space to make them stand up from the plane, so as to vertically convey their intentions in the space and show their charm.

　　Creating three-dimensional characters is a pioneering work in the history of the Chinese characters. However, the real value of Liu Yonggang’s stone sculptures is not the value of the Chinese character study. He tried to reduce the character as symbol to the appreciable state with the modeling meaning but not to the noumenon of the symbol, so the reduced characters do not have readability of the characters and only have visibility. His goal is to deduce a new type of visual style with the help of “character form” and “character image” but not to create a new type of script in the sense of the Chinese character study. His spatial “characters” do not have “pronunciation” or “meaning”. These specious “characters” are not certain characters but “script structures” similar to the Chinese characters, or a kind of visual images with the characteristics of the Chinese character structure. These “script images” lead us to a kind of tangible imagination. The theme of “embrace of love” is to convey a kind of image of support, love and embrace each other through these spatial postures similar to the human body and body language.

　　I was reminded of a large number of stone tablets and stone sculptures handed down from the ancient time of China. As the carrier of the characters and calligraphy, they have always been the object of study of philologists and calligraphers but have never been treated as the sculptures. These non-modeling character sculptures have never occupied an important position in the field of sculpture. That is because the characters on the stone tablets only have the meaning of record event but do not have the visual meaning. The meaning of the stone tablets is to record events by using characters, so such characters only have readability. However, Liu Yonggang’s stone sculptures are to create models by using characters and to convey affection through modeling, so it is the recreation of characters with visual meaning. This is because his thinking on the characters started from vision. His original “recreation” of Chinese characters not only provides a new perspective for us but also opens a new way of thinking for us to think about the uniqueness of the Chinese characters.

　　It should also be mentioned that an artist realizes his art conception through one hundred stone sculptures (340×220×150cm for each sculpture), which is unimaginable without economic support. Fortunately, when hundreds of maquettes form a matrix in his studio in Berlin, a boss loving art and knee to support artists was touched by the matrix and decided to privately provide fund for the artist to realize his long-cherished wish. Then the “earthshaking” project started in a stone sculpture plant in the suburbs of Shijiazhuang. Consequently, there is the painting album and the exhibition that we see today.

　　January 30th, 2007, Sanjingju, Shangyuan, Jingbei, Beijing