Eyes filled with contempt mixed with dread, expressions of defiance amid hopelessness…
These are the emotions we encounter in Self-Portrait No. 8, 2021 (2021), a work by the Chinese contemporary artist Liu Yaming 刘亚明. In what was supposed to be an era full of vitality and hope, Liu’s Self-Portraits series conveys an emotional resilience that challenges despair. As if to penetrate the primordial “darkness over the surface of the deep,” his gaze evokes a longing for the light of eternity.
To a certain extent, Liu Yaming’s “Life Portrait” series represents a condensed expression of the “bitter self” in a unique era. For more than a decade, Liu dedicated much of his time to creating his three monumental oil paintings: Fable of the Century (2007-2009), Eye of the Sky (2011-2015), and Human Fantasy (2016-2021). In consequence, the artist has been hailed as a “prophet” of collective salvation representing the relationship between humans and the objective world (that is, the human-thing relationship); a “hopeful soul” in depicting the human-divine relationship; and a “colorful artist-intellectual” who employs magical realism to portray human-human relationships. His concern for the human condition approaches that of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, which famously graces the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel. Rather than focusing on universal fate, however, Liu’s preoccupation is with humanity’s future in this life; his rich artistic language rivals that of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in the Louvre. Rather than employing solid colors to illustrate shifting directions, he is more skilled at evoking mystery and brilliance with the use of fluid tones. Just as [The Last Judgment and the Mona Lisa] represent the height of ideas in art during the Renaissance, Liu Yaming’s trilogy marks a highpoint in the nascent spiritual mode of Chinese contemporary art!
Before embarking on his Fable of the Century, Liu Yaming's Figures (此岸, lit. “This Shore”) series (2000-2004) boldly revealed his profound compassion for women’s mortality. Emotions of loss, despair, fear, numbness, fragility, and supplication are liberated and purified by the presence of Buddha statues or angel figures. Perhaps, in the artist’s mind, human emotions – whether rooted in human-self or human-human relationships – must ultimately be grounded in the human-divine relationship. No. In fact, the enlightened figure in the paintings is usually enveloped by its own peace and tranquility, indifferent to the desperate human cries for redemption – unless the image features a Madonna-like figure who guides the way.
A resolute yet melancholic gaze—this is the living impression left by Liu Yaming's two youthful Self Portraits (1995), imbued with the sense of crisis shared by Chinese intellectuals since Qu Yuan 屈原. With time, Liu discovered that true artistic value lies not only in what the artist expresses, but also in the use of artistic language. This constitutes the inherent cultural motivation for his three seminal works. At the same time, each figure in the paintings merely externalizes the full range of the artist’s emotional experience of living, a spring that wells up from the spiritual depths encountered in the human-self relationship. Liu’s Self-Portraits 2021 series (2021) and Self-Portraits series (2024) are visual testaments to the vast compassion he demonstrated after tasting the bitterness of an era deprived of freedom. Gazes interlock with expressions of disdain and anger, shock and arrogance, hatred and disgust, weeping and lamenting, lingering and withdrawing, helplessness and sadness, suspicion and criticism, kindness and empathy, calmness and anticipation, composure and obsession.
It's true, as multidimensional portraits of individual human life, the polyvalency of negative emotions embodied in Liu Yaming’s Self-Portraits is perhaps rivaled in modern art history only by Van Gogh. Do these “Life Portraits” not epitomize our entire era?
August 14, 2025.
(The author is a critic, biblical scholar, and editor-in-chief of Humanities & Art. Translated by Naomi Thurston)
