Cao Liwei
Liwei has always been my mentor. He was the one who showed me that an artist’s work is bound to be inseparable from their own personal experiences. He was the one who opened my eyes to art, and even life itself.
It was 1984, and I was still in my last year at the Affiliated High School of the Central Academy of Fine Arts when Liwei, a professor from Studio 3 at the oil painting department at the Central Academy, came to teach at our school to give us a taste of college education right before the college entrance examinations. My four years at school were spent flamboyantly, chasing blindly after trends. I painted my fingers to the bone, imitating first old school English watercolor, then the Russian style of Repin. When I thought I’d mastered those styles, I set my sights on naïve art, rebelling against conventional training, running pell mell after “style” and modernism, and even dabbled in performance art, a channel for primitive instincts. I chased after all of these things, yet forgot who I was, where I was from, how I was unique.
The college entrance examinations were almost upon us, and we put away our wild ambitions for the time being, taking up the classics so we’d have an easier time of getting into Central Academy. That’s when Liwei arrived. He set up a still life—but it couldn’t even be called that. It was just a stove with some wood and coal piled beside it, and he even went and ground the coals under his feet and kicked the pieces around. The Cezannes in our class sat with mouths agape, along with the backlit floral arrangement connoisseurs. All we could do was duck our heads and begin drawing. As my charcoal moved across the paper, an indescribable feeling started to take over my senses. I thought of my childhood, when we would bring our lunchboxes to school, and would stack them by a stove just like the one in front of me. Come lunchtime we would scramble to the stove to get a share of food, crunching coal bits and wood scraps beneath our feet. I couldn’t tear my gaze away from the familiar scene before me and my go-to still life routine lay in pieces like the coal cinders on the floor.
After class, I went and did another sketch of a pile of coals stacked in the school yard with a water tap in the background. I showed it to Liwei, and he said, “Very untamed…very raw. But can’t you make the tap bigger? It’s a tap that wild-hearted youngsters from the north would often get their tongues stuck on in the winter, isn’t it?”
His words hit home. Suddenly, art wasn’t so grand and lofty, and for the first time, I felt it in my heart, a living, breathing thing.
The exchange opened my eyes and made me realize the value of understanding myself and following my own instincts. If instinct tells me one particular path is truest to myself, I should take it, because the artist is always right. For this reason alone, I applied for Studio 3 at the Central Academy and became his student, as well as his friend. I would often go to his house in the evenings to grab a bite to eat, where jokes and teasing flew back and forth at the dinner table, with little talk about art. Two years later, Liwei set off for America with his wife and settled down in the New York, after which we often wrote to each other.
In 2005, almost 20 years later, Liwei came back to China, the same witty man he always was who enjoyed a good joke; still hiding gems of thought between the lines of nonsense talk.
Liwei is a proud man who doesn’t like to make a show of his artwork, putting the rest of us strutting peacocks to shame.
In his words and actions, as well as his creative process, I feel that he has rewritten that famous quote from Ernst Gombrich, “There really is not Art. There are only artists,” to something like “I don’t like art. I only like artists,” or something along the lines of “I only like art, not artists.” Which one of these statements are true? You’d best go ask Liwei himself.
Liwei will always be my mentor.
Xiaodong
December 30, 2013