Powen Gallery is pleased to present "Liú Yung-jen: Cruising Alone in Painting?", a solo exhibition featuring the artist Liú Yung-jen's recent paintings. The show runs from November 19 to December 17.

The work of Liú Yung-jen often arouses passionate debate between the figurative and the abstract. But this contention is ensued from a misunderstanding of abstraction and figuration as opposites rather than complementary, and a failure to understand the complex relationship between painting and the world it seeks to represent.

We can venture a hypothesis that Liú Yung-jen's artistic practice goes through the mental processes of 'Einfühlung' (Empathy) and 'Fernbild' (the distant form of vision). He attempts to 'feel himself' in his works but never is he strayed from the realm of visual re-presentation, only that the re-presentation of the external world is not his intent, but rather, the unification of form on the canvas. It is, therefore, reasonable to assume that the beautiful but slightly somber greyish blue in Through Infinity 1, the cheerful and luscious orange in Through Infinity 2, and the gleaming and luminous yellow in Through Infinity 3 in the three circular paintings, all come from the painter's perception and sensation of a slice of his life or a corner of the world, and then ' Einfühlung' to these swathes of colour. These vast expanses of colour, painted with brushes of various sizes, are almost 'the Monochrome', and Denys Riout believes that the monochrome between the absolute and the void is 'a re-presentation of a lack of re-presentation, a visibility of the invisible'. Yet because of this void, the paintings imbue strong intention.

But Liú does not paint in monochrome. He always opens up gaps at the edges or in the centre of his paintings and embeds distinctive forms, such as the series of works developed in the 2010s from the lotus or haystack and evolved in 2021 where the rectangle is formed by the interlacing of half-orange and half-yellow triangles emerged from the black. The form resembles a living organism that changes constantly and recurs in different paintings. Its size and composition, its totality and fragmentation, suggest shifts in perspective. Be it drawing closer or further away, it parallels the perfectionistic cinematography, repeatedly capturing the same scene that fascinates the painter. The tiny, subtle and hazy star-like forms that drift across each painting, seemingly restrained and unobtrusive, but escaping the flat monotony and ornamentation of the tract of colour, open up spatial layers in the painter's consciousness. The reality beneath this simple appearance is all the more intriguing for its simplicity, and for the fact that in addition to the intrinsic and external worlds the artist attempts to re-present, there are layers of meticulous underpainting, an inevitable expression of mediums (various paints, solvents, brushes, canvas, paper, lead, beeswax, etc.), and brush strokes that embraces the interplay between homogeneity and diversity. The painting seems to respond to the action of the painter with the reality of its mediums and the operation of the form itself.