| A ghost materialized, wandering in the street of a city in the middle of the night—this was the feeling I had when I first saw the new works of Liu Xin-Tao. People fear the night because they can’t see the world as clearly as they do during the day, and that makes them feel they’re small and helpless. It is also in the night that people are allowed to imagine and dream the indescribable and the inexplicable, which they can’t during the day. There are so many stories about the night around the world and in different languages, expressing reveries and emotions people have for the natural darkness. To a great extent, the reveries, descriptions or emotions about nights came into being in the ancient agricultural age, as a result of the relationship between humans and nature. | 
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Gao Ling
Liu Xin-Tao, Collapse Night 20#, 2007. Oil on canvas, 120 x 150 cm. Courtesy of Pata Gallery.A ghost materialized, wandering in the street of a city in the middle of the night—this was the feeling I had when I first saw the new works of Liu Xin-Tao. People fear the night because they can’t see the world as clearly as they do during the day, and that makes them feel they’re small and helpless. It is also in the night that people are allowed to imagine and dream the indescribable and the inexplicable, which they can’t during the day. There are so many stories about the night around the world and in different languages, expressing reveries and emotions people have for the natural darkness. To a great extent, the reveries, descriptions or emotions about nights came into being in the ancient agricultural age, as a result of the relationship between humans and nature. Not until the Industrial Revolution of the capitalism and the birth of modern cities were associations of humans, cities, and artificial scenery added to these stories about nights. In the 19th century, Charles Baudelarie was one of the people who were sensible to the night scenery of French cities. Baudelarie’s keen sense enlightened Walter Benjamin. In his grand research topic Plan on Arcade, Walter Benjamin described and revealed, with vivid words, behaviors of modern city dwellers to open up a new way to study their spiritual world.
The world in Liu’s painting is also about the city night, but his night image isn’t about Paris at the end of the 19th century or at the beginning of the 20th century, but about a small city in the south west of China, in the first several years of 21st century. Liu has been living and working in such a city. He has witnessed a street transformed from simple and crude to brilliant and prosperous. So has him seen the side effects of such a transform—derelicts like scattered garbage, dazzling colorful advertisements, and do-nothing crowds. In China and in a small inland city, every day there is an inrush of farmers who have lost their land from nearby areas, along with jobless people, who become vagrants in a city street at night. Interestingly, Liu doesn’t depict how these vagrants occupy the public city space, but focuses on the environment where they live in on a city night, as the state or behavior of these people is deeply influenced by their surroundings. The city scenery at night is more unique and powerful than it is during the day. Liu succeeds in engaging the audience by bringing their attention to deep influences of the external environment on human beings, and by exerting his imagination and sensitivity about the night. It is hard for us to find, in Liu’s works, crowds and crowds of people, but we find empty shops, buildings, and streets occasionally lighted by cars passing by, showing the nightly loneliness after the hustle and bustle of a city quiets down.
What on earth intrigues Liu to be different with most artists hot on a town life in night marketplaces of small cities and the urban petty bourgeois, but turn to silence and obsolescence after clamor? If you want to find out inside reasons, maybe you can study changes on his works in recent two years after moving his studio to Beijing. Beijing—a super-large city, streets, buildings and plazas here have larger dimensions than a small city—Sichuan. In Beijing a giant city space is divided and wrapped by reinforcements, cement and glass curtain wall; apparently, their existences intend to accommodate more people to live and work in, however, they change ways of direct communication between human and human—all things in a regular order and become indirect and circuitous. E.g., two persons looking at each other on two sides of a street have to bypass a long way to cross over a rail fence in the middle.
Facilities and regulations of these cities seem to be the materialized high walls, display city civilization and modern rationality and regulate all persons in one city, therefore, each goes his own way, improve efficiency and live in peace with each other. However, at night it seems to be the Pandora’s Box and shows another face—garbage bins lying disorderly on the partition area in the middle of a street, withered lilies dropping to pieces randomly, wild dogs doing sexual intercourse without any considerations and underground shaft covers symbolizing dirtiness and garbage…the all makes lights gave out by lamp houses, shops and street lamps more weird and desolate. Existence of the latter brings people no sunshine and intimacy, but makes all city scenes before eyes look more remote, distant and hard to hold at night.
No matter a small city in the southwest and the capital in the north, the development difference in regional economy makes different cities with different scales, but the difference brings artists no sense of security. Conversely, a bigger and more developed city brings along oppressing sensation and sense of strangeness hard to refuse. For better representation of an insecurity sense, Liu’s night painting always has a young man and a young woman hugging together closely in dark, their images or identities are obscure, but the image of the man with a bake upper body seemingly imply random or dirtiness behind city civilization, especially when the image appears on the symbol street of a central city in China, even if in the dark of night.
As if all street scenes and facilities were the city skin with a duality, during the day it is spirited and vigorous but at night reveals its face of declining, decadence and deterioration. Desiring lures and inexplicable uneasiness are swarming, maybe only the close hug can evade the fears to the surrounding environment. At night and in a countryside field, people always worry that they would be possessed by souls in the dark to take away their spirit. In human mind, the soul always has a human image. Facing a city scene at night, nobody would have a psychological projection of souls, but shop windows, street lamps, occasional cars and white garbage left by days, etc. are just as many invisible hands tearing sensory organs and affecting nerve endings of the people. Seemingly, before our eyes a picture is spreading behind a canvas personally torn by an artist, which is completely enwrapped with a single dark-grey tone. It is the tearing deep in the spirit, struggles and fights between a soul behind a materialized scene at night and a sensory nerve of an artist, miserable but transient and full of obliquity and uncertainty. Liu makes a success in guiding us into his spirit world to sense his game playing with the materialized reality. In the mean while, he enlightens us to think the social reality outside a picture; what we shall do facing influences and lures of the reality?
