Liu Shiming observes and feels the world with an innocent eye and a pure heart, creating the original and heart-touching art. His art is rooted in life, but carefully selected and refined so that the plain reality becomes dramatized by his hand, with interesting scenes that contain the philosophy of life.

Scene 1:

Liu Shiming loves the art of opera so much that he often travels a long way to see an opera, and he is very familiar with the life of opera actors/actresses. Interestingly, instead of portraying the actors/actresses on stage, he turns his attention to the backstage, where the actors/actresses have lost the glamour of the stage and are just ordinary people, or parents. Liu Shiming has shaped the life scenes of many opera actors resting backstage, dressed in costumes but affectionately coaxing the children in their arms, or breastfeeding them or helping a small child urinate by holding his legs apart.

Scene 2:

Some works reflect the delicacy of observation of life. For example, in the work “Repairing Shoes”, the girl’s shoes are being mended by the shoemaker, while she is sitting on a bench, with her body leaning slightly on her boyfriend. Take a closer look, you will find that both her feet are actually resting on the top of the boy’s feet. This kind of observation of life’s details is really striking.

Scene 3:

A child holds up a tile basin with a wooden stick and scatters some grain below to attract the birds. A little bird is staring at the basin from afar, and the temptation of the food is about to make it throw itself into the net. This “Net and Birds” evokes many fond memories of childhood! He adds a lot of joy to the monotony of the rural kids’ childhood.

Scene 4:

Another work depicting sparrows is “Looking at Each Other Through a Cage”. The big sparrow standing outside the cage is eagerly watching the little sparrow locked in the cage, dreaming of helping it return to the sky, but they are so helpless and can only look through the cage. The work is full of wit and humour, but it makes us think deeply. This is a call to family affection, a form of praise to mother’s love. This is the benevolent heart of Liu Shiming, who has the love for everything in nature.

These playful works reflect the artist’s intelligence. It is his unique discovery of the truth of life and his unique creation of beauty. These selected and refined images have a higher degree of authenticity, a deeper ideological content and a more intense emotion. They are all expressions of the most beautiful human emotions, such as motherhood, family affection and true love. This was even more precious to Liu Shiming, who had been wandering from place to place all his life. The ups and downs of his life had given him a tangible experience of these emotions. They involuntarily flowed out from his heart and were rubbed into the clay in his hands.

However, this eternity and heaviness leave no trace, and it does not diminish the vividness of the work in any way. Liu Shiming says that he is like a child playing with clay, but he is “playing” in a very committed and serious way. He always tries to make something new, to open up his own creative path. He has summarized his conceptual approaches and the criteria he pursued into the following four aspects: the absolute, the strange, the subtle and the refined. In his own words, the absolute means the idea is unique, the material used is extraordinary, and there is no second work; the strange does not mean odd or weird. It is something unusual, the first time of seeing a new face; the subtle refers to something wonderful which you can never get tired of, with endless aftertastes. The unity of the content and the form is perfect. The viewers love to see and enjoy the works; when refined it is the thoroughly tempered refinements of words and meanings that go with a painting in the poem and a poem in the painting, shocking and touching people’s minds, triggering and evoking people’s emotions, broadening people’s horizons and enriching people’s imagination. It is by following such a creative view that he has created such touching and intriguing works!