Everything about Liu Guohui’s paintings—their everyday subjects, their accurately detailed observations, their efficient and non-obtrusive rendering—bespeaks a patrician modesty for which the man himself is widely esteemed. Yet, in their quiet way, Liu’s pictures defy many of the esthetic biases that prevail in the West and among Chinese avant-garde artists strongly influenced by Euro-American practice. His work actually realizes some of the solidarity-with-the-people values that experimental art espouses but, caught up in its own contradictions, often fails to fulfill.

　　Tradition-based Chinese artists like Liu are somewhat akin to classical musicians. They have a repertoire of subjects, forms, and techniques whose effects are insuperable. You cannot imagine the thing they do being done better than they do it. But you can legitimately ask how such artists should accommodate cultural change. The world we live in is not the world in which traditional Chinese art developed. That simple fact presents the nation’s painters with three options: pure antiquarianism, conversion to a contemporary mode, or some fusion of old and new.

　　Liu has clearly chosen the third path, depicting the visual realities of today in a manner that at once honors and refreshes tradition. (He has done heartfelt portraits not only of Zhang Daqian, Qi Baishi, Wu Changshuo, and other modern Chinese masters but also of Matisse, that fatherly pioneer of Western experimentalism.) This balance, which can be seen in many individual works, becomes even more evident in the conceptual dynamic revealed by their formal groupings.

　　A number of pieces present plants, trees, and flowers—some of the most venerable motifs in Chinese painting. Yet Liu does not follow any of the conventions that, for better or for worse, have allowed generations of artists to turn out branch-and-blossom imagery with astonishingly swift regularity. Instead, he employs each time whatever method best captures his subject and his own interpretive intent—as though this humble still-life element were not merely flora but a sentient being, worthy of a portrait. Thus in Plant Grown by Au Pair the container for the soil—is it a pot or a sack?—remains indistinct, in keeping with the emergent nature of the sprouts, whose upward thrust is rendered in stronger, more distinct lines. In other works, such as Brightness of Fall and Sea of Snow, blossoms explode into clouds of color as though the life force itself had burst forth, obliterating the distinction between individual petals.

　　Here and there, a few cityscapes can be found, such as Salzburg with its cubistic jumble of riverside buildings done in quick, straight strokes as dexterous as those of Wu Guanzhong. Russian Impression, by contrast, is a symphony of curves large and small, echoing the onion domes they depict. But, as the vast majority of works make clear, Liu’s principal interest is the human figure—both as a sensuous form in itself and as a vehicle of cultural signifiers (clothing, hairstyles, jewelry, accoutrements). Ultimately, this leads beyond figure studies and social observation to an encounter with the person, conveyed in portraits that are at once remarkably relaxed and direct.

　　Ironically, perhaps, the purest of Liu’s pictures are his female nudes. Exercises in pure painting, they investigate just how effectively attenuated lines and a few touches of wash can evoke contour, volume, weight, and depth. In many instances, the bodies—so seemingly vital and torqued with subdued strength—are in fact blank, untouched passages, faintly recalling the voids that connote time and distance in traditional landscape painting. Moreover, Liu’s nudes are “pure” in the moral sense as well. Frank but never salacious, each unclothed woman, whether averting her face or looking us straight in the eye, is an embodiment of sheer beauty—with none of the shame, guilt, titillation, and torment that so often attend naked figures in the Western art canon.

　　Liu’s fully attired figures—by far the largest quantity of cases—meld the private and the public, noting with equal precision the deportment of the body (in posture and pose) and the casual display of personal items that situate the individual socially. At times, an element of exoticism can be detected, as in the images of turbaned old men, costumed members of ethnic minorities, bowmen on horseback, or musicians playing traditional instruments. More frequently, however, Liu’s neutral gaze takes in the particularities of contemporary life: the shuffling migrants of Tide of the Century, the level stare of a woman smoking a cigarette (Being Originally a Good Girl), the crumpled jeans and T-shirts of today’s college students (Students, Teacher and Friends), the individualistic style of a young lady who combines a necklace and elegantly draped top with boldly patterned stockings and combat boots (Xu Qian). These are, for the most part, people of the middle way, neither abjectly poor nor obscenely rich. Liu commemorates the weathered and old, steeped in personal lore; the displaced, whose condition bespeaks convulsive social change in China; the confident but vulnerable young.

　　It is this ability to render—and this nonjudgmental willingness to accept—the outward appearance and the inner self of each individual that gives Liu’s work its greatest distinction. This capacity comes from natural talent long cultivated by training, combined with an empathy—an ability to sense and share the feelings of others—that was fostered by a poignant personal history. In an essay for Liu’s 2007 catalogue, Wang Xufeng relates how imagery and story were fused from the beginning for the artist, when, as a child, the young Liu was prompted by his mother to copy a figure she had drawn, while she simultaneously told him a moral tale. To this day, Liu’s work is marked by a deep interest in personal narrative, and an unquestioning sympathy more akin to maternal affection than to the impersonal rigors of art training or the sharp divisiveness of professional competition.

　　Perhaps this is due to the fact that politics intervened so forcefully in the artist’s life. Born in 1940 as the son of low-paid soldier, Liu at 15 won admittance to the middle school associated with the art academy in Hangzhou. A top student, he should have advanced shortly to the academy itself but instead fell afoul of the fanatical intrigues of the late 1950s and, later, the Cultural Revolution. Falsely accused, he was shipped off for a life of craft work, duck farming, and boat salvaging. Only in 1979, at the age of 39, was he finally able to clear his name and enter the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts. Over the years, his teachers have included Fang Zengxian, who gave new life to Chinese painting in the mid-1950s, and the revered figure painter Li Zhenjian. In addition to exhibiting, lecturing, and publishing extensively, Liu has garnered many official awards for his work and served as Dean of Traditional Chinese Painting at the China Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou.

　　Despite Liu’s past tribulations, his oeuvre is remarkably free of anger or resentment. Instead, one repeatedly feels the artist’s profound human regard—in the sense both of accurate seeing and respectful caring. Liu presents the celebrated and the obscure, the local and the foreign, the virtuous and the troubled, all with the same familial intimacy he brought to his striking 1993 portrait of his young daughter.

　　This sense of a universal “family of man” is something that has been lost—and, sadly, even derided—in the critically progressive sector of the Western art world. Liu challenges global viewers to face an unfashionable fact: namely, that humanistic work speaks to its audience in ways that nothing else can, and that what it says is supremely worthwhile. He dares us, in effect, to drop our irony-laced pretense and to return to something we all know in our hearts but are somehow afraid or ashamed to acknowledge. That “the best portion of a good man’s life,” consists, as the British poet William Wordsworth once wrote, of “his little, nameless, unremembered acts / Of kindness and of love.” Liu’s pictures are among those priceless, understated gestures, visually memorializing what the same poet called “the still, sad music of humanity.”