“A person’s temperament of innocence is a form of sincerity. And a seemingly awkward kind of childishness in creativity is the most mature kind of ease.”　
　

Liu Shiming (February 8, 1926- May 24, 2010)

Qian Shaowu said: “The life of many great artists is a great piece of artwork. This is the same for Liu Shiming’s.”

He had a special appearance, having had rheumatism and polio since he was a child and he walked with a little limp. He had always exercised adopting both Chinese and Western approaches but in the end his upper body was very muscular while the lower parts still remained weak. His eyes were lustrous, which was said to be the result of his “night eyes” training, but his cheeks were particularly long and narrow, as if they were a third narrower than those of the normal people. They had been like that since he was young, but they did not appear to be so when he was old and fat. He usually wore a black cotton cloth shirt and a pair of trousers with the leg bottoms tied, which was very different from the university students of his time.

He was not talkative but simple and sincere. He never put on any airs, but whenever something like “Confucius did not speak of strange events, violence, riots and supernatural things” was mentioned, he would spout eloquent speeches. Not only did he believe in it, but he also practiced it. Every night, he had to “sit in meditation” and practiced the “night eyes”. Once he startled the guard at night, because he was all in black and was seating still, with only two big eyes glowing in the dark.
　　
The purer, the colder 

In contrast to the prominence of many 20th century masters, Liu Shiming is someone who has voluntarily been left out of the picture.

Liu Shiming, also known as Er Gui (the Second Ghost), was born in Tianjin on 8 February 1926. His ancestors were in Tianjin and as a child, his family moved around Tianjin and Tangshan areas with his father who had returned from studying abroad, and finally they settled down in Beijing.

Er Gui had a great talent for art, and his artistic personality was first evident from an early age. When as an adolescent, he carved a small penis of himself out of a wooden stick and coloured it for display in the living room. It was so vivid that it even made his father who had returned from studying abroad, become concerned, asking him to “take this to your own room, otherwise people will think I carved it.”

Because of his childhood polio, Er Gui seems to be quite dumb to life, and this is reflected in his works. I can’t remember where on the internet I saw the comment about Er Gui: “He brings a refreshing sense of countryside and innocence to contemporary Chinese sculpture.” This is indeed how ordinary people will feel when they see them. However, if you look at them over a long period and ponder the mood of his works, you may inadvertently come across the reason for his artistic pursuit.

His old friend Wu Jing said that he was a transparent person, because there were no secrets in his life history and he never told a lie in his life. He was such a straightforward man, and his works are the same. Apart from a few pieces of still life, most of his works are fixed combinations of people and people, or people and animals, and what he wants to tell is always the purest relationship between people and people and his personal likes and dislikes.

All these things together with his love, have been supported with evidence that his concept of love is completely detached from the secular world and can be described as pure, unadulterated, sincere to the end. He once left his job at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and went to Henan alone because he loved Ma Jinfeng, a Henan opera actress, whom he called sister and she called him brother, and they had a sincere relationship with each other for over fifty years. They truly did it as love and treated each other well, and no matter what happens, they promised to look after each other throughout their life.

The plainer, the prettier

“Men are mud, while women are water, and bones are square, but flesh is round.” Er Gui prefers to carve simple rural women with big breasts, his works are never “noble” at all. The work, “the Farmhouse”, shows women breastfeeding with shirts open or standing in the courtyard with their bare backs and heavy breasts, sweating and rolling noodles and baking pancakes for their husbands, with a willingness to do so. Their husbands squat on the ground, shaking a fan to get cool with one hand, eating and drinking in the courtyard, feeling at ease and justified, while the children play on the ground, jumping around. These crude little firgures are Er Gui’s emotional sustenance and he feels that he shares their lives, so he naturally feels close to them and is willing to befriend them.

As a child, Er Gui did not receive systematic professional training, he enriched his imaginative world by reading comic books. You can see that the style of simple and easy lines in the comic books are evident in his mature works of sculpture, especially in the pursuit of a childish aesthetic style. It can be said that his unorthodox path of study has led him to strive for the “rawness” and the profoundness throughout his life, and that the images he creates are therefore free from the clichéd techniques of contemporary Chinese sculpture.

When the family moved to Beijing, his father asked him to learn Northern style landscape painting（Bei Zong, categorized by Chinese painter and theorist Dong Qichang from Ming Dynasty）by following Mr. Ji Guanzhi, a native of Yantai, Shandong Province, who was a member of Xuelu Painting Club in Wuwanghou Hutong at Xicheng District of Beijing.) In 1946, his father told him that the National Art School in Beiping（the former Central Academy of Fine Arts）was enrolling students and that Xu Beihong was the headmaster, so he should go and take the exam, because it would be a way ahead for him. When he took the National Art School in Beiping examination, he ate the erasers in the examination hall because he took them for steamed buns. Having never sketched before, he learned how to draw from the candidate next to him in the test, and he later passed the examination together with that student, who later went to Hong Kong. That student is the great director Li Hanging.

The harder, the stronger 

The early years of Er Gui's artistic life went smoothly because of the appreciation and guidance of many famous masters. Yet very unexpectedly, after enjoying the ease and smoothness of his youth, the fate of Er Gui remained quiet and hidden throughout the years of his adult life.

In 1981, he returned to work at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and later, when he recalled his life, the deepest ingrained and enjoyable part of his life was a brick kiln in the narrow lane of the sculpture department. Perhaps the era in which he lived was romantic, and in that period it was lyrical, poetic and innocent, even if he was neglected.

He was willing to endure the pains that would be hard for anybody to bear in that hut in such poor conditions, and every day he made small sculptures that were different from everyone else, all of which was a joy for Er Gui. He had a photograph of his work taken at the time, surrounded by the sculptures he had made, and all were small in size but vivid as if they were alive, and he sat in the middle of these little creatures, enveloped in the light of the sun.

Throughout his long artistic path, he experimented with a realistic expression but without being faithful to the clichéd principles of realism, especially in the highly innocent and clumsy modelling of the figures, which is incompatible with any sculpture technique in the history of contemporary Chinese sculpture, and very different from any of them. It is perhaps also true to say that he blends his dreamy and poetic feelings into his work. He is good at combining the subtle artistic conception of reality with non-reality, and his characters have a realistic sleepwalking state. For example, in his work Performer Backstage, an actress, still in costume, sits on a theatre box, holding her the child to pee, with a teapot on the top of the box to moisten her throat, the child’s expression is full of pleasure, the dog waiting at her feet, and the actress’ slightly tilted face as if she is watching the progress of the scene on the stage. The whole sculpture is less than a foot in size, but the living atmosphere of the backscene is shown, which is very vivid. This type of figure plays an essential symbolic role in shaping the style of Er Gui’s works.

Liu Shiming passed away.

His friend wrote a poem in his honour.

May 24, 2010.
　　
Ascending to Heaven

Horse-faced, leg crippled, arms like those of an ape,

In the year 1958, he made sculpture to split a mountain.

Transferred to the Zhengzhou Art Institute in 1961,

We have known each other for fifty years since then.

Travelling all over Henan with great difficulties,

All the way there were jokes spreading.

First he came to meet me by bicycle, then by tricycle.

Then even with a pair of crutches he had difficulty walking.

Having to sit at home and use sculptures instead of words.

To represent freely what he thought and what he was dreaming,

The cave dwelling, the patio courtyard, and the boat on the Yellow River.

Henan people having noodles in a big bowl, and Henan Clapper Opera in the small village.

The family reunion, with cold water drinking and tobacco smoking,

Calling every now and then to ask about the changes in Henan.

No calls have come for over a month. 

He has passed away all of a sudden.

My heart was sinking, legs shaking, and throat inflamed,

Tears flowed down my face without stopping.

How could it be? How could it be?

Sobbing, sobbing! All words were failing.