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SCMP Reporter

LIU Da Hong took in the famous skyline, the crowds, the galloping consumerism and reached his verdict.

  ''Hongkong,'' said the man from the mainland, ''is like a dry goods store and a big bowl of congee. Both have a bit of everything.''   Another country bumpkin? No, a phenomenon who has been called ''an eccentric genius'' and ''the artist laureate of China's Reform Age.''   He also seems to have set a local record.

  ''I have lived in Hongkong for 20 years and have never come across anything like it. I would say it's unprecedented,'' said local antiques and art dealer Manfred Schoeni after Liu's recent exhibition at the China Club.

  It was his first one-man show and the opening drew 260 people. What was unprecedented was the reaction to the 33 oils on display.

  By the third day, all the paintings had been sold except for three. They had already been reserved by Mr Schoeni, who organised the exhibition.

  Another painting by Liu, exhibited by Sotheby's at the Art Asia fair, had the same galvanising effect. ''It was bought within five minutes by a local collector,'' Mr Schoeni reports.

  The Swiss hotel executive-turned-art dealer brims with pride in relating this. So he should, for it is thanks to Manfred Schoeni that Liu Da Hong has finally ventured outside China.

  ''I met him for the first time in Shanghai a year ago,'' Mr Schoeni says. ''Lu Jie, a well-known painter and critic told me about him.

  He said: 'You must meet my friend,' when I told him I was looking for good artists - collecting paintings is my passion - so I went to the Shanghai Normal College where Lui Da Hong teaches and has a little studio overlooking a garden. That's where I saw his work. I was astounded.''   It was the same at Liu's show. Forgotten was the usual socialising. In front of each painting stood knots of spectators, utterly absorbed.

  ''People get almost hypnotised by them,'' Mr Schoeni says. ''They stare and stare, then come back for more. There is so much to study.''   Often, the wealth of detail is almost overwhelming. So are attempts to analyse Liu's influences. The problem is well-illustrated by Shanghai's Zhu Dake.

  ''A close examination,'' writes the critic, ''reveals Goya, Kafka, early Picasso, the absurdism of the German expressionists, Persian miniatures, early North European oil paintings. . . Hieronymous Bosch and Peter Breughel. . . the Homeric epics as portrayed by the giant frescos of the Renaissance, Chinese woodblock book illustrations and Chinese New Year prints. . . ''   Until last month, all that was academic, for what Manfred Schoeni discovered in that Shanghai studio was not just the artist, but all his works.

  None had been commissioned. None was for sale. All were mouth-watering, but the artist was adamant: he was not interested in commercial success.

 IN the end, Liu Da Hong agreed to the Hongkong show. Two things persuaded him: Mr Schoeni's assurance that only genuine art lovers would be invited and his own conviction that the time was right.

  ''China is going through a crucial period in its development and it's important for artists to reflect these changes and show their work to the world,'' Liu says.

  ''It's true that for a long time, I didn't want to part with my paintings, but that was largely because I couldn't bear the thought of losing them one by one. In letting them go as a group, I felt it was almost like a cultural exchange.''   The youngest of four children, Liu Da Dong was born in Qingdao, Shandong Province, in 1962. ''I came of age during the Cultural Revolution and witnessed many of the social comedies that were being played out during that extraordinary decade,'' recalls this son of intellectuals who filled their home with music and art, even if they were short on material comforts.

  He was a sickly child who discovered his passion for drawing and painting early and with his parents' encouragement, began his formal training at the Shandong Art Academy at the age of 16.

  At 19, he was admitted to the prestigious Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts and in 1989, created a sensation at the Seventh Annual All China Art Exhibition with his painting The Awakening Of Insects.

  ''Unquestionably one of the finest works of the present generation,'' Hua Yin, assistant professor in the art department of Shanghai Normal University, writes in the catalogue published by Schoeni Fine Oriental Art in conjunction with the China Club exhibition.

  The All China Art judges, however, felt otherwise. Confronted with Liu's densely detailed 170 x 130 cm oil on canvas, they ordered its withdrawal during the final judging.

  ''It will probably be a long time before works of this nature are accepted and tolerated in China,'' said Beijing critic Yin Shuangxi, one of many outraged by the ban.

  If Liu was disturbed, he didn't show it. Winning prizes was unimportant to him, he shrugged. What mattered was creating a painting ''that sums up everything.''   The same approach is evident in his powerful Four Seasons depicting the life of Mao Zedong in the traditional form of a four-panel screen.

  ''A masterpiece of semi-divine inspiration,'' says Lu Jie. In casting Mao in the role of a hero-gone-wrong who progresses from a Buddha-like saviour to a lonely mortal whose familiar raised-hand gesture mocks his bleak surroundings and dying coterie of admirers, the artist made his point as few others have dared.

  Nothing seems to inhibit Liu Da Hong. In a country conspicuous for its parochialism and prudishness, this slightly-built, bespectacled 30-year-old demolishes the barriers with paintings that deal - often humorously and always with humanity - with politics and sexuality, myth and history, race and creed.

  Married to a singer from the Zhejiang Song and Dance Troupe, Liu finds Shanghai ''tolerable enough'' and is grateful for his teaching post and humble but adequate studio.

  In September, he will make his debut in Singapore in an exhibition featuring several paintings shown in Hongkong - ''we will borrow them from the owners'' - plus some new works.

  A fastidious artist who takes between three months and two years to complete a painting, Liu refuses to submit to commercial pressures and has little interest in widening his perspectives in the West.

  ''Everything I like and want to see is in China,'' he maintains. That's not to say his first venture beyond its borders left him cold.

  Inspired by the ''big bowl of congee'' Liu Da Hong is now working on a seven-panel painting based on the Tang Dynasty, though its central theme will be unmistakable.

  ''Hongkong and 1997. A fascinating subject.'' 



Liu shows the world another side of China