The naissance of photography undoubtedly symbolizes the emergence of a duplication and new art era and declares such powerful magic that could affect people's life and change the creation patterns of art. With the digital era approaching, the photograph leads our visual sense to the exploration of unknown fields and creation of new fields. It not only witnesses changes of modern society but also records historic memories With commercial development and immersion and close interaction between photography and society, photograph has made part of advertisements become spatial art with meaningful connotations. And Yu Liming is such a photographer who works for both trade and art. He possesses studying experiences of "85 new tide" and 15 years of professional photograph so that he could create graphic filming works with personal styles. As a foreign trader in 1980's, he witnesses the beginning and development of commercial photograph in Nanjing. Though he is the predecessor in this filed, he behaves himself in a low-key. His works often appear in the street. He created many photographic works on the billboards of Honeycomb, Mountain River and Siemens and some of them have aroused national attention. However, he just said: "Commercial photograph is used to make a living but I put more energy into artistic creation." In retrospect of his photographic career, his love for art photograph has a long history. When in university, he handed in the only conceptual photographic work in his class. At that time, he had realized the main theme of photograph would not be about how to see external materials or just reproduce objective reality. In his eyes, concept could make everything possible.
His photographic exposition: Dreaming of Returning to Jin Ling and the Charm of Ming Dynasty is being on. Through traditional culture and modern fashion, he conducted the process of the interactive relating between reality and history. Clothes juxtaposition of different ages forms cultural contrast. Its contradictory intention is based on the reflection that single culture could form value judgment. At first glance, it has some kind of nostalgia and retro feelings. But nostalgia is not equal to retro. On the contrary, with the projection of fashion signs, it shows unavoidable disappearing process of Nanjing's glory, which brings people sweet but a little melancholy call.
Crossing the Rail series, which select rails as the real scenery, take pictures of models' actions and facial expressions and attempt to present the new-generation youth's potential anxiety and uneasiness. Yu Liming who is expert at exposing psychological levels of human nature recounts postmodern people's desire in Crossing the Rail. It seems to be a self -consoled blissful illustrated book in a material-desiring paradise and becomes a person's excuse of escaping facing one's true self through various grotesque and gaudy superficial disguise. There is no emotion, no past, no future and there is only giddy sense floating accompanying consciousness.
In a digital society, the existence of image itself has transformed from reproducing, distorting reality to reflecting lost reality and then to transcending reality. The blessed and nice world seems to retreat utterly from reality and Utopia proclaims the end and disappearance of meaning. As in "the Impression on the Never Setting Empire", Yu Liming employs the red rays of the setting sun to indicate the downfall of the British Empire. The Union flag, a big symbol arranged by four lattices, makes the work itself based on a lost illusion.
With careful observation, you will notice Yu's fancy for creating subject contexts by the changes of red rays in his works. Disregarding the natural color or artificial color, the pursuit of true atmosphere or the super-real shadow effect, Yu Liming attributes all these to his oriental complex of red color. The transition from brightness to darkness just corresponds to the gray areas interconnected by the psychological dominance and recessiveness of human beings, which remains vague but thought-provoking.
Compared with the mature photograph collection market in western countries, together with more unknown doubts on the collection of digital photograph than on other works of art, the limited population of collectors has not yet developed to an influential scale. According to Yu Liming, with the skyrocketed prices of modern Chinese oil paintings in recent years, the works of image in China come to attract the global attention. Due to the consideration of cost on the one hand and the right time to step into on the other, America has always been the largest collection market of modern Chinese photograph.
What the modern art aims to convey is the pursuit and challenge of nature. Confronted with the frangibility of photography in the digital era, Yu Liming, an image artist, is wise enough to contemplate and take challenging attitudes to the traditional thoughts of photography and the various problems of human beings in photograph. He seeks answers in his works, incessantly challenging the original motivation behind them. Then through further self-inspection, the contradiction and indefiniteness between reality and abstract becomes the nucleus of his works.