In Liu Ye's Bamboo Bamboo Broadway, the artist continues to engage the history of modernism, while referencing the tradition of abstraction in historical Chinese painting.

Here, Liu Ye introduces new genres such as landscape and still-life painting to his oeuvre. The centerpiece of the show is a nine-part painting of abstracted and simplified details of a bamboo plant which spanned the gallery’s double-height wall.

Born in Beijing in 1964, Liu Ye came of age during the Cultural Revolution, a period between 1966 and 1976. His father was a children’s book author, and one afternoon, Liu Ye discovered a collection of Western literature hidden in a black chest beneath his parents’ bed. Although these books were banned at the time, Liu Ye nonetheless studied their illustrations intensely. As a young adult, the artist went on to study industrial design and mural painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts before moving to Germany to pursue an MFA at the Hochschule der Kunst in Berlin from 1990 to 1994. He later spent time in Amsterdam as an artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie, where he first encountered works of art by Mondrian, Vermeer, Klee, and Dick Bruna. In 2007, the Kunstmuseum in Bern, Switzerland hosted a major solo exhibition of his work.