It was about a few years ago. Liu Yun, who had been engaged in oil painting and had had a certain influence in the oil painting field, invited me to look at his ink paintings for the first time. I could only use two words to describe my feeling at that time: greatly shocked. In a sense he even suddenly became a stranger to me. That the familiar oil painter Liu Yun seemed to have turned into another person forced me to know and understand him again. Since then, Liu Yun has created a large number of infectious artistic ink paintings, which not only have reflected his diligence in his work, but also demonstrated his extraordinary talent in the field of ink painting.
　　Perhaps we will never understand where and when Liu Yun gets his sense in ink painting. However, from his ink paintings, we can find where his staring point is, what the artistic meaning of the starting point is and how it connects with the preceding ink painting. I think Liu Yun’s starting point of ink painting began from the art tendency of ink painting in the eighties of the last century. That is using the language of ink painting to re-interpret and display the ancient Chinese traditional culture “Nature First” perspective from the position of modern culture. Obviously, as a late artist entering the ink painting field, Liu Yun sees clearly the achievements of the tendency. Using it as his starting point, Liu Yun has created a new image to ink painting with his artistic talent in ink painting. .  
　　In the artistic language, Liu Yun’s ink paintings, especially “Dream Around the Home” “Green Hills” as the pure representative ink paintings, paid great attention to the simple, unified aesthetic value and the visual impact of ink itself as a color. If we study the connection between ink language and art history from the angle of knowledge genealogy, we will find that his style comes from a deep tradition, which first associated with Gong Xian, one of the eight Jinling masters in Qing Dynasty. It was Gong Xian who inherited Dong Yuan’s style, and began the style of depicting mountains and rivers with thick ink. But in Qing Dynasty when depression and indifference were considered authentic in painting, his thick ink style was not taken seriously. It was the criticism to the paintings of four Wangs in twentieth century that made people rediscover Gong Xian’s ink style and showed its artistic charm. Bringing a great height of development of Gong Xian’s style, Huang Binhong and Li Keran not only reached their artistic achievements, but also directly impacted a number of late ink painters. Such as Long Rui, Fan Yang and others were influenced by Huang Binhong, Jia Youfu, Chen Ping and some others undertook and promoted Li Keran’s style. Obviously, Liu Yun’s ink paintings explored the connection with the traditional art. But in terms of strategy, he took the ink painting achievements from the ninetieth of last century as his starting point. In other words, he doesn’t take Gong Xian and Li Keran as his artistic creation reference, but directly stands on the ink painting platform built up since last ninetieth and uses it as the basis to promote the development of ink painting art.
　　From my point of view, Liu Yun has promoted ink art in two aspects. First he uses ink as a color to such an extreme that the thick ink can show its brilliance in his works. I think that’s because he is an oil painter who is familiar with colors. From Zhang Yanyuan in Tang Dynasty, the artistic value of ink first and the concept of sub-colored ink opened the new era of visual arts in China. But sub-colored ink can’t be separated from the image and the realm of the universe. It is for this reason that ink has been used in landscape painting as the art language and nobody goes to the extreme to use ink only. Liu Yun is no exception at this point. But I also think Liu Yun has gone to the permitted limit of using ink, especially thick ink in his works.    Second, Liu Yun has taken a greater step forward in the composition of flat space than those before him. In his works “Dream Around The Home” and “Green Hills”, we can find the full straight lines don’t demonstrate the lofty and far-reaching sense of illusion advocated by traditional landscape paintings, but create a geometric and planar form by splitting mountains, water, fog and sky with black and white. What is particular worth mentioning is that there is no congestion and airtight feeling in the visual form of his compressed flat space. That’ s because Liu Yun only stresses the composition of the spatial characteristics of the painting on the whole, and in many particular places, he makes flavor alive by using wet and dry ink, picturesque disorder and orientation of movement in painting, which makes not only the landscape vibrant, but also the color of ink brilliant. At the same time, for Liu Yun, the purpose of emphasizing the black and white contrast in flat space is not to create a form in accordance with western modernism, but rather with the modern method of composition to break the previous inherent perspective relationships of long-range, medium-range and close-range view in landscape, and abandon the established conventions of “three ranges” to build a more strong visual impact of landscape image. If we use the words of Mencius in ancient China to describe aesthetic features of Liu Yun’s landscapes, that is “enrichment with brilliance”, which belongs to the aesthetic categories of “grandeur” and magnificence.
　　In China’s own painting system, the literati paintings are undoubtedly its representatives, and in those literati paintings, landscape paintings have developed fully and achieved its highest achievements. Therefore, for the late painters, in the face of numerous masters having achieving artistic heights, it is not an easy thing for them to surpass those masters, or even make little progress. Take a general look at Liu Yun’s landscapes, although I can’t say they are already perfect, he is conscious to explore and expand the possibility of ink landscape in the composition of flat space and taking ink as a color as an aesthetic charm and so on, which is an important step forward for him. As for that whether the big step forward in his personal art history (from oil painting to ink) will become a big step forward in ink painting history, or even a small step forward, will be confirmed by his future development in art. However, I hope and believe he can do that. 
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　2010-1-2 Wangjing Garden in Beijing