Of Light and Memory: A Comparative Essay on Liu Kang's Jagged Memories and Claude Monet's Peupliers au bord de l'Epte, crépuscule

Across a century and continents apart, Liu Kang's Jagged Memories (1992) and Claude Monet's Peupliers au bord de l'Epte, crépuscule (1891) stand as towering testaments to the capacity of landscape painting to transcend the mere depiction of nature and enter the realm of spiritual and emotional resonance. While their origins—Singapore and France—and their cultural frameworks differ, both paintings explore the boundary between the external world and the inner life of the artist. Each, in its own way, transforms the natural into the ineffable, using brushwork, composition, and light to shape meditations on memory, time, and the sublime.

Liu Kang's Jagged Memories portrays the surreal limestone spires of Wulingyuan in Hunan province. Towering, vertical, and serrated, these stone giants rise from the earth like forgotten thoughts piercing through layers of mist. Painted late in Liu's career, this 169 x 117 cm canvas is less a naturalistic record than a spiritual evocation. It is an emotional mapping of heritage and reflection, anchored by the solitary tree in the lower right—a poignant symbol of rootedness and endurance amid a landscape of geological memory.

In contrast, Claude Monet's Peupliers au bord de l'Epte, crépuscule is a vision steeped in atmospheric transience. Painted in 1891, this 100 x 65.1 cm work captures poplar trees lining a reflective riverbank at dusk. The palette is delicate and vaporous—pastels dissolve into one another, and the scene appears suspended in a moment that could vanish with the next breath of wind. Monet's brushstrokes shimmer with fleeting light; the trees, though tall and stately, sway gently in an impressionistic dreamscape.

Despite these differences, both works share a profound reverence for verticality. Liu's stone peaks and Monet’s poplars both reach skyward, invoking awe, but with different metaphysical undercurrents. Monet's trees stretch upward as if drawn by light, emblematic of temporal beauty and impermanence. Liu’s peaks, by contrast, are rooted in myth and memory, exuding the weight of permanence and cultural continuity. His jagged cliffs do not merely occupy space; they embody time.

The treatment of light also reveals their contrasting philosophies. Monet, the progenitor of Impressionism, uses light as a subject in itself. His crépuscule—twilight—is not a backdrop but a condition of being, one where light fractures and reveals the ephemerality of nature. Liu, conversely, uses light more symbolically. The mist and muted luminosity of Jagged Memories convey distance—spatial, temporal, emotional. The light here is less about surface and more about depth, a medium through which memory is filtered, obscured, and revealed.

Technically, the two artists approach their canvases differently. Monet's work is all shimmering motion—his brushwork light, quick, and dissolving form into colour. Liu Kang's style in Jagged Memories is more sculptural, even muscular, with thicker brushwork and defined masses. His peaks are chiselled with memory and paint alike, suggesting solidity, tangibility, and rootedness, perhaps a nod to his Nanyang sensibilities—synthesizing Chinese aesthetics with Western methods.

Most critically, the emotive force of both paintings lies in their quietude. There is no human figure in either work, yet both are deeply human. Monet's poplars mirror the transient moment of dusk, the gentle melancholy of time passing. Liu's jagged stone forest is a silent monolith to ancestral memory, speaking to a different kind of temporality—long, deep, unyielding. While Monet captures the fleeting, Liu confronts the eternal.

Ultimately, these two works speak across time in a dialogue about place, identity, and the soul's relationship to the natural world. Monet gazes outward and captures the light that slips through time. Liu Kang turns inward and carves remembrance into stone. One paints the breath of a moment; the other, the echo of centuries. In Peupliers and Jagged Memories, we do not merely witness nature—we are invited to inhabit it, to feel its passage, and to remember our place within its vast and shifting continuum.