If we say that Ai Wei Wei subverts antique and traditional value, then Liang takes traditional learning as an aesthetic tool to reinforce his art. Liang’s work parallels and co-exists with history and modernity. If Cai Guo Qiang uses ancient inventions to create effects similar to brush ink painting on rice paper, then, Liang’s work appeals in some ways to traditions found among scholars and in other ways is characteristic of laymen. Liang’s scholarly work might be closer to Xu Bing’s Book from the Sky. Unlike most contemporary artists, Liang’s concept is more neutral; he has not explicitly taken any political or societal stance. He has created a world unique in Chinese and western art.
Liang was born in Beijing in 1967, and raised in Shandong Providence. Since childhood, he has showed a striking talent for and interest in art. Liang was aware of traditional folk art from the time he was in middle school. He studied at the Beijing Professional Art School from 1983-86, then continued by majoring in decorative Arts at Peli University. He chose paper cutting as his primary art form when in 1994 he entered the Beijing Central Art Academy. Afterward, his creativity was not confined to pappercuting, but expanded to pottery, ink drawing, and painting for contemporary surreal expression. Satirical figures always dominated his art works. In 1993, he began to mix enlarged, distorted background images with main figurative subjects such as Buddhas and self invented big-headed whimsical creatures. A seemingly ancient landscape painting, when examined closely reveals a series of symbols from around the world – all in delicate black and white line brush drawings. After 1996, Liang experimented with color; he tried a different acrylic color palette and created a repetitive pattern of bizarre humanoid figures. Afterwards, he developed a long scroll format in which he used a brush to make very delicate strokes. These very traditional scrolls are packed with Buddhist and Taoist deities, praying devotees, and entire entourages of fantastic creatures, all parading across the paper.
Paper Cutting
Paper cutting represents one of the highest technical virtuosities of Chinese folk culture. Paper cutting is Liang’s primary form; since junior high school, he has been inspired by this home town folk art. The subjects are normally single figures with a flower or bird. Other images include Beijing opera characters, Buddha heads, deities, various human profiles, and more exaggerated surreal portraits. In his later more inventive work, his paper cutting combines contemporary, imaginary, and folk phenomena, in an idiosyncratic cutting edge style which gives rise to his unique art form.
Brush ink line drawing
Starting in 1996, he developed a series of Elysium World drawings. In his preface, he writes “I use these two words (He Le) to name what I see in the other world. ..He Le is located in the Elysium world, which corresponds to the world of us.” In a seemingly legendry catalogue, he drew bizarre creatures which combine animal and human characteristics in different ways. For example, some of the figures lack bellies; according to the artist this is so they won’t worry about food. These half-human and half-animal figures all get along well since they realize that their forms are illusions of the elements earth, water, fire, and wind. These drawings are ranged across a type of the Chinese long scroll painting; the artist used an ink brush to populate it with all kinds of dreamlike, whimsical absurdities, fantastic creatures, conjuring up fictional scenes, packing the painting with a plethora of new unearthly creatures. Those figures are shown walking, running, flying, jumping, and floating in the air. A surreal world full of unearthly figures does not reveal any judgment good or bad, nor any statement either horrifying or pleasant. The figures of legendary ancient Taoist immortals create a heavenly time space for these works.
In traditional Taoist painting, a single line is used to describe the afterworld or the different heavenly levels. In the old paintings all the Taoist immortals march in line, with the emperor dominating the scene. Liang’s work of this period squarely participates in this tradition, with the jarring difference that none of the figures are Taoist luminaries or deities. We might also remark that his paintings are even much closer to Tibetan Buddhist paintings, with circular Mandelas being released to long horizontal scrolls which take a global journey exploring time-space.
Acrylic oncanvas color painting
After 1996, he supplemented his brush ink painting with acrylic. The rich color allowed a mural-like natural shading and enabled the artist to incorporate shadows, thus recalling his paper cutting which depicted subjects in profile.
Jonathan Goodman wrote Liang’s work “has precedent in the horrors experienced in the disturbing panoramic vistas of Hieronymus Bosch.” In Liang’s colorful paintings, the ambiguous relationship between figures and the bizarre assemblages of body parts generates a manic energy. This vital energy is augmented by the unexpected use of color. In contrast to Hieronymus Bosch’s macabre medieval paintings, Liang’s art is lighter, more fantastic – possibly suitable for a pleasant magic carpet trip around the world.
Three dimensional works (Sculpture, ceramic)
Liang’s sculpted figures are likewise weird distorted forms; figures have been reduced to an unnaturally small size in his sculpture series, which we might say is a mixed media installation rather than an individual sculpture piece. One imagines that figures from the paintings have unexpectedly broken free to take three-dimensional form.
