FU LIANG

FU Liang has been grinding by hand the mineral pigments used in his works, while continually exploring other substances with strong raw-material qualities as vehicles for his art. In his pieces, matter lingers, confines, permeates, and dissolves the images of figures, symbols, and environments—seemingly on the verge of gently strangling the image itself, almost without intending to. In the artist’s recent video work Memories of Bee Wax, matter truly succeeds: the reflection of the tree fades completely into the solidified beeswax, while the wax’s veins and fissures slowly surface.

The cracks are the stele of the tree’s shadow, and time here carries no concrete historical content, no length in spacetime. In FU Liang’s works, its name might be “the time of liquid becoming solid—or gas, or the reverse.” In recent paintings such as Presence, Absence, Ritual of Memories, and Translation of Memories, he paints directly onto materials like labradorite and crystal, so that the images resemble specimens formed through long sedimentation.

Yet because of the very properties and textures of these materials, the images frozen in time appear or disappear as the viewing angle shifts. Between matter and image runs a fierce laceration—cruel beyond measure, and utterly mute.

Images in FU Liang’s works are weightless, even when they are based on photographs he has taken of reality. In the Butterfly Samples series shown here, the artist embosses these photographic images onto glass scorched by wax flames. What the material energy of the flames, which reduces everything to ash, envelops is not only the content and memory the images carry, but the images themselves. This is no simple eulogy for the past; it is the artist’s reflection on the world of images: in the face of their formidable capacity for production and reproduction today, the more easily images vanish, the more we must ask whether images of emotion and memory can still bear the weight of content.

For FU Liang, rich images are no different from raw matter: each bursts with elusive energy while entering the cycle of its own rise and decline. In his practice and thinking, matter and image, reality and virtuality, existence and memory, past and present all echo the ancient philosophical allegory of the butterfly: the more vivid the vitality, the more fragile it becomes. Unstable images, matter, even scent, here they are all metaphors for a living environment.

And how, in the end, do we perceive?