LIANG HAO

The exhibition title Essayer, a French verb meaning “to try,” names this suspended state. To try is to test: to approach without certainty, to measure a distance, to attend to a tension, to weigh the pressure between fingers and object. The experimental hand in Decentralized, the divining hand in Essayer, the playful hand in Elasticity, and the devotional hand in Orchid all belong to this minor, unstable verb.

These hands hold a volume of energy at the brink of contact. Behind them lies the painter’s invisible hand, whose labor is buried beneath a highly controlled surface: a surface of many surfaces, built through repeated layering. Early layers are not simply covered; they remain beneath, and clean edges hold the evidence of what has been erased.

This logic is inseparable from Liang’s use of chiaroscuro. Since painting learned to use shadow to give bodies weight, shadow has carried more than an optical task. It has staged revelation, secrecy, psychological depth, and the limits of visibility. In Liang’s construct, shadow is neither theatrical nor absent. It is the condition from which the visible is drawn out.

In Essayer, the deep green field of drapery forms a tenebrist construction from which the hands, reflective arch, and geometric planes emerge. Even the brightest surface does not dispel darkness; it casts another shadow, bending vision back into uncertainty and disorientation. In Decentralized, light is cooler and more evenly distributed: white cloth, a pale blue airy backdrop, mirrored planes, coral, and skin rise at once. Yet shadow remains decisive. It cuts through the swallow’s body, deepens the mirrored surfaces, and gathers in the folds where white turns grey. The work decentralizes not only vision, but painterly labor itself.

In Elasticity, the scale contracts to fit between the fingers. A hand holds an animal tooth while an elastic band stretches across the image, turning the gesture into a game of endurance and risk. If the hand resists too strongly, the tooth may fall; if it yields, the sharpened edge may return against the skin. Here, testing becomes sustained tension: a minor action held at the threshold of release and play.

In Orchid, the hand takes the posture of applying gold leaf. The Chinese character “兰” appears on the red spine of a book. It is a plant, and also a common element in Chinese names. Here, language loosens from communication and becomes line, a devotional gesture, and the color red. The material quality of the character’s font approaches that of Liang’s fossils: a form carrying memory through its surface.

– Yuan Fuca, writer and curator

Courtesy MASSIMODECARLO.