Liu Jian was born in Shanghai in 1961, and at eighteen was one of the few students accepted to attend the Beijing People’s Army Art College. At twenty-four, he was made life-time resident of the Traditional Chinese Painting Academy, Shanghai, and began teaching thereafter. There he met and worked with many prolific painters, and learned first-hand both Northern and Southern styles of traditional Chinese art. A photograph from the artist’s study shows Liu Jian as a young man addressing a group of elderly painters, including Wu Guanzhong and Ye Qianyu. After several major shows across France, Germany, and Italy, the artist eventually settled in Canada in 1990. Liu’s early works incorporated broad swathes of colour and texture, and were undoubtedly influenced by Western abstract artists such as Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko and Joseph Beuys. In contrast to his early oil and acrylic works, Liu’s ink works embrace traditional painting techniques especially in his emphasis of lines and the freedom of his brushstrokes. The artist’s works are embodiments of his experiences and education, like dreamscapes of what ink paintings could be, with the term “ink” loosely reifined by his technical execution. He blends together traditional and abstract styles, in different tones of black, with hints of colour here and there.
Read MoreOcula presents comprehensive online access to a diverse number of artworks by a broad range of artists. On Ocula you can find artworks by well-known established artists as well as emerging artists.
Read MoreUsing the tools within Ocula you can learn more about the artist who created the work, share the artwork with others, and enquire as to its availability for purchase, and also its price. Defining contemporary art is both complex and controversial, but the decision to place an artwork within the category usually rests on one requirement: namely, that the artwork was created in the current century, regardless of its medium.
Beyond this simplistic definition, however, it can be difficult to pin down any universal principles that bind the pieces produced by 21st-century artists—though perhaps diversity itself might be understood as a general theme. Developing in parallel with the prevalent theory of postmodernism, contemporary art shares a commitment to pluralism and variety (rather than, that is, to stability and straightforward truth).
Some commentators speak of 'modern contemporary art', with this term's conflation of the modern art and the contemporary art models pointing to the murky boundary that separates the early 20th-century modernist movement from the sprawling latter movement that has ruled the art scene in recent decades.
The two are indeed connected—with the contemporary fine arts essentially an outgrowth of the modern movement—but what definitively separates them is the clear set of principles that all modernist artworks share, as opposed to the relatively absent criteria surrounding contemporary artworks.
For all its experimentalism, though, contemporary art is not entirely anti-traditional, as semblances of prior artistic conditions—be that modernism, impressionism, or realism—can be found hidden within many works. Long-established ideas like the anti-establishment role of art and the artist in society continue to prevail in the contemporary art scene, with visionary creatives across the globe often using their talents to make political statements through art.
The diversity of contemporary art is reflected in the many different artworks presented on the pages of Ocula. On these pages you will find artworks ranging from watercolour paintings, acrylic paintings, oil paintings, video artworks, sculptures, conceptual artworks to fine art photography and prints. Many of these artworks are for sale and you can make an enquiry directly to the Ocula member gallery representing the relevant artist.
In Ocula Magazine, an even wider range of artworks are referenced, including performance works. In considering the artworks on Ocula, we encourage you to not view them in isolation, but to consider how the work might fit into the artist's practice by reading the artist's profile, how the work relates to the artist's exhibition history and by exploring the articles written by Ocula Magazine and / or other publications on the artist.