Born in Wuhan, Fred Liang grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution, eventually moving to Canada where he attended the University of Manitoba’s School of Art and then to the United States where he earned an MFA at Yale University.

Currently a professor at Massachusetts College of Art, Liang blends an ongoing homage to his Chinese heritage with a visually complex and contemporary approach to painting, printmaking, sculpture, and installation. Interested in Taoist and Buddhist philosophy and art history and inspired by Song Dynasty scroll paintings and jian zhi, the traditional Chinese art of cut paper, the artist transforms paper into delicately layered, often three-dimensional, worlds that bridge tradition and innovation. In describing his work he has written:

At the most basic level—and beyond attempting to link the “formal” language of abstraction with the folk art of jianzhi (paper-cut)—I also tinker with subtle, symbolic implications and metaphors that connect the past and the present, east and west, philosophy and religion. In doing so, my work traverses through the medium of drawings, installations, and sculptures.

Comprised of a decorative, free-form version of jian zhi in combination with an elaborately detailed gouache and screen-printed drawing, Untitled demonstrates the ways in which Liang’s nuanced worlds draw one in with their abstract and seductive beauty then, upon closer inspection, offer up details that as one critic has described, act as “buried secrets rising and expanding into open air.”