Liu Jiahua was born in Sichuan in 1979 and graduated from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2006.Absurdity and Paradox:
How can tradition be transformed into modernity? This has always been a central question in Liu Jiahua’s artistic practice. Since the early 20th century, many terms have emerged around Chinese ink painting—“Chinese painting,” “new ink,” “modern ink,” “experimental ink,” and “abstract ink.” These terms all undeniably point toward a fundamental issue: the modernity of ink art.
In his early work, Liu painted architecture using pigments. Later, he began using the remnants of “disappearing architecture” directly as artistic material. A Drop of Ink is a solidified mixture of Great Wall bricks and earth, ashes of ancient architecture, cement, seeds, and pigments. This combination endows the color black with a cosmic spatial implication.
Here, this “drop of ink” is not the same as the ink of the ancients—defined by ideals such as vitality, spirit, poetic resonance, and the expressive language of brush and ink. Instead, it represents the artist’s new conceptual resource, one that explores the relationship between individual existence and space-time, between humanity and nature (or the universe), and a pursuit of purer form in the present context.