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Mark


My grandmother Liu, Liang Ling-Fan

Born in Guangzhou in 1924, she moved to Taiwan with her husband Liu Yimin in 1949. She had a passion for traditional Chinese ink painting and studied under Mr. Yuan Tianyi. She had a special affection and fondness for ink bamboo. She passed away in 1998.




“Sparrows”
Pencil on my grandmother’s old Chinese painting / 36 x 94 cm




“Knot”
Pencil on my grandmother’s old Chinese painting
69 x 39 cm




“Order”
Pencil on my grandmother’s old Chinese painting
69 x 36 cm




“Infinite Reverse”
Pencil on my grandmother’s old Chinese painting
70 x 46.5 cm




“Spatial Disorientation”
Pencil on my grandmother’s old Chinese painting
92 x 36 cm




“Vague”
Pencil on my grandmother’s old Chinese painting
92 x 36 cm




“Black Crown”
Pencil on my grandmother’s old Chinese painting
94 x 36 cm




“Times”
Pencil on my grandmother’s old Chinese painting
92.5 x 36 cm




“Context”
Pencil on my grandmother’s old Chinese painting
137 x 36 cm




“Triviality”
Pencil on my grandmother’s old Chinese painting
137 x 36 cm




“Minor Scale”
Pencil on my grandmother’s old Chinese painting
43 x 69 cm



Dialogue among Bamboos - Drawing with Liu, Liang Ling-Fan, 2014


In the summer of 2013, I went to Paris for a six-month residency. Before leaving, I casually packed several art collections and my grandmother's ink bamboo exercises into my suitcase. During the residency, I started doodling with a pencil on the ink painting collections I brought along. Later, this led me to create drawings on top of my grandmother's ink bamboo exercises using a pencil. The pencil was the basic tool I learned to draw with since elementary school, while ink was what my grandmother first encountered aesthetics with in her youth. One is an extremely Western tool, and the other an extremely Eastern one. They seemed unrelated, yet in the act of drawing, they appeared similar.

After completing a series of ink pencil drawings, I pondered for a long time on how to present the artwork. Should I lean more towards the Eastern or Western style in terms of framing? Since I couldn't imagine my work presented in the traditional scroll format, I eventually chose a slim aluminum frame with a black woodgrain finish, giving the artwork a hint of Eastern aesthetics on the outside while having a Western skeleton on the inside. In 2014, I held an art exhibition at the Absolute Space in Tainan, showcasing over ten pieces that resembled a "Dialogue and Drawing" across time and space, marking the beginning of the entire ink drawing series.