In Liang Fu’s Latest Work, a Vision of Humanity Touched by Relentless Entropy

A continuous tension between the physicality of matter and the fluid nature of imagination and the subconscious animates the latest body of work by Chinese-born, Paris-based artist Liang Fu. Most recently seen in “Sublunary” at Nicodim, his distorted and warped human faces crystallize, as if caught in a cinematic crop, encased in black marble frames that hold their imaginative symbolic metamorphosis within the natural structure of earth- and time-bound materials. Fu has always embraced the image as unstable territory. There, features, bodies and landscapes appear, but they rarely settle into fixed representation. Instead, they remain in a liminal condition, caught in continuous metamorphosis between the perception of the self and the natural flow of events, within the relentless entropic flux of transformation that affects all things. The process itself, the way Fu lets the image emerge and manifest from the materiality of paint, contributes to this unstable quality. Fu likes to describe his images as beginning from “a drop of water”: watercolor, mineral pigment and oil are left to flow on unprimed canvas, allowing water to carry pigment into the fabric before oil paint adds density, glow and depth. Diffusion and fluid expansion produce shapes that are then developed into figures or fields.

At the center of his practice is an investigation into the origin of these visual apparitions, suspended between matter and intuition. With his latest works, Fu pushes this confrontation between image-symbol and sculpture as material history even further, making the frames part of the painting rather than leaving them as neutral supports. “I am interested in painting as an object. I created these marble frames and broke the edges, so they also look like fragments,” Fu told Observer shortly after the opening of the now-closed Nicodim show. “I use the stone as part of the painting, as a way to represent an image on raw material. It becomes another way to save an image.”

Fu is also interested in the frame’s mineral materiality and how it creates an equivalence with the mineral-based pigments in his paintings. He has always used mineral pigments to imbue his paintings with both geological temporality and material memory as they carry a geological quality that changes how an image is perceived. Their matte surfaces and visible material presence allow the image to be read not only as representation, but as something embedded in matter. As curator Oona Doyle notes in the exhibition essay accompanying the show, Fu combines the presentation of materials (mica, quartz, marble, Chinese selenite) and the representation of materials (crystallized shapes, thistles and melancholic star-like corners).

The mineral pigments also determine this blue, black, red, milky white, turquoise and mineral gray palette, making his painting surfaces feel aqueous, dusty, lunar or anatomical. There is a clear, watery quality that characterizes these paintings, as if these faces had been frozen in ice for centuries or were emerging from the dark abysses of the subconscious. Their eerie, ghostly and blurred appearance seems eroded or disturbed by physical or psychic forces.

There is plenty of psychological and symbolic material to analyze in Fu’s dense compositions. Some of them include talismanic objects, as if a symbolic clue had suddenly emerged from a dream, or an ephemeral relic of past beauty had been evoked as light in the darkness. The use of cold colors connects to the title “Sublunary,” which, in classical and medieval cosmology, represents that sphere beneath the moon: the earthly realm of change, decay, birth, death, weather, bodies and unstable matter. If the sphere above the moon was imagined as the celestial realm of permanence and perfection, the world below is mutable, embracing transformation as a force within matter, part of its very essence. Fu’s paintings are images of this matter in continuous passage, bodies caught within the sublunary condition of appearing, dissolving and becoming something else.

Reading these images in Jungian terms, it is hard not to see this aqueous dimension as a manifestation of the subconscious, with the painting serving as the threshold where subconscious truth begins to emerge. Fu’s faces seem to inhabit that threshold: not fully revealed, not fully erased, but pressing toward visibility from within the mineral and aqueous substance of the painting, which becomes both a metaphorical vehicle for a spirit submerged in matter and the symbolic and imaginative material that resurfaces through the alchemy of paint. Fu’s liquid images also appear to translate what Gaston Bachelard writes in Water and Dreams, describing water as a force of material imagination capable of deforming forms and loosening objects from fixed identities. The paintings operate in this same register: the face is not so much represented as released through water, pigment, evaporation and stain, as if the image were less a depiction than a physical event.

Asked where the images originate, Fu explained that they mostly come from photographic references, models, random images found on screens, people around his studio and even glimpses of neighbors seen through the window. Painting allows him to shift the perspective and context of those photographic records, reintegrating them into a more ambiguous visual field and resituating the individual within a broader, more entangled environment of visible and invisible forces. “The image looks frozen or locked inside the material, but we can still see it through the transparency,” he explained. “I am thinking about transparency and how materiality can change the perception of the image.”

While in earlier works he gave the human figure a more direct presence, this new body of work lets the figure appear even more submerged, dissolved or merged with its surroundings. Some of them even appear twisted and doubled in a mirror or in a drop of reflection. While the metaphysical register seems to prevail in these images, it also opens them to a poetic reflection on the contemporary condition, where identity is no longer solid, but constantly mediated, reflected, fragmented and reassembled, with increasingly disorienting fluidity, across different screens and surfaces of representation. “The human condition is still the main topic of my observation. It is about our living conditions today, which is something we cannot avoid, politically or geologically,” Fu added. “For me, it is an interesting way to reflect on how we situate ourselves.” Asked whether there is something spiritual in these paintings, he said that he grew up with Buddhism, which helps explain the symbolism in these works.

Notably, the spiritual aspect feels inseparable from his process: the water-based mineral pigments evaporate as the painting develops, making transformation central to both the material behavior and the immaterial structure of the work. “The evaporation becomes a metaphor,” according to Fu. There is, at the center of his work, a reflection on the relationship between image and materiality—a question that appears even more timely at a moment when our sense of reality is increasingly challenged and distorted. Fu is interested in how these elements can become interchangeable: solid stone contains a fluid image, while the liquid process of painting points back to minerals formed underground through heat, pressure and time.

The submarine or subterranean dimension of the paintings—the alchemy of minerals turning into light and color—illuminates a deeper intuition about the human condition in relation to the relentless flow of matter and energy, which sediments into symbols through the magic of the painting process. It is a process to which Fu surrenders and gives form, making his works into a philosophical contemplation on the passage of time and the gradual change of life as part of an organic and sometimes mystical ecology.

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