Between Modernism

Liang Hao’s sculpture often conjures the modernist tradition that originated in Europe in the late nineteenth century. At the time, the gradual movement towards abstraction in visual representation revealed a shift in the focus of art from the worldly to the spiritual, from the visible to the invisible, and from the known to the unknown. A conceptual evolution can be seen from Cézanne to Kazimir Malevich to Mark Rothko—as Clement Greenberg wrote in Avant-Garde and Kitsch (1939), “the avant-garde artist sought to maintain the high level of his art by both narrowing and raising it to the expression of an absolute. In turning his attention away from subject matter of common experience, the artist turns it in upon the medium of his own craft.” Investigating the metaphysical through the medium of sculpture lies at the core of Liang Hao’s practice. She once said, “Art is greater than humans; our personal experiences are so insignificant in comparison with art. I wish to explore the higher dimensions of existence through art, while moving beyond modernism in the process.”

Concurrently, Liang Hao has developed a renewed understanding of ancient Chinese art through the lens of the modernist tradition. She recalls encountering ancient Chinese paintings and calligraphy as she was growing up, and being deeply impressed by visits to ancient tomb sites, grottos, and statues during her studies at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. “Inspired by Cézanne and Cubism, I was able reach an interpretation of Han Dynasty pictorial bricks, Shang Dynasty bronzes, and Chinese calligraphy from a new perspective, and attain an understanding of the changes and effects of dimensionality.”

The influence of these two traditions on Liang Hao’s work is apparent in the way her studio space is configured. Next to her sculpture workspace is a room dedicated to practicing calligraphy, where the abstract lines inside the room resonate visually and spiritually with the sculptures outside it. In practicing calligraphy, as her brushstrokes materialize on paper and break through the two-dimensionality of the calligraphic form, they simultaneously construct a spatiality and temporality that negate themselves in the process. Similarly, when Liang Hao works with wood, she often senses that she is generating brushstrokes similar to those of calligraphy: With each cut, the artist herself transforms into a medium of space and time, and the marks left behind become both a display of absence and a representation of the artist’s spiritual experience.

The Early Years

Liang Hao grew up in a family of artists in Beijing. When she entered the Sculpture Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1980, it was a time of ideological enlightenment and the beginning of the Reform and Opening-upz. Liang Hao received her training in socialist realism under Cao Chunsheng, Dong Zuyi, Situ Zhaoguang, and Qian Shaowu—key figures who incorporated Soviet experiences into the pedagogy of the department. At the same time, as a student, Liang Hao witnessed the rise of an artistic new wave, in which an avant-garde movement emerged from the practices of young artists across the country.

Having encountered a wide range of artistic discourses, Liang Hao yearned to expand her horizon even further. After graduation, she enrolled at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in the United States to continue her studies. There, immersed in the contemporary art scene and coming into contact with the modernist artworks that had previously only sporadically appeared in books and slides, Liang Hao became inspired visually, conceptually, and culturally. When she saw her classmates freely making use of all kinds of materials and expressing their ideas without any formal restrictions, she felt as if she was, in her own words, “a person who had grown up inside a jar, and even after the jar had been broken, still retained its shape.” From then on, Liang Hao attempted to shed the burden of her cultural heritage, abandon her previous artistic language and subject matter, and embark on new explorations and experiments. For instance, for the work Ashes Know Once Built (1988), Liang Hao constructed a wooden pillar before embedding candles into the surface of the stump and letting them burn down. In Condense (1988), she cast her personal belongings brought from China into cement as a symbol of farewell to the past.

During this search for liberation, Liang Hao also began to reflect on her own traditions, the legacy of modernism, and the influence of artists active in the 1990s such as Eva Hesse, Richard Serra, and Cy Twombly, all of which inspired epiphanies and formal transformations. Liang Hao’s development as an artist cannot be easily categorized within the conventional narrative of contemporary Chinese art as a phenomenon that emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Instead, it shows a more personal trajectory and the staggering of different points in time.

Material Essence

Raw timber is Liang Hao’s most frequently used material. Early in her career, she experimented with industrial and composite materials including cement and steel. However, her creative focus quickly shifted to wood—with its natural vitality, lack of artificial processing, and sense of intimacy. The ease with which she could handle, connect, and combine the material guided the artist and her creative process towards a state of intuitive surrender to nature. Whether it is directly cutting the material with an industrial chainsaw or assembling and recombining as the piece develops, Liang Hao’s interventions with wood have all transpired through a dialogue with its form. For her, wood allows for an encounter with nature, and the power to explore energy, space, and the language of sculpture itself. 

If the arrangement of the wooden sculptures in the West Gallery evokes a primal and contemplative atmosphere, the presentation of the plaster works in the New Gallery offers a contrasting sense of buonyancy and transcendence. Since 2023, Liang Hao has been revisiting plaster, the most basic sculptural material. Because it is predominantly used for molds and inherently fragile, few artists would deliberately employ plaster as the final material for their works. However, by casting plaster molds on the surface of wooden logs before splicing and shaping it into form, Liang Hao manages to transfer a part of the wooden form and texture onto a new material, achieving a result that transcends the imagery of trees and becomes liberated from their original structural and material forms, attaining a new state of freedom and metaphysical poetics. For Liang Hao, “Every cut or move to shape the material is an attempt to advance, challenge, or even disrupt familiar forms, which requires a great deal of courage.” In this sense, the experimentation of the latest series of works is not only about transformation at the material level, but also an occasion for the artist to reflect on and anticipate the unfolding of her own career in art.

Life as a Teacher 

After her return to China in 2007, Liang Hao taught for a decade in the Sculpture Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Her courses on studio practice interwove a classic sculpture curriculum—including three-dimensional composition and material knowledge—with art history, where she, as a working artist, would analyze and explicate how creative motives, personal backgrounds, and historical conditions have influenced the works of artists from the past. In Liang Hao’s view, art-making should transcend the confines of form; what matters more is to study the diverse connections that lie beneath its surface. Acquiring a nuanced understanding of these connections would enable students to engage in a more comprehensive reflection on their own creative practices. Using individual case studies as starting points, Liang Hao often conducted class discussions based on artists’ writings that elaborate on their personal creative philosophies. Over time, Liang Hao’s teaching practices compelled her to constantly reevaluate works by past artists, leading her to reflect on the grand, linear art-historical narratives spanning from historical traditions, through modernism, and eventually to the development of contemporary art. In turn, these insights have fed back into the ongoing introspection and exploration that characterize her own artistic practice.