Liu Jiadong: Celebrating Meaninglessness

Liu Jiadong's solo exhibition Celebrating Meaninglessness opens at Studio Gallery on 1 August 2026. His fifth solo exhibition at the gallery, it takes conversation and experience as its through-line, presenting oil paintings on canvas made since 2024.

Entering the gallery, what one meets first is not the work but three lines: The Human Condition The Kingdom of Heaven Death Is at Hand We Should Repent Who Sits as King? They are not religious slogans, and they ask for no answer. They return one fact to the room: that a person will die, and that a person wants to live meaningfully.

Liu Jiadong calls this a more realistic realism. Reality is the most immediate present, the immediate condition that has not yet been understood or explained. The body, whether sitting or standing, is the state that is happening now and hardest to catch. The reality he faces is not the visual cultivation of a sense of the real, nor art understood as a position taken on social reality, but the human condition as it is constituted by desire, time, recognition, and death together. A CV, a reputation, a price — none of these can stand in for an artist's actual work, and the more intractable judge sits inside: the mind that keeps auditing meaning and calculating its own place in history. The mind made king, he says, seems to be the source of the suffering. Who sits as king? Who is entitled to reward an artist? The root of every action lies in who your king is, and to whom you make your sacrifice. In this exhibition, that seat has been left empty.

Celebration, then, acquires a concrete referent. For years he was anxious about meaning: auditing his own work, swearing loyalty to one aesthetic doctrine after another, drafting in advance, in his head, the words that would describe his paintings. Then he set one fact against his own mind — that this world will one day come to an end — and found, to his delight, that the dissolution of self-consciousness is the key to every problem. Painting is objective, made by body, consciousness, material, and process acting together; a decision is not necessarily reached by thinking but made in the doing. Repeated preparation and the judgment of timing are compressed into the single instant of striking, and amid uncertainty and error that one stroke is still carried through. He felt his soul grow quiet. What is worth celebrating is exactly this: the inner experience of a free person rather than of a slave.

Painting then returns to something quite concrete. See a face, a telephone, a detail, and take long enough to paint it. Pigment and oil paste adhere to a canvas and come to look like a person, and that alone is marvel enough, and conceptual enough. In the exhibition, each painting stands in darkness with a single lamp before it. The source of the light is not concealed; it reminds us that seeing has never been a given. Whether the painting holds an ordinary person or a king, whether or not he is held to be important, at that moment a viewer can feel the presence of a person.

Celebrating Meaninglessness can be read two ways: that meaninglessness is worth celebrating, or that celebrating is itself meaningless. Liu Jiadong does not choose for us. He leaves the throne empty and the lamp on. The rest is left to anyone willing to stop: to sit a while before a painting, to recognize that time is passing, and to recognize that for now we can still see.

Text by Yaoxiang Zhuang Studio Gallery