Visiting Artist Lecture Series presented by the Department of Art and Center for Art Research

Lectures are live on Zoom with registration and will also livestream on the Department of Art Facebook.

Much of Fred H. C. Liang’s recent work combines jianzhi, the folk art of cut paper, with porcelain to explore cultural exchanges between the East and West.  The assemblage of his work explores the complex global exchanges and the subsequent dissemination, appropriation, and transformation of cultural ideas and peoples. Life is more bewildering than fiction, and hidden, historical narratives more beguiling than those preconceived. In his work, Liang takes viewers down the rabbit hole of domestic and global events, where our collective understanding of history is disassembled and linked as unexpected chains of events—and descending through the burrow allows an alternate reality to reveal itself.  In much of his work, he excavates familiar global narratives to illuminate the complexity of events that impact both Eastern and Western societies in unanticipated ways.  Doing so encourages a visual dialogue that examines the intangibility of the past, present and future by considering the tangibility of personal rituals, cultural traditions and shared iconography.  Such considerations expose the fragility and impermanence of things both large and small. Through forms and materials, Liang’s work re-contextualizes art and deconstructs cultural traditions from places far and near—reflecting societies’ cultural and economic exchanges. 

Fred H. C. Liang received a BFA from the University of Manitoba and an MFA from Yale University. His honors include Massachusetts Cultural Council Arts Grants in both painting, printmaking and works on paper. Liang’s work is in numerous public and private collections including Fidelity, the Gund Collection, Addison Museum of American Art and the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. He recently exhibited work at the Currier Museum of Art in NH, Inside Out Museum in Beijing and the ICA, Boston. Liang’s most recent exhibitions include the Milwaukee Art Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Addison Museum of American Art in Massachusetts, XC.HuA Gallery in Berlin and Jerez de la Frontera Gallery at University of Cadiz.  He just completed a residency at the Museo de Arte Contemporary in Sandiago de Chile and the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai, China.  His work was recently interviewed by Huffington Post, WBUR Open Studio and reviewed in The Boston Globe.  Liang is a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, Massachusetts, USA where he is the Coordinator of the Printmaking Department. Liang is also a 2020 Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant recipient.

This lecture is made possible by the Gordon W. Gilkey Endowed Fund.