Jia Lu has been drawing or painting for most of her life. Exposed to oil painting in her father's studio as a child, she later trained as a traditional ink painter in classes with the celebrated Fan Zeng, absorbed a wide variety of media and processes as a student at the Central Academy of Art and Design (Zhongguo Zhongyang Gongyi Meishu Xueyuan). After her move to Canada she explored mixed media as a graduate student under the supervision of Canadian painter Bruce Parsons. During her early North American career she made frequent returns to China and Japan where she developed a vocabulary of traditional Buddhist design. These disparate influences ultimately led to the discovery of an individual style when she returned to oil painting in 1995.
Oil Painting
Influenced by her father, the self-taught impressionist Enyi Lu, Jia Lu returned to oil painting after a visit to Europe in 1995. Like many of her contemporaries educated under the socialist art academies, Jia Lu chose figurative realism, but her use of color and emphasis on spiritualism and symbolism separate her from other Chinese painters. Our gallery documents her work over the last twelve years, including the artist's first hyper-real paintings completed in Canada, to her more impressionistic and colorful work following her move to California.
Sketches and Watercolors
These works, executed over the same period as the oil paintings, are sometimes preliminary studies or explore variations on a completed work. They demonstrate strong evidence of her training in classical ink painting, and are mostly completed in ink and pale color.
Mixed Media
Jia Lu's mixed media work represents a transition between her earlier Chinese-style work and her more mature style. These paintings reflect her first exposure to western art training and a period of intense cultural change while she adapted to life in Canada. Using highly personal subjects, including a series of dream-like self-portraits, Jia Lu explored her cultural and sexual identity, revisiting imagery drawn from her childhood, putting techniques and materials borrowed from traditional painting, such as xuan paper and mineral colors, to new use in her image-making.
Design Work
Western graphic design can trace its roots to Cubist-influenced German design from Bauhaus, and Japanese-influenced French affiches of the Nineteenth Century. While she absorbed the Vienna Secession design idiom fashionable in China during the early 1980s, Jia Lu's graphic and design work later became rooted instead in Chinese religious art, particularly the subtle colors and rich patterns of Buddhist art from Central Asia. This graphic tradition emphasizes iconic poses, ornate surfaces and subtle, muted colors, and has given her costume and jewelry designs a strong theatrical flair.
Ink Painting
Jia Lu's early professional work demonstrated a mastery of the gongbi style of Chinese brush painting, with its attention to realism and controlled brushwork. A disciple of the master Fan Zeng, her own work was nearly indistinguishable from his, both in style and in her preference for painting figures drawn from classical literature and history. While she enjoyed certain commercial success as his favorite student, she began looking for other sources of inspiration and explored ways to create a style of her own.