A Beijing Childhood 1
Jia Lu was born into a Beijing that stood relatively unchanged by the ravages of the Chinese Communist Revolution. Land reforms and a fundamental reorganization of government and civil life had transformed relations between individuals during the five years of Communist rule preceding the artist’s birth. But the Beijing landscape, with its narrow, winding alleys and compounds enclosed by gray walls, the palaces of the Qing emperors and aristocracy weighted under their yellow and kingfisher roof tiles, the lakes and parks where one could swim during the summer and skate in winter, the songs of vendors falling through the dawn air like the swallows appearing at first light—these were the permanent aspects of a Beijing that filled the artist’s memories and provided the earliest inspiration for a lifetime of work. The people of Beijing still maintained a dignified politeness among themselves, their language touched with the dialect of the Manchurian elite and the terms of respect that had been used in the capital for the last three hundred years.
But among the new rulers of Beijing there was a fashionable interest in all things soviet. Bold marble architecture began to tower over the gray brick and timber homes. Socialist realism became the central style of the new fine art academies, taught to a new generation of artists by painters who had returned from Paris and Moscow. Even the names given to children born in the early 50s were based on Russian names: Lina, Sasha, Masha.
A Beijing Childhood 2
Jia’s parents were members of the new Beijing society. Her father, Enyi Lu, the youngest son of a landowner in Jiangsu province, had joined the New Fourth Route Army at the age of fourteen and had served as war artist for much of the struggle with the Nationalists and Japanese. Later assigned to the cultural department of the Navy, he rose in rank in part for recognition gained painting revolutionary scenes featuring the new leaders and depictions of navy life. Jia’s mother, the daughter of a landscape painter and calligrapher, was herself a graduate of the new Central Academy of Fine Arts and worked in the Forbidden City as a museum exhibit designer.
So Jia was born into a home where art and history were the central subjects of discussion and work. It was a home that smelled of turpentine and naphtha, where unfinished paintings hung on every wall in every room, and where plaster casts of European sculpture, naked and flayed, perched in the corners and atop antique rosewood furniture. Family life was modest but privileged nevertheless because of her father’s rank and social status of her grandparents. Jia’s kindergarten was run for the children of members of the State Council. It did not last.
A Beijing Childhood 3
In 1958 Jia’s father called on the Communist party to attach greater importance to the work and livelihood of artists, and was accused of being a Rightist. Reduced in rank and stripped of Party membership, he was ordered to repair reservoirs north of Beijing as labor reform. Investigations of the family revealed that grandparents on both sides had been important administrators in pre-communist society, and several of Jia’s uncles and aunts had accompanied the Nationalists’ flight from China and now lived in Taiwan. Jia’s family was suspect and accused of anti-revolutionary tendencies.
In 1959, with her father still serving his sentence, Jia’s family moved to Dongcheng district immediately north of the Forbidden City, among the old imperial warehouses and lesser palaces, away from the naval residence and scrutiny of the military. Jia’s skills were recognized and encouraged from the beginning. In her first grade she was appointed class chairman and allowed to join the poetry recitation and fine art extra-curricular groups at the local Youth Palace. These institutions borrowed from the Soviets the idea that early talent must be identified, separated and nourished. By 1962, Jia was acting on Central Television and had participated in the Beijing International Children’s Art Exhibition.
It was a precocious, active childhood, much of it spent away from home and in the company of teachers. Drawings filled her letters to her father. Her imagination was stirred by legends of Chinese heroes as well as by European fairy tales. In spite of the hardships her family felt on the wrong side of the political fence, it was for Jia a silver age.
Revolution & Youth 1
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution swept over Beijing in 1966, and brushed away her poetry and painting teachers before it. Jia Lu saw the drowned body of her school principal dragged from a lake where he had flung himself to escape his accusers. She witnessed local intellectuals beaten by crowds of youth who poured salt into their wounds. On the basis of her good school record, Jia herself became the target of angry students ready to turn over anything related to established authority. Returning home one evening, Jia persuaded her grandmother to sell or give away or burn all that remained of their pre-Revolutionary past. Heaping the thirteen school awards she had earned in her first five years, Jia burned all that might attract the attention of the Red Guards, now roaming the neighborhoods.
That summer she joined the Navy Residence Compound Agricultural Association with twenty other children to undergo training at a nearby military camp. The experience proved her leadership abilities, and she remained an extra month with a handful of girls to receive extra training. Returning to a burnt-out and all but abandoned school in September, Jia decided the best way to carry out a Cultural Revolution was to rebuild the place where culture is taught. She established her own Red Guard group, but with a different mission: the destruction of old ideas must be accompanied by the rebuilding of state property. Her group replaced broken windows, repainted walls, repaired desks and chairs. By 1968, classes resumed under the leadership of peasants, workers and soldiers. But more and more, Jia’s group of school rebuilders came under attack by other Red Guard groups bent on further destruction of the old order. Accused of being ultra-conservative by rivals, Jia arrived at school one day to find her desk and the floor and ceiling around it covered in ink, glue and written accusations and death threats. Realizing that she was prepared to fight, her friends dragged Jia home to avoid violence.
Revolution & Youth 2
But her courage was noted at higher levels, and she was elected to the Beijing Committee of Activists for the Study of Mao Tsetung Thought, a position she kept the following year into high school. She began writing and directing performances praising revolutionary ideas for factory, school and military audiences. And because the propaganda needs of the Cultural Revolution require an endless display of inspiring images, her father is allowed to return to the Navy. At home, the antiques and reproductions of Western art are now replaced by portraits of Mao Tsetung created by her father. Jia’s own drawings follow the needs of the time as well: her daily job is to design the main blackboard at school with images of Mao guiding the children of the revolution. Early on, Jia learned the importance of her audience and knew her work to be one of communicating ideas to them in as direct a manner as possible. That populist vision of an art for the masses, of speaking out clearly for what she believed, and of creating intelligible, even educational messages in her art, would reappear again and again in her later career. But there were other detours along the way. With the military’s attention focused on the rising tide of revolution, Jia’s family returned to life in the naval compound. At fifteen, enamored of the heroic tales of military life, Jia Lu decided to join the Navy.
Navy 1
Jia Lu enlisted in the Chinese Navy in December of 1969, and brought her leadership and creative abilities with her. Assigned squad leader, she continued to produce and direct propaganda plays throughout her military career. The following year she entered the Naval Logistics Command and began training as an operating room nurse. A strong visual memory assisted her in her medical studies, and after working for a year in the Navy General Hospital, she was transferred to the Science and Technology Exhibition Group.
Her new assignment allowed her to continue a scientific education that the Cultural Revolution had interrupted, but most importantly it brought Jia into daily contact with young men and women chosen for their intelligence and accomplishments from the largest army in the world. For the first time her range of contacts extended beyond Beijing into the varied provinces around her, and it stimulated her curiosity. At Naval Logistics Command she was also given access to international publications, books and movies that were restricted during the austere politics of the Cultural Revolution. Her friend Wang Zhongling opened the Beijing Military Command library to her, and together they explored the canons of Western literature and American culture.
Navy 2
The activities of Jia’s childhood and her teens continued into her twenties. She began to act again and the various film projects allowed her to travel extensively around China. Her natural energy and strength won a place for her in the Navy basketball team though after a year of full-time training, her five-foot-six-inches was not enough to make the cut to the Armed Forces team. With a staff of four she organized athletic meets, cultural activities, parades, festivals and performances, organizing volunteers to make the costumes and set decorations. She learned to work at a feverish pace, to apply her imagination to the sparest of materials, to inspire and motivate others.
One day while at the hospital she met a young patient who drew incessantly. The drawings were the best she had ever seen and used to her reputation as a skilled artist, it was a shock to realize that she had much more to learn. She asked her father what she had to do. His answer was direct: buy a stack of sketchbooks, as many as you can afford, and resolve to fill them within a year. Anything can be your model: your shoes, your cutlery, your room, your friends and colleagues. And so Jia began sketching at every free moment. She was rewarded by having her paintings accepted at two of the most difficult juried exhibitions in China, the Meizhan or National Fine Art Exhibition held at the National Gallery of China.
Navy 3
Other forces propelled her along her way to a fine art career. Following the death of Mao Tsetung and the fall of the Gang of Four led by his widow Jiang Qing, the armed forces were shaken by a political struggle for power among various factions. In the fallout Jia’s father was arrested as a right-wing element, and her family background was dragged up again as a reason for preventing her own advancement. Jia Lu applied to the Navy General Command to continue her scientific and medical training, but her application was denied. The same happened when she tried to apply to the Central Academy of Fine Arts, in spite of the fact that Academy professors supported her application. Her acting career was held up too by losing roles to better connected, though less seasoned actresses. And her father was an example that a future in the military would be fraught with political difficulties. The lesson was clear: success would depend entirely on her own efforts and not on promotion within an organization where family background would always be a factor against her. And she needed a career where she could develop no matter where she was sent.
It was a wise decision: in August of 1979 the political climate turned chilly again. Jia was sent for a month of labor reform in the countryside near Beijing, then ordered to lead raw recruits for basic training, again away from Beijing. At the end of the summer she left her post in dismay and returned to Beijing where she secured a transfer out of the military to the National Bureau of Oceanography, on staff with the monthly periodical Oceans.
Navy 4
She put all her effort into her new work as an art editor of the magazine, preparing layouts and illustrations, and traveling throughout China in search of new stories. Her efforts won her a medal for outstanding work, and several awards for her magazine. It also won the appreciation of the Bureau, who offered her a three-year bursary to attend intensive instructor training at the Central Academy of Art and Craft. The chance she had been waiting for arrived at last. But her military background provided one last important opportunity. Drawing on her own reputation, her reporter status at the magazine, and some inside help from a new friend in the Academy, Jia Lu left Beijing in the summer of 1981 to travel alone to Central Asia and the deserts and steppes of Xinjiang.
Silk Roads 1
Throughout her childhood, Jia Lu had seen movies and heard songs about the people of Xinjiang, the westernmost autonomous region of China. A romantic idea of their free life roaming the high plateaus with their herds and their unrestrained expression in song and dance had powerfully attracted her for years. Now at last she had a chance to experience it for herself. It was to be an experience she would never forget.
No sooner than she arrived, Jia began to draw the busy market life in the streets and to make friends. She traveled by military plane, truck, jeep and camel north from Urumchi to Altay and Tacheng and southwest to Kuqa, Aksu, Kashgar, Yarkand and Khotan. At Taxkorgan she stood on the borders of China, Pakistan and Afganistan. She drew Tadjiks, Uighurs, Mongols, and Kazakhs, and men, women and children would line up to pose, then walk away without asking for the picture or any other word when Jia was finished.
During the summer an outbreak of ethnic violence swept over Xinjiang. Sparked by a dispute over a donkey, a riot flared up between local Uighurs and the few ethnic Chinese merchants and their families who lived in the area. Jia had already begun to wear local dress as a convenience. Now she had to remain disguised by necessity.
Silk Roads 2
Local Tadjik friends offered her shelter for several days through the worst of the violence, until it was too dangerous to remain. From the balcony of the house where she was hidden, Jia spotted a Chinese-speaking performer in a dance troupe she had met earlier, and he told her that he was leaving the next day for Taxkorgan, a days drive away, but she would need a special pass because the border with USSR was nearby. In the dead of night, wearing clothes lent by her landlord’s wife, Jia followed her friend down the streets to the police station, where Uighur and Chinese armed police were desperately trying to command their troops in the rioting city. After revealing she was a reporter from Beijing and a naval officer, the passport official reluctantly gave her the necessary papers.
The day-long drive took her out of immediate danger. Several weeks passed in Taxkorgan without any news from Kashgar, and Jia was expected back at work. No one knew what had become of her.
Silk Roads 3
In a final attempt to escape from Xinjiang, Jia boarded a hospital ambulance returning along the mountainous route to Kashgar for brake repairs. At the military airport in Kashgar she saw a goat being loaded into a military transport, and persuaded the pilot to leave the goat and take her instead to Urumqi.
Jia Lu finally returned to Beijing in December, having left half of her 300 drawings behind, but carrying in the other half of her sketches a remarkable record of her adventure. In spite of nearly costing her life, the experience convinced Jia of her desire to travel to far-off places. By 1982, China was beginning to open up to the outside world, and the overseas relatives whose existence had made Jia’s family background such a problem before now invited her to study in Canada. By spring of 1983 Jia had made up her mind.
New World 1
Jia Lu's first few years in Canada were difficult, but her problems only deepened her resolve to succeed. Jia had given up a job in China that paid two salaries, a certain notoriety for her adventures in Xinjiang, and a growing reputation as an actress, reporter and artist. In Canada she knew poverty, anonymity, and discrimination. Her first room was a windowless basement storage room under a piano shop on Danforth Avenue in Toronto; her furniture were cardboard boxes, her rent paid by moving boxes to and from the shop upstairs. By the light of a single electric bulb she painted her first several exhibitions in the new world.
Jia made friends easily, and by the summer she had met Vivian Huang, an engineer who would soon become her roommate for several years, and Geoffrey Bonnycastle, a young artist and student of Chinese whom she would marry fourteen years later. With her sister Miao Lu, who had come to Canada the previous year, Jia Lu produced enough work for two large exhibitions of Chinese ink paintings.
The paintings sold well and immediately brought Jia to the attention of the Chinese community in Toronto. She began to lecture on Chinese art history at schools and libraries in Toronto with Geoffrey as her interpreter, and later organized Chinese painting demonstrations and related activities for the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Royal Ontario Museum.
New World 2
Meanwhile Jia was attending English classes in exchange for her paintings, and had decided to blend the experiences of her past with the new art she was seeing in Canada. In 1988 Jia applied to graduate school at one of Canada’s leading art schools, the Department of Visual Arts at York University. She was first admitted on the strength of her work, but later declined because she could not yet reach a high enough score in the Test of English as a Foreign Language. As a compromise, York offered Jia a position as research assistant to Toronto artist Bruce Parsons, provided studio space and permitted her to attend all graduate classes in fine art.
It was not long before Jia discovered the fundamental differences in Chinese and North American art education. The emphasis at the Central Academy of Art and Craft reflected the academic tradition inherited from France and Moscow: rigorous technical training in drawing from plaster casts and from life, pure color and virtuoso brushwork, and an emphasis on realism and social subjects.
New World 3
York University’s focus was on developing creative problem-solving skills, an awareness of political and philosophical issues relevant to contemporary art, and an emphasis on abstract art and new figurative expressionism. Where in China Jia had been encouraged to suppress her feelings in the pursuit of an objective visual reality and criticized for an abundance of emotion, in Canada she was urged to explore the depths of her emotions, her sexuality and her feelings as a woman, and express them without regard for draftsmanship or painterly skill. It was unexplored territory for her, and she moved tentatively at first, as if not quite trusting what she might find in this abandonment of control.
The resulting paintings were an amalgam of Western and Eastern symbols, punctuated with images from Jia’s childhood, and constructed in layers of different materials, mainly rice paper, acrylics and oils.
Three series of paintings resulted from her experiments at York. The Cocoon series were images of women, stripped naked, in poses of sleep or self-protection, wrapped in enormous dry leaves and silk threads. They revealed Jia Lu’s vulnerability, and at the same time her willingness to expose herself and her fears on canvas in a way she had not done in her earlier work. Her Secret Garden series were more nostalgic, almost surrealist pieces that suggested her sense of self is deeply linked to her early childhood. The Mask series featured classical nude sculpture with the genitals covered by a Chinese opera mask. Most of Jia’s work as the powerful "Self-portrait" featuring a red figure curled helplessly beneath the imponderable weight of an archaic Chinese bronze vessel.
New World 4
With the inevitable uncertainty that arose from such demanding self-reflection in her work, Jia looked for stability and certainty in her private life. She thought she had found it in Patrick Lam, a chemical engineering student at the University of Toronto. Soon after their marriage in 1986, however, she realized she had made a mistake. The two had little in common and could agree on nothing. After marrying, he took up worked in Sarnia, a petrochemical processing town in Southwest Ontario. Jia wished to remain in Toronto, but by 1987 she left York to try what she could to save her marriage. In 1989 she bore her only son Anson and nursed him as she prepared for her first major solo exhibition. Twenty-two works were exhibited at the Sarnia Public Gallery that summer.
Almost as soon as the exhibition came down, her husband took work in Calgary, Alberta, and sold their house. Jia had no choice but to follow unhappily in 1990. Calgary was as far away from the art world and friends Jia had spent so much time developing for the past seven years. Geographically isolated and kept at home by the demands of an infant son, Jia’s relations with her husband continued to disintegrate. Already estranged from her husband she moved to the unfinished basement of their house, and painted in despair. Two self-portraits from that period are particularly telling.
New World 5
The first, "Red" depicts the artist wearing the uniform of a Chinese soldier and the Chinese characters for "Proletariat of the world, Unite!" behind her. But beneath the jacket is a red taffeta skirt, stockinged legs and red stilettos, and a collage of lipstick, automobiles, handbags and other luxury items cut from consumer magazines.
The second painting, "Bride" shows the artist dressed in a nun’s habit, holding a bouquet of red roses, with the Chinese wedding symbol of double happiness hanging behind her. By 1990, Jia had sunken to a life that seemed a pale image of the dreams she held for North America. Locked in a loveless marriage and isolated from her market and friends, she had neither the financial means or influence to escape; she barely had the strength to continue painting. Until in 1991 she received a telephone call from Tokyo.
Buddhism 1
Several years before moving to Calgary, Jia was asked to paint "The Seven Scholars of the Bamboo Grove" for an agent with a Japanese customer. The piece was received well, and the agent invited Jia to travel to Tokyo to show more of her work. Sensing a financial solution to her problems, Jia accepted and in 1991 arrived in Japan.
Over the next two months she met several collectors and painted numerous commissions. Then she met Mr. Isao Abe, the hereditary owner of the Peony Garden of Ueno Park in downtown Tokyo. Mr. Abe wanted to build a replica of the Dunhuang murals for a museum and hotel complex modeled on the architecture and history of the Chinese Tang Dynasty. He asked Jia to provide advise and undertake research. The results were impressive enough that Mr. Abe formally offered the job of Chief Designer to Jia and sent her to China to organize a team to produce a mural of 7,000 square metres.
Buddhism 2
Along the Silk Road at the frontier between ancient China and the nomad dynasties of Central Asian kingdoms lay a town that was to become one of the most remarkable crossroads of history. Sheltered slightly from the sweeping desert winds off the Taklamakan, the garrison of Dunhuang was the gateway to China in the Eight Century, and a point of exchange between East and West for two millennia. Caves dug into the soft loess earth and decorated by local artisans have become a treasure house of religious art for a thousand years until buried by the sands. Uncovered in modern times by the explorer-archaeologist Aurel Stein, the 492 caves contain remarkable murals and sculpture on Buddhist subjects executed over ten dynasties between 366 and 1368 AD, including some of the first figure paintings in Chinese art history.
Jia had visited the Dunhuang caves on her way out of Xinjiang in 1981 and had completed several large reproductions of the murals on site. She was therefore familiar with the images and styles of art they represented. This time, Jia realized she had an opportunity to do more than simply reproduce the ancient paintings. For three years she steeped herself in Buddhist philosophy and studied all she could about the art and archaeology of the site. She made detailed studies of caves designed in each period and settled on two periods she felt represented the very best of the murals - early and high Tang Dynasty caves. She then set about to redesign the compositions and to improve them, while adhering closely to the spirit of the originals. A total of two caves, containing twenty separate murals, were entirely redesigned from scratch with a team of forty professional artists. The full scale designs were rolled out for approval in the Beijing soccer stadium in 1993. They covered the stadium floor three times.
Buddhism 3
For her work, Jia was recognized by the China Institute for Buddhist Studies and by the Chinese Institute of Buddhist Art as the foremost living Buddhist artist in the world. Unfortunately, economic difficulties in Japan forced the project to be suspended before color designs or construction were begun. Jia insisted her design team respect for the religious images she was charged with creating, and required temperate language and dress in front of the designs. But she considered her work a celebration of Chinese culture, not a religious act or duty. In fact, Jia’s education and upbringing had not given her a religious turn of mind. Yet when her work was shown in Japan, to her surprise and embarrassment, the intensity of the images caused many viewers, in formal dress, to drop to their knees and bow before them. Some of her admirers began to imagine Jia Lu as an incarnation of a bodhisattva herself, an enlightened being returned to the world to help eliminate the suffering of all beings. It was a long way from her days as a Red Guard destroying superstition and feudal ideas.
Buddhism 4
During her three years in China and Japan, Jia Lu also had a brief return to the world of film. Mr. Abe invited her to join a team of international consultants to propose improvements to a historical romance, also set in the Tang Dynasty, in which he was the main investor. Jia Lu assisted in the selection of the lead role, and when the project was completed beneath the expectations of the investors, led a European team to rewrite the screenplay. Jia Lu also came to the attention of Pierre Cardin’s agent in China at this time, who invited her to prepare original designs for a fashion show based on Chinese costumes from several ages. The show was to be held in conjunction with the Olympics planned for Beijing in the year 2000.
Living in China and Japan after almost a decade in the West reaffirmed for Jia the importance of craftsmanship and tradition in her own work. The return to Asia was part of a process of spiritual recovery and artistic rediscovery, so that when she returned to Canada, she was prepared to take her work and her life in a new direction.
Transitions
Several months after her return from Japan, Jia Lu finally left her husband of eight years. A bitter divorce and fierce custody battle over her son Anson followed, during which time she was unable to leave Calgary. Her long-time friend and translator from Toronto, Geoffrey Bonnycastle, moved to Calgary to help with her case, and together they established the Jia Lu School of Art in her apartment. Teaching provided an income in a city where Chinese-style painting and Buddhist art had few serious collectors. As Jia’s reputation as a teacher increased, so did her students, until over a hundred youths and adults were taking classes in drawing, painting and design every week in her home.
In the summer of 1996, Jia and Geoffrey spent their earnings on a six week trip to London and Paris. For the first time in her life, Jia came face-to-face with the European culture she had previously only read about. At the British Museum, the National Gallery, the Louvre and the Musee d’Orsay she was surrounded by masterpieces of Western and Oriental art. For the first time, perhaps, Jia Lu saw the importance of oil painting in general, and paintings of the human figure in particular, to world culture. And like so many artists before her, she fell in love with Paris. She sensed in the architecture, sculpture and painting of the Nineteenth Century an empire at its full glory, comparable to the Chinese Tang Dynasty but untarnished by several intervening centuries. All around, in private and public spaces were sculptures and paintings of the human figure, the magnificence of the nude in its unashamed beauty.
Exotic Realism 1
The inspiration was tremendous. Jia returned to Calgary determined to capture that universality embodied in the human figure. Certain that she needed a new medium to express herself, she returned to oil painting, which she had set aside for the previous fifteen years. The first paintings completed were "Wheel of Night" and "The Dancing Flame" a pair of male and female nudes with Indian sculpture she had seen at European museums in the background. Each painting took a month of work to complete, grindingly slow for an artist used to finishing several ink paintings in a day. But the results were worth it. Jia Lu had found for herself a style and subject that embodied more than just a blend of East and Western symbols. She had at last managed to infuse her paintings with a quality that transcended Chinese and European culture, that seemed to belong to another time, to another place. The men and women she now wanted to paint were like anonymous characters in a narrative we have read but forgotten, a glimpse of a dimly remembered past life.
Most remarkably, having at last settled on her new style, Jia began developing compositions at a furious pace, continuously inspired afresh by all that she had seen in her busy life. It was as if through these paintings she could mine the full range of her experiences in China, Japan, North America and Europe for imagery and inspiration. While continuing a busy teaching schedule, with Geoffrey’s help, Jia finished twenty oil paintings in the following year and half. The resulting exhibition at the Stephen Lowe Gallery in Calgary was a commercial success, and enabled the couple to close their classes, move to Los Angeles and concentrate on painting full-time.
Exotic Realism 2
In October 1997 Jia Lu exhibited at Art Expo Los Angeles, an international exhibition of commercial fine art. Her work occupied one of the largest spaces devoted to a single artist and as a newcomer she attracted the attention of several art publishers.
Almost immediately, Jia Lu found she had to make some hard decisions about how she would show her work in the United States. The American fine art market was divided quite clearly between "high7quot; and "low" markets. The "high" market was the home for conceptual, abstract and avant-garde work, generally shown in artist-run cooperative galleries, a small number of commercial galleries, and public and university museums. It had its own magazines, critics and collectors. In the 1990s it was also relatively unsympathetic to realistic work. The "low" market was dominated by realistic and decorative painting, shown in commercial galleries, earning very little critical attention, with serigraphy and the newer giclee reproductions as important products.
Jia Lu felt her work lay somewhere in between these sharply divided worlds. She wanted to share her work with art lovers beyond the small number of collectors who could afford her original paintings, but also wanted the freedom to explore new styles and content in the future. Her emphasis on beauty and nudes seemed to put her at odds with critical trends in the non- commercial market, but found the work in commercial galleries to be light on ideas and substance.
Exotic Realism 3
Unsure how to describe her work, between 1997 and 2000 Jia Lu chose to concentrate on new creations and let the art world decide for itself. She had only begun to work in oils and had a number of themes she wanted to explore, reintegrating the compositions she had developed in her ink paintings, subjects she had explored in her Buddhist designs, and the highly personal, confessional mode she had discoverd in her mixed media work. During this period of intense activity she had time to invite her parents to the United States and now formally studied her father's own impressionist painting techniques, particularly his use of color and looser brushwork.
By 2000 she held several non-commercial exhibitions: her oils were shown at the new Asian Art Center and the United Nations Building in New York, and she was the only oil painter chosen to represent China at an important UNESCO exhibition during the China Cultural Week in Paris. Closer to home she showed at the Pacific Asian Museum in Pasadena.
Commercial galleries in the West began to purchase and exhibit important work to a growing audience. Exhibitions in Denver, San Diego, Santa Fe, San Jose, Bellevue, Los Angeles and Hawaii helped to establish a devoted corps of collectors and supporters. Several print editions began to sell out and her publishers, Alius Fine Art, had trouble keeping up with demand for a book on her life and work.
Exotic Realism 4
Jia Lu's commercial success allowed her to travel more widely and see Western art in a variety of forms. With her background in film and her exposure to performance it's perhaps not suprising that she was drawn to the stage. She began to attend productions of Broadway shows in New York, opera in Los Angeles, modern dance in China and extravaganzas in Las Vegas, fascinated by their sets, costumes, makeup and drama. She recognized a connection with the cast of costumed gods and heroes from the elaborate Central Asian murals she had studied, as well as the dramatic political theatre she had participated in during her youth. She discovered the same emotional transport she was trying to create in her audience with her own paintings, and the same love for beauty, fantasy, texture and opulence.
In 2003, Jia began to develop imagery for a stage production of her own. Originally titled Immortal, over the next three years it would transform into Transcendance, a live musical performance featuring dance, acrobatics, martial arts, magic, on-stage musicians, puppetry, moving sets and spectacular special effects, blending Asian and Western myth and legend. It was an attempt to bring her own paintings to life, to break out of the confines of two dimensions, to blend Chinese philosophy into Western art and to reach a larger audience.
By 2005 Jia had developed the script and concept art with Geoffrey and a small team of artists. The work attracted the attention of Tony Dimitriades, manager for Fleetwood Mac, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Yes and Billy Idol. He in turn brought Jia to AEG, producers of the Celine Dion "A New Day" show at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, owners of the Staples Center in Los Angeles, and one of the largest producers of live musical entertainment in the United States. Impressed with the work, AEG signed a contract to co-produce Transcendance and began working with Jia Lu to bring the show to Las Vegas in 2010.
Jia Lu has continued to paint and exhibit her art. Increasingly, elements of theatre and dance, always present in the elaborate costumes and jewelry her models wore, are now more striking. As her work continues to evolve, she has adopted a looser, more confident style, paying closer attention to lighting and brushwork, movement and composition.