Artwork Appreciation
The artist Mia Liu once drew in pencil on her grandmother’s ink bamboo studies and several albums of paintings to create more than a dozen works that were like dialogues across time and space. As a result, she began to think about the relationship between painting and framing or mounting. She imagined that whether a work goes from mounting to painting or from painting to mounting, they are united, so the two are on an equal footing. In her Drawing Dialogue in Kyoto: Crabs, Mia Liu took an ink painting of crabs that she bought at a flea market in Kyoto and drew many block patterns around the crabs with pencil. Between the crabs, she pressed and glued a black mesh, which added the effect of a layer of transparent mesh pattern that contrasted with the pencil and ink. A fabric with a modern geometric pattern—unlike the kind used in the past—was selected for the mounting. Thus, both the painting and the mounting have been reconstructed with different techniques to form a “pictorial dialogue” between tradition and modernity.