Book of the Unknown (Liber Ignota)
Title: Book of the Unknown (Liber Ignota)
Medium: acrylic and watercolor on cotton paper, framed
Dimension: 19 x 28 cm
Year: 2021
Description: The latin word “Ignota” means unknown. In this artwork, I created a fictional manuscript-style book page about an unknown myth, with self-invented esoteric languages and occult symbols. While the fictional language is deliberated by the absence of meanings, how will you read something you don’t know how to read?
Jia LIU (b.1996) graduated from Central Saint Martins College of Art, University of the Arts London with a Masters degree of Fine Art in 2021, and achieved a bachelor degree of Visual Arts in Emily Carr University of Art. She predominantly works with oil, watercolors and acrylics to explore the concept of the mystery and the unknown. Through her personal obsessions of the spirituality/transcendentalism, Liu combines different elements of eastern & western occultism and metaphysics, mystical symbols, geometry, UFOs, and self-invented fictional languages (pseudo-language) in her paintings, to discuss the subtle relationships between the material and spiritual world, known and unknown, fiction and reality in the contemporary society. She utilizes abstract languages, surrealism and symbolism to express mankind’s eternal question of the existence of the physical world: is it as real as it seems to be? How can we prove we are not “brains in vats”? The paradoxical co-existences of body and soul, life and death, virtuality and reality motivate humans to dig into the unknown and truth, and their relationships are what Liu is interested in exploring.