Celestial Ladder (天梯)
Title: Celestial Ladder （天梯）
Edition:1/1 (unique) 孤版
Medium: etching on paper
Dimension: 42.5 x 32.5 cm
Year: 2017
Celestial Ladder (天梯) combines various elements such as astrology, ancient mythologies, celestial body, geometry and dream objects. The snake-symbol represents wisdom, temptation, and death/rebirth; ladder represents the spiritual ascension (Jacob’s Ladder in Genesis).
In the middle of this work portrays the union of Nuwa and Fuxi (女娲伏羲交尾图), surrounded by astrological symbols. The four ladders in the sky symbolize the connection between the heaven and earth, god and man.
The original cooper plate of this artwork was destroyed. 此版画原铜板已销毁。
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.