A drop of powerful water is enough to create a world and to dissolve the night. To dream of power, all that is needed is a drop imagined in depth. The water thus energized is a germ; it gives to life an inexhaustible rise. The being devoted to water is a being in vertigo. He dies every minute, without ceasing something of his substance collapses. Daily death is not the exuberant death of fire that pierces the sky with its arrows; daily death is the death of water. Water always flows, water always falls, it always ends in its horizontal death. In countless examples we shall see that for the materializing imagination the death of water is more son-geous than the death of the earth: the sorrow of water is infinite.

–– Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: Essay on the Imagination of Matter, 1942

Liang Fu’s compositions stem from a drop of water. Using pigments on unprimed canvas, he begins with a diffusion of colors, figures, and forms. The figurative dimensions of Fu’s subjects are blurred, blending interior and exterior, visible and nonvisible, presence and absence. What emerges in his paintings may appear to be landscapes, or figures, or ghosts as they dissipate into the background. The viewer’s understanding of the image oscillates, remaining elusive and ever-changing. Fu notes, "It may feel as if the picture is watching the viewer, forcing them to continuously adapt." Water, as weightless as it may seem, is what causes the pigment to pervade and transform the thickness of Fu’s canvases.  

For Fu, water brings forth a wealth of symbolic associations that are more or less conscious, halfway between states of awakening and dreaming. Even while producing the works, he attempts to dwell in a state of uncertainty through a delicate interplay between transparency and opacity in his paint. To begin, he produces his own mineral pigments with a watercolor binder, then switches to oil paint upon completing the work to enhance, detail, and build on the possibilities that stem from the encounter of the two mediums.