Counterpart

By 1972 Liao was in New York, having left Paris in 1968, and had committed to printmaking as a primary practice. Counterpart, an etching from this period, sits within the body of intaglio work he produced after his Atelier 17 training under Hayter, characterized by hard-ground line, soft-ground texture, and aquatint passages used to model symmetrical iconographic forms. The title points to the binary, paired compositions Liao favored at this date — two gates, two lanterns, two festival objects facing one another across a central axis — a pictorial structure drawn from the architectural symmetry of Chinese temple façades and from the doubled couplets pasted to doorways at Lunar New Year. Counterpart belongs to the early-1970s phase in which Liao was systematizing the iconographic vocabulary established in the late 1960s into a printmaking language: the gate, the offering, the talisman reduced to flat, geometric, often mirrored forms. The etching medium allowed him to pull editions of these meditative pairings, a model for his later silkscreen work.