Prayer

Prayer (2004) extends Liao's long preoccupation with Chinese folk-religious iconography, which he first encountered as a child near the Longshan Temple in Taipei's Wanhua district. Mixed-media works from this period typically combine intaglio, silkscreen, and applied metallic leaf on a single sheet, building a layered surface in which symbolic objects — incense sticks, joss-paper offerings, lantern shapes, paired roundels — float against fields of saturated color. The 'Religious' tag is consistent with Liao's career-long use of temple votive forms as a vocabulary for cultural memory rather than literal devotion. By 2004 Liao had been working between Taipei, Tokyo, and New Jersey for several decades, and his prints of this period show the deliberate flattening and bilateral symmetry he developed after the early 1970s. The print belongs to the same conceptual lineage as his earlier 'Door God' and 'Festival' series, where everyday Taiwanese ritual furniture is abstracted into formal motifs and treated with the print-craft rigor he absorbed from S.W. Hayter's Atelier 17 in Paris.