Praying

By 1966 Liao had moved from Tokyo to Paris and had begun working at S. W. Hayter's Atelier 17, but he was still producing oils in parallel with his nascent printmaking practice. Praying continues the religious cycle begun with Worship (1963), narrowing the field from collective devotion to a single act. Works of this transitional period typically show Liao moving toward greater abstraction and flatness — the figure simplified, the picture plane shallower — under the combined influence of Hayter's modernist intaglio circle and his own deepening investigation of Chinese and Taiwanese folk-religious form. The painting sits at the hinge between his early representational treatments of Taipei temple life and the iconographic distillations of the late 1960s and 1970s, in which prayer would no longer be depicted as an act but encoded in symbols: the censer, the door panel, the gilt offering plate. As such, Praying documents a vocabulary in the process of being abstracted.