Liao Jianhua is a Chinese painter born in 1981 in Yueyang, Hunan Province, who lives and works in Beijing. He graduated from Yueyang Normal University in 2005 and settled soon after in the Songzhuang artist village on the eastern edge of the city, where he has built one of the most disciplined bodies of process-based abstraction of his generation.

Liao makes each painting from a single, simplified form — a stroke, a mark, a small cell- or seed-like shape — repeated across the surface without interruption or limit. From a distance the paintings read as calm, near-monochrome fields; up close they teem with subtle, orderly variation, every mark overlapping and inflecting the last so that the whole seems quietly in motion. The work values labour over outcome: an art of accumulation in which long stretches of concentrated, repetitive handwork press time, will and a settled mind into matter. Order and disorder, the infinite and the limited, constraint and freedom coexist on a single plane.

He has held solo exhibitions since 2009 across China and in Singapore, and has shown widely in group surveys of Chinese abstraction and ink-line art in China, South Korea, Germany, Switzerland, Romania and Hong Kong.