Jia Lu was born in Beijing in 1954 and after stints in medicine, acting and magazine editing at the end of the Cultural Revolution, she entered the China Central Academy of Arts & Design (now the Academy of Arts & Design at Tsinghua University) graduating in 1982. In 1983 she moved to Canada and enrolled in the graduate program of the Faculty of Visual Arts at York University in Toronto. She has held over two hundred solo exhibitions of work at galleries in Canada, Japan, Europe and throughout the United States.

Known primarily for her academic oil painting, the artist has also worked as a senior designer or art consultant for numerous projects, including stage performances and museum and exhibit design. While emerging from the same generation as leading Chinese contemporary artists, Jia Lu has lived for most of her life in North America and the major themes of her work remain highly personal and introspective. resume

After several decades of commercial success as a figurative painter, Jia Lu began her contemporary practice in 2018, following a studio move to San Diego. In her new body of work the artist explores surreal imagery and biological form in a variety of media to develop themes of belief, passage, identity and spirituality. statement