JagathWeerasinghe is one of the pioneers of the 90s Art Trend in Sri Lanka, and is currently a frontrunner in the contemporary art scene in the country. Having acquired a BFA in Painting from the University of Kelaniya in Sri Lanka and an MFA from the American University in Washington D.C., USA,Weerasinghe pursues his passion for visual art while also working in education contexts, most recently as the Director of the Postgraduate Institute of Archaeology at the University of Kelaniya. Weerasinghe co-founded the Theertha International Artists Collective in 2000 as a platform designed to foster dialogue among the local artist community in Sri Lanka beyond boundaries of ethnicity, region and artistic style. He was the Chairman of the Collective until 2017. He has presented his work in a number of solo and group exhibitions locally, and internationally in Dubai, United Kingdom, India, Germany, Netherlands, USA and Singapore. He is also an exceptional artist who has contributed to the art industry in Sri Lanka with several academic publications that shed light on the manner in which contemporary artists have evolved and developed their craft over the years. He is currently based in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Weerasinghe mostly uses Acrylic on canvas or paper as his medium of expression, but has experimented with murals and monuments as well. 

His works are best described as abstract depictions of contemporary socio-political issues that have an especially personal bearing on his creative thought process. Weerasinghe is credited with the coining of the term “the 90s Art Trend”, and he has mainly contributed to the movement through artistic deliberations about the thirty year Civil War in Sri Lanka. His early works manifest a unique personal reaction to animosity, as a Sinhala Buddhist in crisis with his identity surrounded by repressive political regimes that continuously imposed questionable solutions to end the war. In July 1983,Weerasinghe was personally affected by the ethnic crisis when he witnessed the mass scale violence perpetrated against the Tamil community of the country, leading to the thirty-year civil war. He was also abducted in the 1970s, which has had a considerable influence on his political consciousness as conveyed in his creative work. In 1999, he completed a monument commissioned by the government of Sri Lanka, titled “Shrine for the Innocent”, in order to capture the violence innocent victims from the southern part of the country underwent during the period between 1988 and 1991. The monument was designed as a act of remembrance, as Weerasinghe states, to memorialize “one bloody incident [which] took more attention than the other smaller ones: the abduction and murder of 33 school children at Embilipitiya, a village in the south of Sri Lanka.” In the years following the war the monument was subjected to a “disappearance”, which Weerasinghe understands to signify the political changes that took place following a series of brutalities: “I mean in a conceptual way is actually a [RE] APPEARANCE of a monument which is much more relevant, and symptomatic of the civil and political society of Colombo, Sri Lanka or of Sri Lanka in general.” His approach to art is therefore one that is socially critical and engaged, establishing the fact that art should evolve with time and that artists should be engaged in their own socio-political consciousness and senses of criticality.