Taiwan Today

By mixing Western and Chinese concepts, Liu Kuo-sung has shaken off the limitations of brush and ink and created a new artistic language.

About five months ago, Goedhuis Contemporary, a London gallery focusing on Asian arts, organized a mini-retrospective of 25 works by Taiwanese painter Liu Kuo-sung. It was highly praised by the British media and critics and shortly after the show, the British Museum acquired two of the exhibited pieces: Sun and Moon: Floating? Sinking? created in 1970 and Rising Sun from 2008.

Liu is recognized internationally as one of the most important advocates and practitioners of modernist Chinese painting. At first glance, his abstract paintings have little in common with traditional Chinese painting in terms of style and technique, yet a closer look shows they always seem to have some kind of link with this cultural legacy. There are not any detailed representations of mountains or rivers in his works, but the images of landscapes from traditional Chinese art seem to be floating somewhere in them. “It’s all there,” Liu says, “I’m just presenting [those subjects from traditional Chinese painting] from some new angles.”

Born in Bangbu, Anhui province in 1932, the son of a career army officer from Shandong province, Liu lived his childhood moving from one army base to another with his family and then with the troop’s rear echelon division after his father was killed in a 1938 battle during the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). Times were tough, but Liu’s mother insisted that her son should receive a proper education. His talent in art was first noticed when Liu was a fourth grader at a military dependents’ school in Hunan province and several of his pencil sketches were chosen by the art teacher as examples for other students.

After the war, Liu entered a junior high school in Wuchang, Hubei province where he had his first encounter with Chinese ink-wash painting. Liu recalls that there was a mounting shop on his way to school and he often stopped outside the shop to admire the paintings. The shop owner noticed Liu and discovered his interest in painting. Since Liu could not afford to learn Chinese painting, the shop owner kindly offered the boy some used brush pens, leftover paper and a book of collected Chinese paintings, along with a demonstration of basic ink-wash techniques. Liu spent all his free time practicing the techniques in the book, and then took his works to the shop owner for advice.

Painting, however, was not for people living in poverty. Liu’s mother and stepfather told him that he would need to become a street vendor after completing junior high school. “I could understand that they couldn’t afford to provide me with further education or instruction in painting,” Liu says. “But I really didn’t want to give up without trying.” Fortunately, Liu learned that the Nanjing National Revolutionary Military Orphan School was enrolling students. The school offered free tuition for children of deceased military personnel, so with a one-way ticket, he traveled to Nanjing, passed the entrance examination and entered the school in 1948.

It did not take long for Liu’s talent in painting to be noticed at the new school, as his ink-wash paintings were showcased in places at the school such as the principal’s office. “It was a great encouragement,” Liu recalls. “I made up my mind at the time that I’d be a painter.” But things did not go smoothly for too long. As the Kuomintang was losing the civil war, Liu and his schoolmates were forced to move south with the school to Hangzhou, Nanchang and Guangzhou, and then finally to Taiwan in the summer of 1949. More than a decade of drifting from place to place, Liu says, had a profound influence on his attitude toward life, as it gave him the strength of personality to face and deal with any difficulty. It also had a profound influence on his art. “I’ve been through a lot of difficult times,” he says. “Understanding life’s hardships enables me to find the soul hidden behind each work.”

Shortly after arriving in Taiwan, Liu entered the High School of Taiwan Provincial Normal College (now the Affiliated Senior High School of National Taiwan Normal University), and then the Department of Fine Arts of the Taiwan Provincial Normal College (now National Taiwan Normal University) in 1951. Being an art major allowed Liu to learn from master artists of traditional Chinese painting such as Huang Jun-bi (1898–1991) and Pu Xin-yu (1896–1963), but Liu lost his passion for Chinese painting when he started to learn Western painting in his sophomore year.

He explains that Western and Chinese painting both started from realism and developed into a semi-abstract style known as deformation in the West and freehand in China. While Western artists continued to advance to various schools of abstract painting, Chinese artists made little progress after the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368). For centuries, traditional Chinese ink-wash artists have focused on imitating the techniques and styles created by masters before them. “Art is all about creating, but there’s nothing creative about repeating what has been done by many people for many centuries,” he says. “For me, traditional Chinese painting was as dead as an animal specimen on a board.” But in the mid-20th century, Western painting was very alive as various schools such as Fauvism and abstract expressionism were all gaining attention. From that time on, Liu devoted most of his time to Western painting styles, studying artists like Henri Matisse and Paul Cezanne.

In 1956, after Liu graduated from college, he and several other young artists had the idea of forming a group to promote the modernization of art in Taiwan. In the next year, the Fifth Moon Painting Society, which is considered the most important group in the modernization of Taiwan’s art development, was formally founded. While actively bringing in concepts and styles of Western arts such as abstract painting, Fifth Moon was also criticizing the conservativeness and lack of innovation of traditional Chinese painting.

In addition to organizing exhibitions to showcase their works, members of Fifth Moon also wrote many newspaper and magazine articles to defend their beliefs regarding the arts. Promoting Western painting—or rather, attacking traditional Chinese painting—was a dangerous thing to do at the time. “The theory was that it would ‘hollow out’ tradition,” Liu says. “It would allow opportunities for communism to sneak in and destroy our heritage.” As ridiculous as it might sound now, such accusations could actually put people behind bars when Taiwan was still under martial law. Liu recalls that there were a couple of times Fifth Moon members were only a step away from being arrested.

After focusing on Western painting for several years, however, Liu found that it was not taking him anywhere. “While we were accusing people of imitating masters of traditional Chinese painting, it came to me that we Western art advocates were also imitating masters of Western painting,” he says. “Copying the new isn’t any better than copying the old.” So around 1961, Liu decided to return to Chinese painting—but not the traditional ink-wash style.

Liu explains that abstract art is not unfamiliar to the Chinese people. On a Peking opera stage, for example, there are not any physical stage props, so the audience relies on the actors’ movements to indicate actions such as riding horses or opening doors and windows. For various reasons, however, Chinese painting did not advance to an abstract form, while other arts did. Liu wanted to apply the concept and techniques from abstract expressionism to present the beauty of ink-wash painting.

Liu explains that traditional Chinese painting is a combination of brushwork—traces left on the paper by the movement of the brush pen—and ink work—the effect of ink absorbed by the paper. Initially, he used traditional brush pens and inks, but soon realized their limitations. “Hundreds of thousands of painters have used the same pen on the same paper for thousands of years, and I really don’t believe anyone can come up with anything that hasn’t been done yet,” he says. “To create new techniques and new styles, I knew that first I’d need to jump out of the frame of brush pen and ink.” To do that, Liu started to experiment with various tools and types of paper in 1962, and since then he has developed a number of new techniques as well as his own personal pictorial formulae. “Artists try to express their feelings or views through art, so when I find my techniques can’t do that, it’s time for more experiments to create new techniques,” he says. “The way I see it, there is no difference between being an artist and a scientist, as both need to do experiments to make breakthroughs.”

He has used unconventional tools such as Western brushes, his fingers and paint sprayers in his experiments. Techniques drawn from other arts such as calligraphy, paper cutting or photography can also be found in his works.

Inspiration from Daily Life

Unlike traditional Chinese painters who paint all kinds of subject matter from their imaginations, Liu likes to find inspiration from daily life or from nature. The Apollo 8 space mission initially inspired the works in his Space series, which he began in the 1960s, for example. All the paintings in the series have one or more circles representing the sun or the moon, for which Liu uses a paint sprayer, as the device is the best tool to create the shapes and the shading within them, he says.

These modernist Chinese paintings, though controversial in Taiwan, were warmly received in Western countries. In 1966 Liu received a grant from the JDR 3rd Fund, established by US industrialist and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, which afforded him the opportunity of a two-year international “road show.” During this period, Liu visited famous museums and galleries, met with established artists and held exhibitions around the world. His works were highly praised and collected, and launched Liu’s career in the international art scene. In the following decades, Liu continued to hold exhibitions around the world. His works have been collected by dozens of the world’s most prestigious museums such as the Palace Museum in Beijing and the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

As Liu’s work gained international fame, research papers and books about his modern Chinese painting were published in several languages. Hsiao Chong-ray, a professor of art history at National Cheng Kung University in Tainan, southern Taiwan has published a series of articles on Liu. Hsiao notes that Liu’s modern Chinese painting, while revealing its roots in the heritage of traditional Chinese art, has differentiated itself by embarking on a new path. For Liu’s part, the artist is by no means stingy about sharing that new path. After graduating from college, he taught modernist Chinese painting at a high school and several universities up until he retired from Tainan National University of the Arts in 1999.

Just like his art, Liu’s teaching approach is also unconventional. He explains that traditionally, art education starts from studying and imitating the styles of many artists to build a broad and solid foundation before students draw on their own creativity to develop individual styles. “It’s like building a pyramid,” he says of the traditional educational model. “The broader and more solid the base, the taller a pyramid can be built.”

Individual Creativity First

Liu, however, believes that individual creativity should come first, and that students do not need to master such a broad range of techniques before pursuing their own visions. “The days of pyramids are gone,” he says. “We’re now constructing skyscrapers, for which the foundation just needs to be as broad as the building.” So in his classes, Liu asked students to develop any technique that they found useful, stick to it and master it. “A painting is formed by points, lines, surfaces and colors,” he says. “Get rid of how master artists do it and just create them with whatever tools or techniques you need.”

Liu is very confident in his theory, as he actually put it into practice starting from his time as a teacher at the Chinese University of Hong Kong from 1971 to 1992. In one experiment, he asked a class of students who had little knowledge of painting to create a work of photorealism. Instead of putting them through the usual process of first learning how to sketch, shade and paint, he started them off enlarging slides to the size of the paper they were working on in order to outline the basic structure. Within a year, all the students produced successful works and some of them even won awards at local contests.

Lee Chun-yi, one of his students at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, is an example of this “skyscraper” theory. Originally a biochemistry major with little knowledge of painting, Lee took Liu’s art class out of personal interest and was inspired by Liu’s approach of “individuality before tradition.” Lee later transferred to the art department and created his own “painting” technique that uses specially designed stamps to make up an artwork, and has since become well known for his unique style. “He couldn’t even sketch,” Liu says. “And I think he probably still can’t.”

From a traditional Chinese painting dissident to master of modernist Chinese painting, Liu has participated in numerous exhibitions. Currently, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum is working with Liu to hold an exhibition based on his works. Titled “Starting from Liu Kuo-sung,” the show will not have any of his originals, but will focus on digital interpretations of Liu’s work by other artists. Liu has happily agreed to authorize the new generation of artists to do whatever they like in their versions of his artwork, as that is what Liu has been doing for decades. “That’s a creative idea,” he says. “I’m anxious to see what they’ll come up with.”

Write to Jim Hwang at jim@mail.gio.gov.tw