Liu Kuo-Sung Goes His Own Way

Editor’s Note: Professor Liu Kuo-sung, who just returned from a lecture tour in the United States, is now holding his one-man painting exhibition at the Leland Art House on Nung An Street. Following is an article written by Michael Sullivan, who teaches history of Chinese fine art in the Stanford University, California. Mr. Sullivan is in Taipei right now attending the International Symposium on Chinese Painting.

By Michael Sullivan

 

A few years ago it would have been necessary not only to introduce Liu Kuo-sung, but to explain and even to justify his work to a largely hostile public. Today, he has both a national and international reputation. Since he and a handful of his fellow-artists founded the Fifth Moon Group in 1956, he has led the struggle for contemporary art in Taiwan, and today it is largely his recognition abroad as a prominent member of the international modern movement that has secured his recognition at home.

 

No, introductions are no longer needed, – but explanations? Does there still linger in the minds of some people a doubt, not about Liu Kuo-sung’s talent, which is obvious, but about the very nature of his painting?

 

Criticism in the international art world of today is dominated by the art galleries and art journals of New York. What they single out as avant-garde is significant; the rest is past history, and memories today are very short. The Asian painter on the international scene is particularly vulnerable to attack. If he paints in the latest Western idiom, - op., pop, kinetic, minimal, etc., - he may be accused of copying something he does not understand. If he goes his own way he may be ignored, or as Liu Kuo-sung’s case, criticized for continuing to be an abstract expressionist long after that movement had been superseded in America and Europe. Abstract expressionism, these critics say, belongs to the fifties, forgetting, if they ever essential element in Chinese knew it, that it had been a painting since the late Tang Dynasty.

 

Others have said that by using calligraphic brushwork, ink and paper, Liu Kuo-sung and those he has influenced are attempting artificially and self-consciously to revive, and identify themselves with, a dead tradition. In view of the fundamental union of painting and writing in China this view is absurd. Some go even further and claim that a Chinese artist in the international modern movement is no longer Chinese, as if his virtue as a painter lay chiefly in the fact that he expressed certain uniquely Chinese values.

 

Finally from the extreme left and extreme right comes the criticism that painting such as Liu Kuo-sung’s is devoid of social relevance, the art of an escapist. This may be debated on political or ethical grounds, but unless we accept the fact of the autonomy of creative art, making and obeying its own inner laws, we must resign ourselves to the death of art itself.

 

In the face of such attacks, the Asian painter may play safe, either by painting in an up-dated version of his traditional style, which will appease critics at home, or by joining the New York-led avant-garde, which will at least ensure that he will be noticed on the international scene. To do neither of these things, to go on, like Turner or Blake, pursuing your own vision, searching for the means to give it form, demands dedication and courage. Paradoxically this is particularly true when, as in Liu Kuo-sung’s case, the images the artist creates are so breathtakingly beautiful. So confused have our values become that when we enjoy these paintings, as we begin to suspect the artist of romanticism, and ourselves of self-indulgence. In the increasingly grim environment we are creating for ourselves, the world of Liu Kuo-sung seems hopelessly unreal, although modern science is teaching us that this is in fact not true.

 

From his beginnings as a thoroughly trained traditional painter, Liu Kuo-sung in the early fifties came under the influence of Cezanne and Matisse, then of Klee, Picasso and Braque. In 1959 the impact of Jackson Pollock made him, inevitably, an action painter, first in oils and plaster, then, and this was the decisive moment in his career in Chinese ink. By 1963 his style had become extraordinarily refined and subtle; ink, colour, even the coarse paper itself and its trailing fibres, had become the instruments for creating images of infinite, luminous depth, totally unlike the hard, opaque gestures upon the canvas of Kline and Motherwell.

 

For several years we were able to revel in these abstractions, reading them as landscapes, waves and swirling clouds, enjoying in them that same teasing ambiguity that enlivened the first Chinese attempts at a landscape art in the Han Dynasty. But where, we wondered, could Liu Kuo-sung go from here? A violent reaction against abstract expressionism has led many contemporary artists into the crudities of pop art, or at least into more concrete images. But Liu Kuo-sung has refused to take this step, which for some modern Asian artists has proved disastrous. Instead, with an astonishing leap of the imagination, his abstractions were suddenly redefined, and we saw in them the poignant beauty of our own cloud-wrapped planet, drifting in the vast loneliness of space, as it was revealed at the same moment in the photographs taken from the lunar orbiter.

 

Perhaps this latest step, the circle of swirling cloud floating in space over another living mass, was inspired by the first lunar photographs. But these paintings are no mere trick of a clever and up-to-the minute painter. On the contrary we feel, when we look back over Liu Kuo-sung work since 1959, that they are a natural indeed inevitable, product of his development, and all that he has done hitherto seems but a preparation for them.

 

How long it will take Liu Kuo-sung to explore and exhaust this new vein we cannot tell. A new phase may be germinating now. Meantime, he has created images that are Chinese in technique, universal in meaning, and his vision has enlarged our own. We can ask no more of a painter than this.