Stopping Short of a Revelation

The meaning of Liu Kuo-Sung’s seal is “A Man of North, South, East, and West,” which puts him someplace where the four corners of our bent-space world meet. He also has managed to find a point of contact – if not an entire interface – between the abstract and the merely stylized. If one is provided with his titles, “Thaw,” “Which Is Earth?” “The Eternal Moon,” and so on, reading the message behind his fresh combination of media is suitably simple and soothing. Left to nonverbal, kinetic wanderings, however, the eye produces subjective stimuli of astonishing strength and vitality.

Mr. Liu, 38 and from Taiwan, currently is teaching in Menominee, Wis. The exhibit at the Cellar Gallery in 49 E. Oak st. is his first one man show in Chicago, although a few private collectors in the area have already found him. He clearly is something special.

Like all Asian artists – and for that matter most Asian intellectuals, I imagine – Mr. Liu has had his struggles with acculturation. How “western” should a Chinese allow himself to become? Or, to put it another way, isn’t a “pure” tradition worth maintaining? Starting in the mid-1950s, Mr. Liu, and several of his contemporaries, recapitulated western “isms” and looked for their new spirit in Picasso, Klee, and other modern classics. Then he found the abstract expressionists, kindred calligraphic spirits, of course.

The works displayed at the Cellar takes his development one, vital step farther – back to the incredibly rich and concentrated work of his forebears. Ordering a special kind of paper, with rough textures and visible cotton fibres, he began painting with large ink brushes, forcing both surface and pigment. To this he has added some typically “western” acrylics and sprays and extended his surfaces with carefully executed collage.

It is a most felicitous blend on all counts. The scrolls and square revel in a sort of definite ambiguity. The hard-edged circle dominates, asking us to consider it both as conceptual question and answer. But the landscapes below manage to be at once precise and mistily surreal. With a sure psychological instinct, Mr. Liu stops short of revelation. Those mystic, not-quite-perfect circles, with their wrinkled, desiccated surfaces, are as enigmatic as “2001s” obelisk and a lot more interesting to look at.