Biography

Born in Anhui province in China in 1932, with ancestral roots in Qingzhou, Shandong, Liu Kuo-sung moved to Taiwan in 1949, and in 1955 graduated from the Department of Fine Arts at what is now the National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU). He had been introduced to traditional Chinese painting at the age of fourteen in Wuchang, Hubei, and he began formal art education at nineteen, studying both Chinese and Western painting. In 1956 Liu co- founded, with classmates from NTNU, the Fifth Moon Group, challenging the out-dated art world of the time. He devoted himself to the modern art movement, advocating comprehensive Westernization and writing daring criticism of conservative authority in the arts.

Later, however, deeply moved by Fan Kuan’s Travelers amidst Mountains and Streams (Song dynasty) at the National Palace Museum in Taipei, and inspired by the contemporary architectural theory of truth to materials, Liu began to reflect on the wisdom of blindly following ideologies or fashionable trends in Western modern art. He also developed a stronger sense of mission to promote Chinese traditional culture. Subsequently, he abandoned oil paint and canvas and returned to the world of paper and ink, advocating the integration of Chinese and Western characteristics, developing various ink-rubbing techniques, pushing for the modernization of Chinese painting, and eventually proclaiming that ‘Imitating the new is no different to imitating the old; copying the Western is no different to copying the Chinese.’

After a two-year experimental period between 1961 and 1963, Liu collaborated with a paper mill to develop ‘Liu Kuo-sung paper.’ On thick and coarse cotton paper containing large fibers, he made bold marks incorporating the style of wild-cursive brushwork in Shi Ke’s 10th-century painting The Second Patriarch in Contemplation. Once the ink had dried, he tore away some of the inked fibers, leaving uninked white areas. Liu named this technique the ‘stripping-tendons-and-peeling-off-skin’ stroke, and created a series of Calligraphic Abstraction paintings, opening a path to the modernization of Chinese ink painting. This control-and-chance effect became a distinctive ink painting technique for half a century.

Through the poet Yu Kwang-chung, the art historian Professor Chu-tsing Li visited Liu Kuo- sung’s studio in the spring of 1964 and was mesmerized by his Wintry Mountains Covered with Snow, a painting using wild-cursive abstraction. On Li’s recommendation, Liu received a two-year round-the-world traveling grant from the John D. Rockefeller 3rd Fund. In 1966 and 1967 he traveled America and Europe, visiting the collections of important art museums, holding many solo exhibitions, and securing representation by the Lee Nordness Galleries in New York, thus entering the international art scene.

After this trip, Liu returned to Taiwan and taught at what is now the Chung Yuan Christian University. At the end of 1968, the American spacecraft Apollo 8 brought back photographs of Earth taken from lunar orbit, which deeply moved and inspired Liu. In China’s ancient cosmology, Heaven is round [a dome] and Earth is square [flat], but the Earthrise photographs revealed a round Earth and the arc of the Moon’s surface. This peculiar view ignited Liu’s boundless imagination, leading him to begin his Space series in 1969. The first work, Which is Earth?, won a painting award at the American international art exhibition Mainstream ’69. Besides large areas of ink wash, he combined pigments and collage in a single composition, incorporating elements of Hard-edge Painting and Pop Art into ink painting, thus blurring the formal boundaries of the latter.

Liu Kuo-sung accepted a teaching position in the Department of Fine Arts at New Asia College, Chinese University of Hong Kong, and moved to Hong Kong in 1971. The following year he became Chair of the Department of Fine Arts and began to implement curriculum reforms, promoting a Modern Ink Painting course and launching a Modern Ink Painting Diploma Program at the Department of Extramural Studies of the university. In 1975 Liu first proposed the idea ‘Overturn the center tip, overturn the brush,’ which sparked a large-scale debate. During the same period, sensing that his Space series was becoming too representational and rational, he once again returned to the path of traditional Chinese ink painting, drawing ideas from the ‘water painting’ technique recorded in ancient Chinese painting texts. Prompted by the swirling layer of floating ink he saw in brush-washing water, he developed a marbling technique using floating ink to produce complex textures and white lines on paper, which he named ‘Water-rubbing.’

In 1981 Liu Kuo-sung was invited to Beijing to attend the inaugural ceremony of the Research Institute of Traditional Chinese Painting and to participate in the opening exhibition. Jiang Feng, chairman of the Chinese Artists Association, offered him the opportunity of a solo show, and in 1983, at the invitation of the Chinese Artists Association and the Central Academy of Fine Arts, a solo exhibition was held at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, Liu giving three public lectures at the Academy. In the following four years the show toured eighteen cities in China, creating a ‘Liu Kuo-sung tornado’ in the Chinese art world and stirring up great interest among young ink painters, who saw in his works a modernizing direction for ink painting.

In the late 1980s Liu began his ‘ink-steeping’ paintings, replacing ink marks painted with a brush with the semi-automatic textures achieved by this technique, creating a harmonious interplay between the solid and the void, and achieving images ‘not made by the hand.’ Liu’s ink-steeping technique can be used on xuan paper and tracing paper, different papers and techniques producing vastly different effects. In 2000 and 2001 Liu visited Jiuzhaigou in Sichuan many times. Deeply moved by the pristine natural landscape, he created the Jiuzhaigou series, using tracing paper with the ink-steeping technique to capture the vibrant colors of the lakes and the beauty of the movement of light on water ripples.

The aesthetic experience of travel has always been an indispensable source for Liu Kuo- sung’s creativity. After visiting Tibet and its spectacular snowy mountains in 2000, Liu created the Tibet series to express their beauty. He fully utilized the unique quality of Liu Kuo-sung paper and the ‘stripping-tendons-and-peeling-off-skin’ stroke to achieve semi- abstract complex textures across the whole picture surface. The white lines produced by tearing the paper fibers now became the cracks and veins of mountains, while dark ink evoked the majesty of the snow-covered landscape of the Himalayas. This process allowed the composition of the painting to vary highly according to the chance distribution of the paper fibers, as if painting were a game of weiqi [Go], as Liu has often emphasized and continuously practiced.

Liu Kuo-sung’s ink painting eschews the realist modes adopted by reformists of traditional Chinese painting in the early 20th century, and escapes the stifling grip of literati brush and ink conventions. In the wave of postwar modern art in Taiwan, he actively absorbed the abstract forms of Western modernism and invented new painting methods and tools.

Through sweeping strokes and the flexible application of diverse techniques, he created new styles of modern abstract ink painting. Even today, Liu Kuo-sung continues to uphold the avant-garde spirit of his ‘studio as laboratory’ practice, tirelessly expanding the possibilities of contemporary ink painting.

Since his first in 1965, Liu has held over 130 solo exhibitions across the world. His artworks are collected by more than 70 art museums worldwide, and monographs have been published in Chinese, English and German. Liu Kuo-sung served as Chair of the Department of Fine Arts at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Visiting Professor at the University of Iowa and University of Wisconsin–Stout, inaugural Director of the Institute of Fine Arts at the National Tainan University of the Arts, inaugural Dean of the Academy of Contemporary Ink Art at the Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts, Honorary Professor at several universities and art academies in China, and is currently Chair Professor at the National Taiwan Normal University.

Liu Kuo-sung has received numerous awards: the 12th National Award for Arts from Taiwan’s National Culture and Arts Foundation (2008), the 36th National Cultural Award from the Ministry of Culture, ROC (2017), the Inaugural China Arts Award for Lifetime Achievement (2011), and the title of Honorary Member of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles (2016). He has also received an Honorary Doctorate in Art Studies from NTNU (2023). Liu was the first Chinese painter to be elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2016).

Liu Kuo-sung lives and works in Taipei.