J.C. Kuo was born in 1949 in Lugang Township, Zhanghua, Taiwan. In 1967, he became modern painter Lee Chun-shan’s student and started to take inspiration from abstract art and Freudian psychoanalytic theory. He graduated from the Fine Art Department of Chinese Culture University in 1973.

Kuo can be defined as one of the Taiwan first contemporary artist. His artistic cultivation and training, while highly eclectic, ultimately arose from a personal self-awareness and broad reading and experimentation. He continues to take the world as it is in the present day as the springboard of his creative consideration which always maintains a high degree of self-consciousness. It is the reason that his works always possess a pronounced contemporary relevance.

Kuo’s formal language also reflects the hybrid nature of Taiwanese culture. From the friction existing among Taiwanese, Chinese, Japanese and Western elements, he has generated an individual system that is visually vivid, powerful in expressive vocabulary, and highly charge with artistic tension. This quality that is both distinctly Taiwanese and international is seldom seen among artists of the same generation. He also affords us a glimpse into an unique Taiwanese form of contemporary art which is created by the first generation of the artists born and raised in Taiwan in the post-World War II era.