Liu Kuo-Sung and the cultural traditions of china and the west
Li Zhu-Jin

Liu Kuo-Sung holds a very special place among contemporary Chinese painters. Born in China in 1932, he endured great hardship inhis childhood, growing up during one of modern China's most turbulentperiods. During the years of the war of resistance against Japan (1937-45) Liu's family was uprooted and he spent years wandering through the provinces of Huber, Shaanxi, Sichuan, Hunan, andJiangxi. After moving to Taiwan, Liu enrolled in the Art Department of National Taiwan Normal University, where he studied both the Chinese and Western artistic traditions. In Chinese art, he studied with masters such as Pu Ru, HuangJunbi,Jin Qinbai, and Lin Yushan, gradually coming to an understanding of the foundations of Chinese painting. In Western art, he received a broad knowledge of Western traditions fromJu Dequn, LiaoJichun, Sun Duozi, and Ma Baishui. After graduating from the Normal University, Liu sought to merge together elements of the Chinese and Western artistic traditions in order to achieve a unique harmony of his own. At the same time, he was interested in developing his own artistic ideas and theories, and often published articles in newspapers and art magazines. Many of these writings have been collected in two books, "Whither Modern Chinese Painting?" and "Copying, Life-drawing, and Creating. His artistic ability and questing spirit put him in the very forefront of the circle of young artists in Taiwan.

In the course of his early artistic development, Liu experimented with a range of media and techniques. In his search to create a new painting style, he developed unusual visual and textural effects by means such as spreading plaster and fine sand over the canvas surface before painting on it, pressing wrinkled paper or cloth onto xuan paper, or painting on extremely fibrous paper. During this same period, Liu's artistic path was strongly impacted by the 1961 preview exhibition of masterpieces of the Taipei National Palace Museum collection, before the exhibition went on a five-city tour to the United States. It was in this exhibition that Liu had his first chance to view some of the great masterworks of Chinese painting, including the great Song period monumental landscapes such as Fan Kuan's Travellers over Mountains and Streams, Guo Xi's Early Spring, and Li Tang's Winds oFPines over Ten Thousand Valleys, as well as many famous works of the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties. Viewing these works awakened in him a deep admiration for the greatness and profound significance of the Chinese artistic tradition. As a result, in his own creative work, he decided to return to the fundamental materials of Chinese ink painting and took the pursuit of the spirit in his own art as his goal.

During the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, Liu Kuo-Sung made significant strides in his creative work and succeeded in developing a unique creative style of his own. Using both traditional Chinese xuan paper or his own made-to-order "Kuo-Sung paper", he painted with both Chinese ink and Western watercolors to express many new ideas and to introduce new subject matter into the tradition, for example the Rocky Mountains and the Grand Canyon in the American west, or the spectacle of the midnight sun in Scandinavia in Northern Europe. In 1968, the first landing on the moon by American astronauts further aroused new inspiration in his creative work, literally bringing Chinese painting into a totally new realm. His resulting paintings on the one hand reflected the achievement of Western science and technology, and on the other, through the imagery of circles and squares, also referenced traditional motifs of the Chinese New Year lantern festival. This combination of Chinese and Western elements created a new kind of artistic expression within the great aesthetic parameters of the Northern Song landscape tradition of Fan Kuan and Guo Xi.

In 1983 Liu Guosong was invited by the National Art Museum in Beijing to hold a one-man exhibition. In the ensuing two decades, his works were shown in all the major cities of China, as far north as Harbin, as far south as Guangzhou and Hong Kong, and as far west as Xinjiang and Tibet. During the many subsequent trips he made to China, Liu visited virtually all the most famous scenic spots in the country, even including the newly developed resorts ofZhangjiajie in Hunan and theJiuzhaigou in Sichuan. All these new views and experiences greatly enriched his repertoire in terms of the subjects of his paintings.

Liu also expanded his technical repertoire by devising innovative methods of utilizing water and ink, in order to better express through painting his deep love and admiration for the mountain-and-river landscapes of his mother country and at the same time bringing to the viewer a completely new and fresh visual experience.

From this examination of Liu Guosong's art, it is clear that his life-long artistic pursuit has been, within the great tradition of Chinese landscape painting, to absorb as much as possible of the essence of Western art in order to enrich a new artistic style with a national character and a contemporary spirit. Liu's artistic achievements have been widely recognized by the international artistic community, and a number of important international museums have held exhibitions of his paintings and acquired his works for their permanent collections.