Liu Guosong (Liu Kuo-sung)

Taipei, Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Museum, The Universe is My Heart, retrospective exhibition, 1999, illustrated
Singapore, Tyler Print Institute, Liu Kuo-sung: A Restrospective View, 2005, illustrated

Liu Guosong is the most celebrated painter of the Modern Ink Painting movement and first made his reputation in the 1950s.  He was invited to the São Paulo Biennial in 1959, and was one of the first modern Chinese ink painters to exhibit in the U.S. Liu is important both as a theorist and an innovator; he has tried to free ink painting from its tradition of “brushwork” and expanded the traditionally earth-bound notion landscape into his celebrated cosmic and stellar paintings. In the late 1960s, while teaching at the University of Wisconsin, Liu was inspired by the American landing on the moon, and worked continuously to produce "Space" paintings. These paintings all contain one or more moons, ranging in shape from eclipsed to fully circular, rising from the horizon of the earth. This experimentation with moons and circles marked a turning point in the artist's career.

Liu's influence continued to grow during his twenty years teaching at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. In 1982 Liu became the first artist from Taiwan to exhibit at Beijing’s National Gallery and exerted great influence on mainland China’s burgeoning modern ink painters. Along with Wu Guanzhong, Liu is part of a “Post-Traditionalist” group characterized by the art historian Julia Andrews as “freed by education from attachments to China’s artistic past, they have sought to construct a Chinese tradition appropriate to [its] own time. In their hands, Chinese tradition is transformed.” (Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, A Century in Crisis, New York, 1998, p. 283)

The present work was conceived and executed in 1999 to celebrate the turn of the century. Its starkly bright colors and eleven rotating suns symbolize the passage of the world through a turbulent 20^th century into a new era.