Declaring war on tradition
Liu likes to provoke. It wasn’t long after he gained admission to the fine arts department at National Taiwan Normal University (then known as the Taiwan Provincial College of Education) that he began butting heads with the department’s hidebound and authoritarian system. He soon came to prefer playing basketball to attending what were to him stale and uninteresting lessons.
Recalling his time in the arts department, Liu says, “I was wild and contrary by nature. At one point, I signed up for a calligraphy class, but then dropped it when I heard a Chinese painting teacher say that you had to learn calligraphy before studying Chinese painting.”
His abandonment of the study of calligraphy was a slap in the face to the idea that painting and calligraphy shared the same roots, and a declaration of war on tradition.
In 1956, he and classmates Kuo Tong-jong, Kuo Yu-lun, and Li Fang-chih formed a painting society they called the Fifth Moon Group. Named after Paris’s famed Salon de Mai, the group’s establishment was indicative of the waxing of Taiwan’s modern art movement. But Liu himself was also influenced by Zao Wou-ki’s “Eastern abstractionism,” which led him away from an entirely Western style and toward one that harmoniously blended Chinese and Western elements. Giving up oils for Eastern paper and ink, he began to explore the abstract and innovate in ink. He never looked back.
“Paintings used to be descriptive, but I felt we should leave that sort of thing to literature,” says Liu, explaining his artistic philosophy. “Painting is by its nature an abstraction from the visual. It is only in abstraction that painting is true to its intrinsic self, that it is pure painting.
“Modern painting is abstract. Abstraction has become the only game in town.” It’s not hard to imagine Liu offending many realistic painters over the years with his ideas.
Liu’s wife, Li Mo-hua, describes him as “wild” and “daring.” A graduate of the plant pathology program at National Taiwan University, Li was working for the Taiwan Forestry Research Institute when they met at a bus stop. Liu was instantly smitten, but Li had numerous suitors. What made her pick an artist with no family in Taiwan who spent what little money he had on books? “He was brave and filled with energy, never tentative, unafraid of pressure, and unconcerned with whether he offended people.”
In other words, he had a rogue’s charm.
Rising Toward Mysterious Whiteness, 1963.