Liu Guosong


Liu Kuo-sung is a Taiwanese artist based in Shanghai, China, and Taoyuan, Taiwan. Liu is widely regarded as one of the earliest and most important advocates and practitioners of modernist Chinese painting. He is also a writer on contemporary Chinese art.

Biography

Liu Kuo-Sung was born in 1932 in Anhui Province, China. He moved to Taiwan in 1949 with the National Revolutionary Military Orphan School. He completed his art training at Taiwan Normal University, graduating in 1956. He became a pivotal figure in the modern art movement that strived to overthrow the prevailing conservatism in the art world of Taiwan. Liu is the principal founder of the Wuyue Huahui, which catalyzed the modernist art movement and brought renewal to traditional Chinese painting. Together with his Fifth Moon colleagues, he incorporated Western art concepts and techniques, successfully placing ink painting on the path to modern innovation, for which he has been called the father of modern ink painting.
Liu has held more than ninety solo exhibitions around the world, with more than half at art museums. His works has been collected at more than seventy museums around the world, including the British Museum and the Palace Museum in China. There are eleven art publications in Chinese, English, and German that focus on his art. There are six art text books in US and Germany that either quote his art theories or study his art. He is also the only Chinese artist who has been awarded both China's Arts Award "Lifetime Achievement Award" and Taiwan's National Award for Arts. He is the first Chinese painter made a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Mr Liu is also a lifetime educator. He is currently the Chair Professor at Taiwan Normal University. He was the Head of the Fine Arts Department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Visiting Professor at the University of Iowa and the University of Wisconsin, Dean of Tainan Art Research Institute in Taiwan, and Honorary Professor of a number of universities and art schools in China.

Chronology

•2006 "Rhythm of Mind" exhibition at Zhejiang Provincial Museum, Westlake Museum, and Hunan Provincial Museum.
•2007 Invited to attend opening ceremony for the new building at the Museum Rieterg, Zurich, Switzerland.
•2008 Awarded Taiwan's "National Award for Arts", presented by Taiwanese President Ma Yin-Jiu.