Winter Mountains

Liu Guosong, a native of Shandong, settled in Taiwan in 1949. Having begun his training in traditional Chinese painting at the age of 14, he shifted his studies to western painting at the age of 20. Upon graduating from the National Taiwan Normal University, he founded "Fifth Moon Group" with other artists to promote Chinese contemporary art with a western perspective. By 1961, after many attempts at oil paintings, sketching and multimedia art, Liu refocused his energies on the ink and brush genre, which allowed him to better express his traditional culture. He saw this as his life-mission and responsibility. Liu taught at numerous institutions around the world, including Chinese University of Hong Kong, University of Ohio, Tainan National University of the Arts, and National Taiwan Normal University. Winter Mountains belongs to the Calligraphic Abstraction Series and is a prime example of Liu's works from the 1960s. During this period, Liu used powerful cursive calligraphic brushstrokes to express his version of abstraction; the results are non-figurative landscape paintings formulated by a combination of lines, colours, and textures. At that time the young Liu Guosong was not content with using the brush. He expanded the tools used in traditional Chinese painting and worked with a rice paper maker to develop a handmade paper in order to achieve the visual results he desired. Thick and uneven in surface, this special "Kuo-Sung paper" opens up many new visual possibilities for ink paintings. Folding, creasing, peeling, layering, and collaging of paper have different and surprising encounters with ink, creating effects that a traditional brush cannot. Liu paints on both sides of the paper; by manipulating the coarse texture of the paper and its various water absorbencies, he creates natural but unpredictable outlines of his sky and mountain. These landscape works are ever-changing and are in motion so that Liu has to observe and change course as the work progresses. This revolutionary idea based on the unpredictability of ink and paper interaction in the 1960s were a foundation for Liu's later and more recent landscape series of Tibetan snowy mountains and Jiuzhaigou scenery.