Liu Kuo-sung 刘国松

Born in Bangbu, Anhui Province in 1932, Liu Kuo-sung is universally recognized as one of the earliest and most important advocates and practitioners of modernist Chinese painting. He moved to Taiwan from mainland China in 1949. In 1956, he graduated from the Fine Arts Department of the National Taiwan Normal University. As a co-founder of the Fifth Moon Painting Society (Wuyue huahui) in Taiwan in 1957, Liu Kuo-sung sought a new approach to art, which was inspired by both traditional Chinese art as well as western styles and techniques, such as Abstract Expressionism. Liu experimented with abstract oil paintings but gradually developed his own personal pictorial formulae by the mid-60s, in which he combines ink painting with collage and applies ink and color on special paper. His fusion of landscape monumentality and abstraction represents the mature individual style that has earned him a place in many prestigious international exhibition in the past twenty years.