Universe in the Mind: Paintings by Liu Guosong
23 September to 8 November 2009

The University Museum and Art Gallery of the University of Hong Kong will present an exhibition of paintings by Liu Guosong to coincide with the publication of a major research article by Chun-yi Lee entitled Universe in the Mind: Liu Guosong's Art and Thoughts.

Liu Guosong is widely recognized as a pioneer of the modern ink painting movement. He was born in China in 1932, trained in Taiwan, and taught art in Hong Kong at the Chinese University of Hong Kong between 1971 and 1992. The experience of growing up in enforced and self-imposed exile during a tumultuous period in China's history affected Liu deeply and may have driven him to seek a new language of art that could reconcile the worlds of tradition and modernity. By the 1960s in Taiwan, Liu had developed the bold and powerful vocabulary upon which his unique art would be based, one that drew on Chinese ink painting, and the abstract and conceptual art of America, where artists were themselves looking eastwards for inspiration.

This exhibition features twenty-six paintings from private Hong Kong collections representing Liu's major artistic achievements from the 1960s to the current decade. Liu developed the abstract potential of ink painting, using experimental techniques and materials to modify the effects that can be achieved with ink and colour. Often suggesting landscape and cosmos, Liu's works are bold, innovative compositions that depict a parallel universe in which the elemental forces of nature run wild.

Liu has been a central figure of the Taiwanese art world since the 1950s, both as a founding member of the influential Fifth Moon Painting Society, and as a controversial commentator of intellectual and artistic debates. As an artist, critic and teacher, Liu remains a vibrant and influential presence in the modern ink painting movement today, dividing his time between Taiwan and Shanghai.