Yellow and Gray, Liu Guosong

Exhibition Label: “Make a Mark: Art of the 1960s,” Mar-2008, Lara Kuykendall Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. Take a canvas. Put a mark on it. Put another mark on it. Jasper Johns. “Sketchbook Notes,” 1965 In the 1960s artists from the United States and beyond strove to “make a mark” on the art world and the culture at large by exploring the nature of creativity. Each of the three themes in this exhibition, color + form, gesture + splatter, and layer upon layer, shows how vivid and dynamic the art of this decade was. Some artists used color and geometric shapes abstractly, often to foster unusual optical effects, whereas others employed the personal, autographic gesture of expressionism. Still other artists exploited various methods of layering to create new kinds of collage. By doing something to an object or putting marks on a surface, artists in the 1960s responded to the realms of art, politics, and popular culture. The objects and images they made defined the visual culture of their generation. Archive Label 2003: Liu Guosong was trained in traditional Chinese painting in Taiwan. While he was still a student, he joined several like-minded artists in the experimental Fifth Moon Group and frequented the library of the U.S. Information Service in Taipei in order to study current issues of Western art journals and exhibition catalogues. In Yellow and Gray, A Landscape, painted in 1968, Liu has used a coarse fiber cotton paper and applied ink on one side with a brush. When the ink dried, he pulled out a number of fibers from the surface of the paper, exposing the white fibers underneath. He left some of these raw and altered others by painting on the opposite side of the paper. Liu's training in the Chinese painting, interest in abstraction, and wide range of techniques combine here to create rich textures and abstract shapes that suggest the strong forms of a Chinese landscape. Archive Label: During the Chinese civil war immediately following World War II, Liu Kuo-Sung fled to Taiwan where he studied Chinese art as well as Western art. He ws especially influenced by American abstract expressionism, and began experimenting with collage techniques. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he minimized the use of the Chinese brush, the tool through which Chinese literati had conveyed their emotions for centuries, yet he included oblique allusions to mountains and rivers, two indivisible elements of traditional Chinese landscape painting. In this work, he used coarse, fibrous paper, applied ink on one side, then pulled out a number of fibers from the surface of the paper, leaving irregular white streaks within the dark aeas. He then painted on the opposite side of the paper so that the ink and color, showing through from the back, enhance the unique textural richness..