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Lot Essay
Liao Chi-Ch'un, born in Taiwan during the Japanese occupation, lived in poverty in his early years but threw himself into the study of painting with pure enthusiasm. A combination of hard work and good fortune allowed him to enter the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, where he received rigorous training in the fundamentals of realism. At that same time, Japanese academics were great admirers of Pleinairisme, the school that developed in France in the latter half of the 19th century and advocated painting from life in natural outdoor light - the school that is often understood as the more realistic, early-period style of Impressionism. When Liao was 25, the holding of the first Taiwan Fine Arts Exhibition had great significance for him; he received the honour of a special commendation and was inspired to introduce more local experience and subjective perceptions into his paintings. The following year, his Court Yard with Banana Trees (Fig. 1) was chosen for a showing in Tokyo's Imperial Exhibition. That work is a poetic and richly-coloured depiction of interwoven trees and shadows beneath the bright sun of southern Taiwan, with a wonderfully flowing style of composition. Later, as the tide of Western abstraction and the demand for modernization swept through Taiwan's art world in the mid-1950s, Liao Chi-Ch'un also eagerly experimented with a freer, more intuitive kind of creative vocabulary. The resulting experiments with form and color would produce the tremendous breakthroughs and achievements that marked his artistic career.
Scene from the Window is a classic Liao Chi-Ch'un work, a remarkable and ingenious painting whose 1959 date of completion places it within this early period. Warm, fullbodied blocks of yellow fill the greater part of the canvas, which is further embellished with patches of dark orange with a slightly deeper chromatic intensity, while grey, black, and white define contrasting areas of brightness and shadow. Through his clean and simple use of color in Scene from the Window , Liao is able to highlight the sheer, elemental 'feel' of color in the painting. Liao himself once noted, 'I use simple and intense color, imbuing my work with a stronger color feel through contrast and emphasis. At the same time, in the structure of my lines, I give attention to shaping forms in an interesting manner. My paintings are not impressions of any one particular moment in time, but instead expressions of the kind of coloristic feel I hope to convey.' Liao showed remarkable ability to create subtle shifts between figuration and abstraction, which grew from the sense of space generated by the relations between colours. This in turn was inspired by the deconstruction and reintegration of natural scenes by the Post-Impressionists. Cezanne had reduced visual experience to its fundamental shapes and he employed painterly brushwork to recreate spatial structures from multiple points of view, thus breaking through the classical presentation of perspective (Fig. 2). Liao Chi-Ch'un moved a step further; taking advantage of symbolic color relationships, he created a lyrical freestyle (xieyi) approach, different from Chinese ink-wash painting, in which light, shadow, and spatial relationships are expressed through color. Combined with rhythmic alterations of lighter and heavier lines, this brings a sense of unity and extended visual dimensions to his canvases, along with a pleasing sense of rhythmic movement. With its lively expression of space, Scene from the Window finds the essence within physical shapes to evoke a vivid impression of this scene in the mind of the viewer. The result is a work that continues to engage the viewer time after time with its boundless charm and interest.
While Scene from a Window, after undergoing deconstruction, exhibits a high degree of formal abstraction, its combination of lines and colours nevertheless expresses a precise conception. It also possesses a richly imaginative quality, providing an exciting display of Liao Chi-Ch'un's explorations into the two realms of corresponding relationships between color and space and linear construction. Liao's unique style of abstraction here is fully the equal of that seen in a Chu Teh-Chun work from the same period, in which natural images are expressed with a sense of poetry and energy suggesting calligraphy and ink (Fig. 3). In addition, Liao arrived at this style of abstraction far earlier than Wu Guanzhong would achieve his own refinement and purification of line, in the early '80s (Fig. 4). The creative vocabularies of these three artists, in their different ways, transcended any distinctions between figurative and abstract styles, though each, through their individual approaches, achieved outstanding success in expressing their chosen imagery. Further, by contrast with Wu Dayu, who produced abstract energy with complex compositions of strong lines that converge and spread (Fig. 5), the aesthetic beauty of line in Liao's work seems more genuine in its refined simplicity.
Liao Chi-Ch'un developed his ability to transform nature and feeling into color and space by way of the Impressionists and the Fauves. On the one hand, Liao had a strong grounding in realist painting techniques. At the same time, the imagery he adopted yielded a different kind of aesthetic than that of Western painters, an exceptionally difficult achievement given the widespread impact of Abstract Expressionism around the world at the time. Scene from a Window highlights clearly an already high degree of maturity in Liao's use of form and color; at the same time, it signals the kind of abstract style he would later develop, and makes clear how Liao was a crucial figure in Taiwan's art history by virtue of connecting tradition and innovation, as well as incorporating the styles of East and West.
An added point of interest, not often seen, is the explanatory label still affixed to the back of the painting, noting the address of Liao Chi-Ch'un's studio, which at that time was located on Taipei's Ho Ping East Road. The view from his studio window was not just the view most familiar to the artist, but one which repeatedly figured as the subject of paintings (Fig. 6) that testify to the changing styles of his creative work.
Scene from the Window is a classic Liao Chi-Ch'un work, a remarkable and ingenious painting whose 1959 date of completion places it within this early period. Warm, fullbodied blocks of yellow fill the greater part of the canvas, which is further embellished with patches of dark orange with a slightly deeper chromatic intensity, while grey, black, and white define contrasting areas of brightness and shadow. Through his clean and simple use of color in Scene from the Window , Liao is able to highlight the sheer, elemental 'feel' of color in the painting. Liao himself once noted, 'I use simple and intense color, imbuing my work with a stronger color feel through contrast and emphasis. At the same time, in the structure of my lines, I give attention to shaping forms in an interesting manner. My paintings are not impressions of any one particular moment in time, but instead expressions of the kind of coloristic feel I hope to convey.' Liao showed remarkable ability to create subtle shifts between figuration and abstraction, which grew from the sense of space generated by the relations between colours. This in turn was inspired by the deconstruction and reintegration of natural scenes by the Post-Impressionists. Cezanne had reduced visual experience to its fundamental shapes and he employed painterly brushwork to recreate spatial structures from multiple points of view, thus breaking through the classical presentation of perspective (Fig. 2). Liao Chi-Ch'un moved a step further; taking advantage of symbolic color relationships, he created a lyrical freestyle (xieyi) approach, different from Chinese ink-wash painting, in which light, shadow, and spatial relationships are expressed through color. Combined with rhythmic alterations of lighter and heavier lines, this brings a sense of unity and extended visual dimensions to his canvases, along with a pleasing sense of rhythmic movement. With its lively expression of space, Scene from the Window finds the essence within physical shapes to evoke a vivid impression of this scene in the mind of the viewer. The result is a work that continues to engage the viewer time after time with its boundless charm and interest.
While Scene from a Window, after undergoing deconstruction, exhibits a high degree of formal abstraction, its combination of lines and colours nevertheless expresses a precise conception. It also possesses a richly imaginative quality, providing an exciting display of Liao Chi-Ch'un's explorations into the two realms of corresponding relationships between color and space and linear construction. Liao's unique style of abstraction here is fully the equal of that seen in a Chu Teh-Chun work from the same period, in which natural images are expressed with a sense of poetry and energy suggesting calligraphy and ink (Fig. 3). In addition, Liao arrived at this style of abstraction far earlier than Wu Guanzhong would achieve his own refinement and purification of line, in the early '80s (Fig. 4). The creative vocabularies of these three artists, in their different ways, transcended any distinctions between figurative and abstract styles, though each, through their individual approaches, achieved outstanding success in expressing their chosen imagery. Further, by contrast with Wu Dayu, who produced abstract energy with complex compositions of strong lines that converge and spread (Fig. 5), the aesthetic beauty of line in Liao's work seems more genuine in its refined simplicity.
Liao Chi-Ch'un developed his ability to transform nature and feeling into color and space by way of the Impressionists and the Fauves. On the one hand, Liao had a strong grounding in realist painting techniques. At the same time, the imagery he adopted yielded a different kind of aesthetic than that of Western painters, an exceptionally difficult achievement given the widespread impact of Abstract Expressionism around the world at the time. Scene from a Window highlights clearly an already high degree of maturity in Liao's use of form and color; at the same time, it signals the kind of abstract style he would later develop, and makes clear how Liao was a crucial figure in Taiwan's art history by virtue of connecting tradition and innovation, as well as incorporating the styles of East and West.
An added point of interest, not often seen, is the explanatory label still affixed to the back of the painting, noting the address of Liao Chi-Ch'un's studio, which at that time was located on Taipei's Ho Ping East Road. The view from his studio window was not just the view most familiar to the artist, but one which repeatedly figured as the subject of paintings (Fig. 6) that testify to the changing styles of his creative work.