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Lot Essay
Liao Chih-Chun was born in Taiwan in 1902, during the Japanese colonial period; at age 22 he gained admission to the Tokyo University of the Arts. Japanese art at the time was still in the sway of the plein air school that had flourished in 19-century France, and the Impressionists' method of expressing light became blended with the European academic style. The disciplined training that Liao received there helped him develop a rigorous, realistic style. At 25 he returned to Taiwan and received special mention in the 1st Taiwan Fine Arts Exhibition (Taiwan bijutsu tenrankai), but real recognition only came the following year, when his Court Yard With Banana Trees was chosen for display in the Japan Fine Arts Exhibition (Nihon bijutsu tenrankai). In it, Liao portrayed the warm sunlight and shade of southern Taiwan in poetic hues, while its naturalist beauty exudes the artist's feeling for his home country. During and after the 1930s, the more avant-garde styles of the Post-Impressionists and the Fauves generated significant influence in Japan, and Liao too shifted toward a more strongly expressionistic style. By the late 1950s, as Taiwan's modern art movement gathered momentum, Liao continued his experiments with freer, more intuitive painting forms as he explored the possibilities of expressive color in an abstract vocabulary.
In the summer of 1962, Liao went on a tour of the great museums of Europe and the US. His ever-changing outlook during that experience and his first-hand contact with original museum works brought him the realization that, as an artist, he should strive to explore and communicate his perceptions in more individualized forms. Through the impact of contemporary art, in the works of American Abstract Expressionist artists such as Jackson Pollock, he further sensed how painting had departed from pure representation and embraced the expression of bodily movement and inner feelings. In an interview he gave after returning home, he said, "All of these factors caused me to quickly search for a new approach of my own."
Liao's Still Life in front of the Window dates from 1968, during the period of greatest innovation in his career. In its colors, lines, and spatial structure, it exhibits an ingenious originality, projecting a contemporary feel by virtue of Liao's new but already richly developed painting vocabulary. Contrasting hues of yellow and blue provide the central tonality of the painting, embellished with touches of red or green that add an richness and vitality to his images of a window, flowers and vase, and table. In this painting, full of life, Liao's subtle use of white superbly captures the feeling of light shining through a window. The artist gracefully produces an imaginary space whose focal point continually moves and shifts, following the subtle rhythms of his free, lyrical lines and the varying shades of his colors in both large and small areas. These abstract, expressive lines display the ease and freedom of his brushwork, guiding the viewer's gaze in a search for concrete images, while uniting the space that extends between foreground and background and interior and exterior – all the while remaining close to, yet still at some distance from the reality of actual physical space. The lines and blocks of colour seem to define each other even while inhabiting a dynamically changing relationship: mutually interpenetrating and mutually defining, they both deconstruct and reorganize. Somehow, between the two vocabularies of figuration and abstraction, Liao Chih-Chun managed to discover an organic, poetic region for his art, one that hovers somewhere between two-dimensional and threedimensional space.
Despite the painting's subject as a "still life in front of a window," its importance lies in the way the artist, through items familiar to us all, conveys his own individual perceptions and aesthetics. His combination of lines and colors produces a richly varied composition and visual experience, like a melody that flows across the canvas: vivid, exuberant, and rich in feeling, with its own clear key signature and its own internal order. Because the items portrayed are linked so closely to life, they seem all the more heartfelt and touching when their images are presented as abstracted pictorial elements, and for that same reason, the still life subject became one of the most important themes running through Liao Chih-Chun's creative work.
In a Picasso work that also features a still life before a window, we see Picasso transforming his subjects into flattened, geometrical elements and images, in stark contrast to the distant scene outside the window. The work as a whole displays both his unique collage style and an intense sense of reality. Andre Derain, however, a representative of the Fauves who had some influence on Liao Chih Chun, employs bright, fresh color; his composition of points, lines, and planes produces pleasing rhythms, vividly depicting a scene that directly expresses the viewpoint of the artist. At the beginning of the 20th century, both the Cubists and the Fauves exhibited an abstracting tendency in the colors and the formal elements of their work; they emphasized expressionistic elements even as their works still referred directly back to the real world. In another area, Kandinsky was one of the earliest artists to engagein pure abstraction, developing abstract forms in an organic manner and building his precise rhythms and harmonious structures into highly musical compositions. These two aesthetics seem to have come together in Liao Chih-Chun, who in his semi-abstract work developed an unusual and yet highly poetic artistic vocabulary.
In his brilliant masterpiece Still Life in front of the Window, Liao Chih-Chun shares with the viewer a rich imaginative vision, yet one that remains allied to natural perception, revealing an inner world that embraces both. His painting style, which seeks a point of balance between abstraction and figuration, features free and lively color wedded to unaffected simplicity; incisive in both thought and technique, its visual attributes are highly recognizable. Liao Chih-Chun fully deserves his place among the generation of modern painting masters in Taiwan.
In the summer of 1962, Liao went on a tour of the great museums of Europe and the US. His ever-changing outlook during that experience and his first-hand contact with original museum works brought him the realization that, as an artist, he should strive to explore and communicate his perceptions in more individualized forms. Through the impact of contemporary art, in the works of American Abstract Expressionist artists such as Jackson Pollock, he further sensed how painting had departed from pure representation and embraced the expression of bodily movement and inner feelings. In an interview he gave after returning home, he said, "All of these factors caused me to quickly search for a new approach of my own."
Liao's Still Life in front of the Window dates from 1968, during the period of greatest innovation in his career. In its colors, lines, and spatial structure, it exhibits an ingenious originality, projecting a contemporary feel by virtue of Liao's new but already richly developed painting vocabulary. Contrasting hues of yellow and blue provide the central tonality of the painting, embellished with touches of red or green that add an richness and vitality to his images of a window, flowers and vase, and table. In this painting, full of life, Liao's subtle use of white superbly captures the feeling of light shining through a window. The artist gracefully produces an imaginary space whose focal point continually moves and shifts, following the subtle rhythms of his free, lyrical lines and the varying shades of his colors in both large and small areas. These abstract, expressive lines display the ease and freedom of his brushwork, guiding the viewer's gaze in a search for concrete images, while uniting the space that extends between foreground and background and interior and exterior – all the while remaining close to, yet still at some distance from the reality of actual physical space. The lines and blocks of colour seem to define each other even while inhabiting a dynamically changing relationship: mutually interpenetrating and mutually defining, they both deconstruct and reorganize. Somehow, between the two vocabularies of figuration and abstraction, Liao Chih-Chun managed to discover an organic, poetic region for his art, one that hovers somewhere between two-dimensional and threedimensional space.
Despite the painting's subject as a "still life in front of a window," its importance lies in the way the artist, through items familiar to us all, conveys his own individual perceptions and aesthetics. His combination of lines and colors produces a richly varied composition and visual experience, like a melody that flows across the canvas: vivid, exuberant, and rich in feeling, with its own clear key signature and its own internal order. Because the items portrayed are linked so closely to life, they seem all the more heartfelt and touching when their images are presented as abstracted pictorial elements, and for that same reason, the still life subject became one of the most important themes running through Liao Chih-Chun's creative work.
In a Picasso work that also features a still life before a window, we see Picasso transforming his subjects into flattened, geometrical elements and images, in stark contrast to the distant scene outside the window. The work as a whole displays both his unique collage style and an intense sense of reality. Andre Derain, however, a representative of the Fauves who had some influence on Liao Chih Chun, employs bright, fresh color; his composition of points, lines, and planes produces pleasing rhythms, vividly depicting a scene that directly expresses the viewpoint of the artist. At the beginning of the 20th century, both the Cubists and the Fauves exhibited an abstracting tendency in the colors and the formal elements of their work; they emphasized expressionistic elements even as their works still referred directly back to the real world. In another area, Kandinsky was one of the earliest artists to engagein pure abstraction, developing abstract forms in an organic manner and building his precise rhythms and harmonious structures into highly musical compositions. These two aesthetics seem to have come together in Liao Chih-Chun, who in his semi-abstract work developed an unusual and yet highly poetic artistic vocabulary.
In his brilliant masterpiece Still Life in front of the Window, Liao Chih-Chun shares with the viewer a rich imaginative vision, yet one that remains allied to natural perception, revealing an inner world that embraces both. His painting style, which seeks a point of balance between abstraction and figuration, features free and lively color wedded to unaffected simplicity; incisive in both thought and technique, its visual attributes are highly recognizable. Liao Chih-Chun fully deserves his place among the generation of modern painting masters in Taiwan.