Falling and Rising

Widely considered the "father of modern Chinese ink painting," Liu Kuo-sung left China for Taiwan during the Communist revolution and began his career in 1956 when he co-founded the Fifth Moon Painting Society in Taipei with fellow young painters who explored ways to modernize ink painting. Liu incorporated the philosophical and visual elements of Northern Song style monumental landscape paintings and looked to mid-century Euro-American abstraction for inspiration and comparison. Focusing on landscape as subject was a deliberate choice, as it is the artistic genre with the highest regard in the history of Chinese art. For Liu’s generation, the trauma of displacement reinforced an obsession with the ideas of land, identity, and belonging; landscape became the perfect vehicle for these complex sentiments and aspirations.


Liu made Falling and Rising while living in the United States between 1966 and 1968 under the auspices of the John D. Rockefeller III Fund (now the Asian Cultural Council). Using a technique he invented in 1963, he applied ink on a coarse cotton paper and methodically peeled off the fiber to create the feathery, white marks that resemble textured strokes in traditional Chinese painting. Borrowing a compositional convention from classical paintings, he left a large portion of the sheet blank to suggest distance and depth and allow room for the viewer’s imagination. The picture, while wholly abstract, conjures the image of a mountain range, with deep valleys and swarming clouds, or mists from streams and rapids.