Liao Shiou-Ping

Liao Shiou-Ping (Liao Shiou-ping; 廖修平; born 1936, Taipei) is widely recognized as the godfather of modern Taiwanese woodblock printmaking — the founding figure who brought contemporary printmaking back to Taiwan in the late 1970s and seeded a generation of younger Taiwanese printmakers through his teaching and his founding of the Taipei International Biennial Print and Drawing Exhibition. His own practice, sustained across more than six decades, fuses Chinese folk-religious imagery — temple gates, festival icons, lantern motifs, gold leaf — with Western intaglio and silkscreen techniques learned in Tokyo, Paris, and New York.

Liao was born in Taipei in 1936, the fourth of ten children in the family of the civil engineer Liao Qinfu. He attended Datong Middle School in Taipei, where he studied painting under Wu Dongcai, before entering the Fine Arts Department at National Taiwan Normal University in 1954. There he trained under several of the senior figures of postwar Taiwanese painting — Huang Junbi, Lin Yu-shan, Liao Jichun, and Chen Huikun — and earned his B.A. in Fine Arts in 1959. After completing military service he travelled to Japan in 1962 to study at Tokyo University of Education (the predecessor of the present University of Tsukuba), majoring in painting and studying graphic design under Masato Takahashi. It was during these Tokyo years that he was first exposed to printmaking as a serious artistic medium.

In 1965 he moved to Paris and continued his studies, first at the École des Beaux-Arts and then at Atelier 17, the legendary print studio run by Stanley William Hayter that had previously taught Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, and many of the major postwar printmakers. The same year he won a silver medal at the Paris Spring Salon Exhibition, and in 1966 he became the first Chinese artist granted residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts. From 1968 to 1976 he was based in New York, where he held an assistantship at the Pratt Graphics Center and his print Festival of Sun won first place in New York's 28th Audubon Art Show in 1969. His print La Fête was acquired by the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris during this period, and major museum acquisitions began to follow.

In 1973 Liao returned to Taiwan and began the teaching career that has shaped contemporary Taiwanese printmaking. He has taught at National Taiwan Normal University, Chinese Culture University, and the National Taiwan University of the Arts, and from 1977 to 1979 he was invited back to Tsukuba University in Japan to establish a printmaking workshop there. In 1974 he published The Art of Printmaking, the foundational Chinese-language print textbook, and in 1983 he initiated the Taipei International Biennial Print and Drawing Exhibition, an event whose first edition drew participants from more than seventy countries and which has since become the principal print biennial in East Asia outside Japan.

Liao's mature visual programme is divided across long-running series: Gate Gods (early 1960s, oil); Gate (mid 1960s, intaglio and lithography); Temple (1960s-1970s, silkscreen and photography); Symbols (1970s, silkscreen and geometric pattern); Seasons (late 1970s); Gathering and Chat (1980s); Manikin (1986, silkscreen, critiquing mechanized society); Garden Party (1980s-1990s, with alcohol containers); Knots (2000); Life Symbols (2000-present, oil, acrylic, gold leaf, wood); Dreams (2003-present, on mortality after his wife's death in a 2002 birdwatching accident); Timeless (2005); Speechless (2008, installation); and Double Wealth (2008). The persistent thread is the temple-gate motif — a square architectural form filled with red, gold, vermilion, and folk-religious iconography — which appears in compositions across all the print and painting series.