Liu Hsi-chuan

Liu Hsi-chuan, also romanized as Liu Xi-quan, is a Taiwanese contemporary printmaker, image-collage artist, educator, and arts administrator whose practice has helped shape printmaking discourse and infrastructure in Taiwan since the early 2000s. Born in Taichung in 1968, he developed a printmaking practice that bridges fine-art printmaking with visual-communication design, and his career has alternated between studio work, university teaching, and leadership in Taiwan's printmaking community.

He completed his graduate studies in graphic fine arts at the Kent Institute of Art and Design (now part of the University for the Creative Arts) in the United Kingdom, earning a Master of Arts in Graphic Fine Art (MAGFA) in 1995. The British training laid the groundwork for a hybrid approach to image-making — situating printmaking in dialogue with reproductive media, design typography, and conceptual layering rather than treating it as a closed studio tradition. After returning to Taiwan, Liu joined Chaoyang University of Science and Technology as a full-time lecturer in visual communication design, a position he held from 1996 to 2005, and later moved to Da Yeh University before joining the Department of Fine Arts at Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA), where he became professor and dean.

Liu's studio practice is centered on image collage and printmaking, combining screen printing with digital image-processing methods that he developed over two decades of teaching design and printmaking concurrently. His work is characterized by layered photographic imagery, dense typographic incident, and the quiet recurrence of motifs drawn from natural forms — trees in particular figure across multiple solo exhibitions, including 'Self-Imagined Within: Writing Dust with Trees' at a Taipei gallery in 2021 and the earlier 'Joy-Point Collage' (樂點拼貼) in 2010. The 2021 exhibition presented prints in which the figure of a tree functions less as subject than as a structuring device through which Liu writes onto the picture plane the residue of memory, weather, and time.

As an educator and administrator, Liu has been deeply involved in shaping Taiwan's contemporary print culture. He has served as chairman of the Republic of China Printmaking Association (中華民國版畫學會), the country's principal printmaking professional organisation, and as dean of the Department of Fine Arts at Taipei National University of the Arts, beginning in 2019. In these roles he has advocated for closer connections between Taiwan's print scene and the broader Asian printmaking circuit, supporting exchange exhibitions, juried biennials, and student print programs that bring Taiwanese practitioners into conversation with peers from China, Japan, Korea, and beyond.

Liu's work has appeared in numerous international printmaking exhibitions across East Asia and Europe. Documented exhibition records since 2002 include seven solo shows at galleries and cultural centres throughout Taiwan, and a steady stream of group exhibitions in Taiwan, China, South Korea, and Asian-print exchange initiatives that have established him as a recognized representative of contemporary Taiwanese printmaking abroad. Notable recent works include 'Earth and Ocean' (2021), a screen print, and 'I Really Love You,' both of which illustrate his recurring concern with the relationship between the printed image and the textures of memory.