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 Technology as a full-time lecturer in visual communication design, a position he held from 1996 to 2005, with a brief concurrent adjunct lectureship at Da Yeh University, before joining the Department of Fine Arts at Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA), where he rose to professor and, in 2019, dean of the School of Fine Arts.

Liu's studio practice is centered on image collage and printmaking, combining print media 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 figure prominently in his 2021 solo exhibition 'Self-Imagined Within: Writing Dust with Trees' (自以為在－以樹寫塵) at a Taipei gallery, one of a series of solo shows that also includes the earlier 'Joy-Point Assembly' (樂點拼裝) of 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 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, from 2019 to 2023, having earlier served as its secretary-general, and he has been dean of the School of Fine Arts at Taipei National University of the Arts since 2019, after chairing its Department of Fine Arts and serving as the university's dean of academic affairs. 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. His documented record since 2002 includes a series of solo exhibitions at galleries and cultural centres throughout Taiwan, together with a steady stream of group exhibitions in Taiwan, China, South Korea, Japan, and Asian-print exchange initiatives that have established him as a recognized representative of contemporary Taiwanese printmaking abroad.

Through his combined practice as an artist, professor, and arts administrator, Liu Hsi-chuan occupies a distinctive position in Taiwan's contemporary print scene. His work crosses the conventional boundary between fine-art printmaking and visual communication, treating both as forms of cultural meaning-making, and his institutional service has helped position Taiwan as an active node in regional and international printmaking networks.