Four Seasons

Four Seasons returns to oil and gold leaf, the materials of Liao's late-1960s breakthrough, applied to a classical East Asian thematic structure. The four seasons are a long-standing organizing frame in Chinese and Japanese painting and printmaking, often realized as a quartet of panels or a single composition divided into four registers. In Liao's hands the format hosts a procession of his iconographic vocabulary — gates, lanterns, festival ornaments, offering plates — distributed across the seasonal cycle and articulated in his characteristic flat, symmetrical, gilt manner. By the late 1990s Liao was a senior figure in Asian contemporary printmaking, having founded the Taipei International Biennial Print and Drawing Exhibition in 1983 and shaped a generation of Taiwanese printmakers through his teaching at the National Taiwan Normal University and the Taipei National University of the Arts. Four Seasons exemplifies the mature synthesis of his practice: a folk-religious symbolic vocabulary developed over thirty years, deployed within a canonical East Asian compositional schema, and rendered on the gold-leaf surface that signals devotional space.