Work A

This early oil dates from the year Liao left Taipei for Tokyo, where he enrolled at the Tokyo University of Education to study with the postwar Japanese print establishment. The generic title and 1962 date place Work A at the threshold of his transition from his National Taiwan Normal University training under Liao Chi-chun toward the Japanese-influenced experimentation that would dominate his mid-1960s output. Without the iconographic vocabulary of temple gates, festival ornaments, and gold leaf that defines his mature practice, works of this period typically show Liao testing oil-painting conventions absorbed from his Taipei teachers — School of Paris brushwork, modernist composition, muted Taiwanese tonalities — before folk-religious imagery entered his work in 1963. As one of the earliest dated paintings in his catalogued oeuvre, Work A documents the formative moment before the artist who would later be called the godfather of modern Taiwanese printmaking had committed either to printmaking as a primary medium or to the iconographic language he would spend six decades refining.