Worship

Painted during Liao's first year in Tokyo, Worship belongs to the cluster of early-1960s canvases in which the artist began turning to the temple culture of his Taipei childhood as primary subject matter. The religious classification and 1963 date suggest a depiction of devotional activity — figures before an altar, offerings, incense — rendered in the oil idiom Liao carried from his Taiwanese training rather than the flattened, symbol-laden vocabulary of his later signature work. Worship predates his Paris immersion in intaglio at Atelier 17 from 1965 onward and his eventual reduction of religious experience to isolated icons: the gate, the lantern, the gilt offering plate. Here those elements are still embedded in observed, narrative scenes. The painting is significant as one of the first explicit declarations of the folk-religious thematic territory Liao would claim for his entire career, and that he would later recast through Western printmaking processes — etching, aquatint, silkscreen — to produce the hybrid East-West idiom for which he became known.