Mid-Autumn Festival

Of Liu Kuo-sung’s abstract paintings, those with Chinese holidays as the subject matter express a very traditional sentiment. Mid-Autumn Festival celebrates the Chinese people’s poetic fascination with the moon, extending a literary tradition thousands of years old.

Mid-Autumn Festival draws on a playful feature of Liu Kuo-sung’s oeuvre: a painting within a painting. The top is crafted by a collage of geometric shapes, which creates a sense of spatial ambiguity. Questions arise on whether the moon is contained within the yellow frame, or superimposed on top of it. While the geometric shapes are arranged by rationality, the calligraphic brushstrokes below are born of sensibility. The former is a product of the West, and the latter is a sentiment of the East. The juxtaposition of the two is sophisticated and a perfect balance between rationality and sensibility.

Liu Kuo-sung’s calligraphic brushstrokes and the “Ripping the Tendons and Pealing the Skin” technique brilliantly represent the surface textures of the moon and Earth. The brushstrokes produce mysterious markings like craters on the moon, and the “Ripping the Tendons and Pealing the Skin” technique creates organic textures in the rice paper resembling the mountainous surface of the Earth. In terms of color, the overall composition is immersed in an atmosphere of yellow. The warm glow from the moon above is gently reflected on the ground below, symbolizing the moon’s presence felt by the Earth.