Liu Guosong is widely recognized as a pioneer of the modern ink painting movement. The experience of growing up in enforced and self-imposed exile during a tumultuous period in China's history affected Liu deeply and may have driven him to seek a new language of art that could reconcile the worlds of tradition and modernity. By the 1960s in Taiwan, Liu had developed the bold and powerful vocabulary upon which his unique art would be based, one that drew on Chinese ink painting, and the abstract and conceptual art of America. As for his works from the 1960s to the current decade, Liu developed the abstract potential of ink painting, using experimental techniques and materials to modify the effects that can be achieved with ink and colour. Often suggesting landscape and cosmos, Liu's works are bold, innovative compositions that depict a parallel universe in which the elemental forces of nature run wild.