Liu Zhibai

In the early 1970s, Liu lived in a mountain village near the Xima River in Longli County, Guizhou Province. In the late 1970s, he began a new period of artistic creation, which has for main theme the landscape of the Qian Mountain, painted in ink. In 1984, the Guizhou Provincial Museum collected four pieces of landscape paintings and a piece of flower painting.

He studied under Gu Yanping, director of the Chinese painting department of Suzhou Fine Arts College. The Gu family is a large family of well-known Chinese collectors. The "Guoyun Pavilion" established by this family has been collecting the works of many great artists in the history of Chinese art for nearly a century, dating from the Tang dynasty to the Qing dynasty. Starting from 1935, Liu Zhibai lived for a long time at the Guoyun Pavilion. There he studied and explored, under Professor Gu Yanping's guidance, the works of the great Chinese painters and learned ancient art history. During the Second World War, Japan invaded China. Liu Zhibai then embarked on a journey of exile that lasted eight years. He finally returned to his home county of Fengyang in 1946 to teach art in a college. In 1948, during the Chinese Civil War, Liu Zhibai fled the war and traveled to Guangxi Province. In December of the same year, he proposed his first theory of painting, External Learning Focused on the Ego, in Quanzhou County, birth country of Shi Tao, a great Chinese painter.

Liu became the last guardian of Chinese painting and a pioneer of innovation in the new century: the art of ink painting, which he fathered in the last years of his life, marked a turning point between Chinese tradition and modernity. It puts forth the historical trend of abstract art and the performance of Chinese ink painting in the 21st century. After Liu Zhibai's death, a number of publishing houses have released a total of 15 monographs and over 20 research journals with titles such as Book of Famous Artists of Modern and Contemporary Chinese Paintings - Liu Zhibai, Book of Paintings by Liu Zhibai, Qian Mountain Characters - Liu Zhibai's Art, Freshness of Painting, Ink Traces and Poetic Drunkenness - Ink Landscape Paintings, Defending Black by Appreciating White - The Art of Liu Zhibai. More than 90 of his works are now part of collections owned by multiple art institutions, including the National Art Museum of China, the National Chinese Academy of Painting, the Guizhou Provincial Museum, the Provincial Institute of History and Guizhou Culture, Anhui Provincial Museum of History and Culture, and Anhui Provincial Museum of Art.

Liu Zhibai (1915-2003) was a Chinese ink painter. Liu studied in Suzhou in 1933, in China's best art school at the time: the Suzhou Fine Arts College (this school had exhibited in the 1920s more than 500 famous plaster sculptures, and brought from France nearly ten thousand albums of Western art).