THE LIANG FAMILY
YUNPO LIANG:
"Stone Arch"
Chinese water color on silk scroll
Image 23.5" x 45.5"
Chinese water color on silk scroll
Image 23.5" x 45.5"
"Blue Lagoon"
Chinese water color on silk scroll
Image 23.5" x 45.5"
Chinese water color on silk scroll
Image 23.5" x 45.5"
Yunpo Liang was born in Beijing in 1926. He received his education through private
tutors, nationally acclaimed scholars--Ma Zongxiang, Huang Xiaoxu, and Guo Zeyun—in Chinese language, history, classics and literature. He attended Beijing Sicun High School, famous for its scholarship in Chinese Classics and graduated well versed in Chinese classics and literature. During the Sino-Japanese War he studied classics in the National Classics and Culture Academy in Beijing (Gu Du Guo Xue Yuan). During the one day he missed school because of illness, the Japanese captured all his schoolmates and charged them as “spies for the Chinese government.” Most were tortured or killed. He had to hide in a temple amid dead bodies and pile of books on Buddhism, Classics, history, and literature—as a result sadly his cultivation in Classical literature and art advanced further. As a talented lover of art, literature and music, he was admitted to the Department of Studio Art and the Department of Music in the Art Academy. He chose studio art training in both Western and traditional styles. In the Beijing Art Academy and Hangzhou Art Academy he learned from modern Chinese masters like Shu Beihong, Fu Xinyu, and Huang Binghong, graduating in 1947. After settling in Taipei, Taiwan, Yunpo became famous in graphic design, especially book covers of famous novelists and poets, forming a circle of artists, novelists, and poets. He founded the "Association of Graphic Design," and served as a board member there for nine years. Besides avid reading of the classics, playing violin, and writing poetry in both classical and modern style, he focused on the practice of calligraphy in standard and running script. With a background in both Western and Chinese style, he later focused on the creation of landscape painting in the traditional style. As traditional landscapists before him he visited famous mountains and seacoasts to study the mountains, trees, rocks, and streams directly from nature. In the early years his landscape painting was both traditional and refined in the manner of Song landscapes, employing traditional texture strokes for rocks and trees—or black and white with large areas of washes, reminiscent of the Zen School of the Southern Song Dynasty. In more work he fell in love with the elegant southern Chinese gardens whose rock piling and landscape designs crystallized in its own way the essence of Chinese art, culture, architectural and landscape design. In these gardens he found new inspiration and his style changed to incorporate more spontaneously washed or splashed ink as a way of suggesting mist, the relationship of the foreground or middle-ground to the background, or “understatement.” His landscapes fused the classical and the modern employing perspectives that were both traditional and Western. Unique to his landscapes was the spirit of the literati scholar painters and use of the "three treasures"—painting, poetry and calligraphy. Unlike Western artists he inscribed poems in the classic manner to his landscapes in beautiful running calligraphy in the “Langting” style. He had more than twenty solo exhibitions in Taiwan, America, Thailand, Japan, and China. He published three books with his poetry in modern style, four books with collections of his essays on Chinese art and culture, and more than ten books with collections of his art. |
"Garden Solitude"
Chinese water color on silk scroll
Image 23.5" x 45.5"
Chinese water color on silk scroll
Image 23.5" x 45.5"

"Garden Passage"
Chinese water color on silk scroll
Image 23.5" x 45.5"
Chinese water color on silk scroll
Image 23.5" x 45.5"
"Garden Party"
Chinese water color on silk scroll
Image 22.25" x 38.25"
Chinese water color on silk scroll
Image 22.25" x 38.25"
"Presipice"
Chinese ink on silk scroll
Image 24" x 38.25"
Chinese ink on silk scroll
Image 24" x 38.25"
"Indecision"
Chinese ink on silk scroll
Image 23.5" x 42.75"
Chinese ink on silk scroll
Image 23.5" x 42.75"