In 1968, the Apollo 8 spaceship, part of the United States’ project to land on the moon, sent back a photo of Earth taken as it rose over the lunar horizon. The following year, the Apollo 11 completed its mission to carry the first humans to the moon. This shocked the then 37-year-old Liu Kuo-Sung, and he started painting the Spaces series. Which Is Earth is a work from this period. The long rice paper, round moon, and precise contours echo western hard-edge painting. The painting combines the lines of Chinese calligraphy and the aesthetics of western formalism to create a connection between the wonders of the universe, human civilization, and Earth, as well as showing a boundless and beautiful space and rhythm.

Liu Kuo-Sung followed the government to Taiwan after the Second World War. Not long after, he entered the Art Department of Taiwan Provincial Teachers College; and in 1956, he and friends from the department established the Fifth Moon Group to advocate for innovations in painting and wholesale westernization. Years later, he felt there was more than the pursuit of western art, so he returned to making ink wash paintings and began to actively promote the modernization of the artform. Liu believed that the characteristics and texture of the lines expressed by calligraphy were limited, so he developed many new materials and techniques.

For example, Liu created a kind of coarse, tendony cotton paper. After coloring a composition, the paper tendons are ripped open to show a cracked white texture, a technique called the stripped tendons, peeled skin texture. This kind of texture, together with the lines of wild cursive calligraphy and the rendering of thick and thin, dry and wet ink, followed by dyeing with colors, produces a special effect. This established Liu Kuo-Sung’s unique ink wash painting style and was received enthusiastically by art circles who praised him as the “father of modern ink wash painting”.