Chinese Ink Master Liu Kuo-sung Paints the Moon Without Using a Brush

Some artists, for good reason, hesitate to reveal their tricks, so as to avoid any chance of diminishing their work’s mystery. But learning how Liu Kuo-sung makes his moon paintings doesn’t take away from the enigma—it only enhances the effect. The 91-year-old artist’s lunar series—begun in the late 1960s and revamped in the 2010s—features in a retrospective at the National Gallery Singapore. All of the 60 works on view are the product of the decades that the Chinese ink master spent innovating ways to paint without a brush.You would be forgiven for overlooking the works’ brushlessness—Liu conceals and controls his experimental methods—and you could appreciate the simple elegance of his compositions and his mesmerizing color combinations all the same. But the magic is enhanced when you come to appreciate how he directs the swirling ink he uses when marbling—a technique that involves adding droplets of pigment to a vat of water, then dragging the paper across its surface. Whereas most artists turn to marbling to invite an element of chance, Liu approaches it as a challenge to prove his control. wargaqq