LI YUAN CHIA

Li Yuan-Chia was born in Guangxi in 1929 and moved to Taiwan after World War II. Early in his career, he was inspired by the modernist ideas of Li Chun-Shan, developing a unique pictorial vocabulary that fused traditional ink with abstract expression. As a founding member of the Ton-Fan Art Group, he played a leading role in the first wave of postwar modern painting in Taiwan.

In the 1960s, Li’s work took on a minimalist, enigmatic, and conceptual character, revealing a vast cosmological schema within restrained expressivity. He began to develop the “point”—a concept and motif that would run through his entire career. After moving to Bologna, Italy, in 1962, he joined the art group Punto, transforming the picture plane into a site for manipulation, cutting, and reconstruction, shifting viewers’ attention from painterly brushwork to geometric composition.