Photo of the day: Red Sun

This week’s photo theme is Reddish Heavens: a smear of red/orange/pink hue muddling the horizon, real or imagined…

Today’s selection comes from one of our favorite blogs, Everyday Life in Maoist China. The other day they posted an image of this 1970 painting by the artist Liu Kuo-sung, entitled 红太阳 (“Red Sun”). We went digging for more info, and found this page (link in Chinese), which gives some background on Liu, who was born in 1932 in Anhui but moved to Taiwan at the age of 17, following the Chinese Nationalist Party after the ascension of the CCP in Beijing:

In 1956, Liu graduated from the Fine Arts Department of National Taiwan Normal University. The following year, he and like-minded friends were called upon to form the May Painting Society — each May, an art fair was held, inspired by the May Salon in France. Later it became one of the most important art fairs in Taiwan’s history. The slogan of the May Painting Society in the era of the modernization of Chinese art was to “revolutionize the life of the revolutionary center,” and Liu Kuo-sung, the leader of the Art Society, once said: “The literati draw at the end of the road. If our concept of ink wash painting can be liberated from the idea of literati painting, there is a brighter future!”

红太阳 (Red Sun) by Liu Kuo-sung, 1970

Read more about Liu Kuo-sung here. Incidentally, the latest post from Everyday Life in Maoist China kinda fits our photo theme as well, but may be a bit too bleak for a standalone post: China’s first successful hydrogen bomb test in 1967.