Born in Tokyo, Japan in 1938, Liu Gung-yi and his family moved back to Taiwan in 1946. He is the son of Liu Chihsiang, a Taiwanese painter in Japan. Since his childhood, he has been surrounded by art as if it is part of his life. In 1957, he started practicing painting with his father. In 1962, he won the “Tai-Yang Prize” of “Tai-Yang Art Exhibition” and the merit award of “Taiwan Provincial Fine Arts Exhibition.” He started teaching in Hengchun Junior High School in 1969 and resigned in 1981 to continue his artistic career as a painter. He has held several solo exhibitions. In 1986, he received Golden Nobility Award in the category of oil painting, awarded by the Art Society of China. He moved to New Zealand in 1998. Liu Gung-yi’s artistic practice is mostly oil painting and oil pastel works. Through his painting, the artist demonstrates his observation on the Taiwanese society and the natural landscape.

The natural landscape has always been an important theme in Liu Gung-yi’s painting. However, his landscape painting has no longer been the objective representation of the natural scenery since the 1980s. Instead, the artist blends his subjective perspective with it. Although Flowing Rays of Light features the natural landscape as its subject, it cleverly intertwines the objects such as the bridge, the electric poles, or the clouds to represent the floating mobility which symbolizes the relation between nature and the passing of time.

Because of his family background, Liu Gung-yi had been through a different path from his fellow artists in Taiwan when he grew up. Born in Tokyo and with a father who was a Taiwanese artist of the older generation, he has never received academic training throughout his artistic career. In the post-war Taiwan, the art society was influenced by various trends in the modern art movement. However, Liu never made a clear and exact response to the trend at that time. From the year his talent was first noticed in 1962 to the year he resigned from the teaching service in 1981, he had always painted as an amateur. During the 1990s when Taiwan ended the Martial Law, he completed a series of paintings about the social phenomenon, through which he visualized his observation on the Taiwanese society and the memory of long-lost humanity. In 1998, he moved to New Zealand, where he experienced the different culture of another society. Nature thus provided him with a shelter for his nostalgia for the beautiful landscape in Taiwan. Although Liu Gungyi has his own observations on people, society, and nature, his painting transforms the thoughts into a poetic and philosophical way of thinking which is reserved and tranquil. Through the unique painting style he has established, the artist reexamines of the essence of life, which keeps chanting the eulogy like a flowing river.