In 1932, Liu was born in Anhui Province. His family was originally from Qingzhou, Shandong Province. He moved to Taiwan in 1949. He started learning Chinese painting when he was fourteen. As he turned twenty-year-old, he learned Western painting instead. In 1957, he graduated from the Department of Fine Arts, the National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU). In 1957, the Fifth Month Art Group held its first exhibition at Zhongshan Hall in Taipei City, marking the beginning of modern art movement. After he graduated from the NTNU, he taught at the Keelung First High School, the National Cheng Kung University, the Chung Yuan Christian University, and Wisconsin State University. He had been also an adjunct professor at the University of Iowa. He had been teaching for 36 years. In 1971, he was invited to teach at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and later became the dean of its department of fine arts. After he retired in 1992, he returned to Taiwan. Then he was a full-time professor at the Department of Fine Arts, Tunghai University and then the dean at the Graduate Institute of Plastic Arts, Tainan National University of the Arts. Now he is retired. He held exhibitions worldwide including Lark Gallery in Carmel, California, the Ueno Royal Museum in Tokyo, Japan, the Yale University Art Gallery, the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts.

The piece is one of the The Earth Ⅲ series. He used Feibai (half-dry stroke) technique of Chinese calligraphy to emphasize the texture of paper, depicting the snowy ridges under the sun and strong contrast of black and white. Influenced by collage techniques, he ingeniously combined it with Chigirie. Fan Kuan's “Travelers among the Mountains and Streams” inspired Liu’s powerful ridges. He drew two to three horizontal strokes in the bottom half of the piece. In the upper half, he pasted ridges made of paper. Earlier, influenced by Hard-edge painting, he used squares instead of ridges. With his feeling about the ball-like lanterns of Lantern Festival and his impression of the Optical Art in the West, he cut out a circle and pasted onto the square. The piece has been exhibited in his 1969 solo exhibition at the National Museum of History, his 1970 solo exhibition at the Museum of Asian Art in Germany, his 1971 solo exhibition at Frankfurt Museum in Germany and at the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery in England, and his 1996 solo exhibition at the National Museum of History.

In the 1950s, Liu began to seek inspiration from new trends of the West. Quite influenced by Picasso, Kandinsky, Klee and postwar abstract expressionism, he started experimenting with media of sand, sawdust, iron sand and plaster on his canvas while working on abstract Chinese painting. In 1963, he painted with ink on a new kind of tissue paper. With the extraordinary effect created by using Caoshu (cursive script) and ripping of the veins of paper to create a special texture, he created his own modern Chinese painting style. In 1969, he entered a new phase, starting his Space series. The first piece Earth I won the first prize of the “Mainstream 69 International Art Exhibition.” In the same year, the American spacecraft Apollo 8 sent back pictures of Earth and the moon from the dark side of the moon. The artist was awed by the achievement so he took out the square and kept the sphere on The Earth Ⅲ.