In the 1990s, it finally became possible for Liu Kang to return to painting nudes more openly. Although conservative voices fixedly advocated the fully dressed human body in art as being in accordance to Oriental moral concepts [,], the 1992 Censorship Review Committee Report recognised the need for balance between artistic creativity and the safeguarding of moral values. Interestingly, the report did not mention nudity in paintings, but its subsection, “nudity in calendars, posters, magazines and newspapers”, stated that “nudity itself is not obscene or offensive to many people” []. In a 1993 interview, Liu Kang concluded: “Recently, I have a sense that people are more open-minded here and I was fired up again to paint nudes. I guess I am making up for the lost time” []. Indeed, Liu Kang’s nude paintings from the 1990s represent the culmination of the artist’s lifelong exploration of one of his special subjects.
Hence, this study aims to investigate the development of the artist’s approach to nude paintings by focusing on the pigment mixtures and painting techniques for depicting nude female bodies. Factors such as brushwork and colour palette were crucial for the characterisation of the forms of the figures and their skin tones. This research builds upon and expands the scope of the earlier analytical investigations of Liu Kang’s paintings [,,], and, for the first time, sheds light on the artist’s palette of colours and painting techniques within one genre. The obtained results can provide conservators and art historians with a better understanding of Liu Kang’s painting process.
The research in this paper focuses on eight paintings of nudes created during two periods, 1927–1954 and 1992–1999, from the Liu family and National Gallery Singapore collections ( and ). Two paintings represent the pre-war, Shanghai years. One was created during the unplanned emigration to Malaya, and five other paintings represent Liu Kang’s career twilight in the 1990s. It should be noted that the final year of the first period (1927–1954) corresponds to the 1954 nude painting on canvas known only from the archival photograph taken by the artist in the 1950s (). The painting was executed in a typical Nanyang style by the artist after his trip to Bali in 1952 []. Although the information about the artwork remains unknown, its unpublished photograph is presented in this study for documentation purposes.
The presented results of the pigment analyses and the discussion focus on the mixtures primarily used by Liu Kang for the depiction of nude figures. However, due to sampling limitations, certain tonal ranges of the skin colours were not fully investigated. Hence, the analyses of the paint mixtures from the drapery settings of the compositions supported a tentative assessment of the pigment mixtures used for achieving skin colours and enabled us to confirm the use of certain pigments found at low concentrations in the skin colours.
The model in (1927) was depicted in a classical way, without any exaggeration of forms or colours. The artist attempted to capture the charm and dimensionality of her body by using suggestive light effects and avoiding strong outlines. Based on the archival photograph taken on the day when the artwork was created, during a live nude painting class at Xinhua Arts Academy in Shanghai, Liu Kang used small and medium-sized brushes that required complex manipulation of the paint, resulting in the creation of the substantial texture (a–d). This visible aspect of the painting correlates with the OM of the paint’s cross-section (sample 7), exposing a wet-on-wet execution ().
