ILLUSTRATED:

The painting is to be sold with a certificate of anthenticity issued by Ever Harvest Art Gallery, Taipei.

In the year that Liao Te-cheng was born, his native town Hulu Dun ("Calabash Mound" was renamed as Fengyuan, short for "fengrao zhi yuan",or fertile plain, signifying the area's status as "Taiwan's rice barn."Not only rice is grown here, though, as this is also the northernmost region of the island where sugarcane can be cultivated. The Taichung Plain with its endless rice paddies and sugarcane fields, its soil and streams and the fragrance of wild plants in the air, was the setting of Liao's childhood, the backdrop for his first experiences in life as he grew up happily to nature's rhythms and melodies.

As a young adult Liao went to study in Tokyo. He hadn't even reached the age of twenty yet, and he went all alone. Understandably, in that strange country he would miss his home and his mother, and the soil of his native town, particularly at night. As a result, he created a series of paintings in the early 1970s with bucolic scenes from his hometown as their motif. This piece, "Sugarcane Field" is brimming with memories, nostalgia and imagination. The picture is filled with dazzling sunlight on tranquil fields, depicting a peaceful rural scene. True, it is a scene of autumn, as that is Liao's favorite time of year, but the canvas still comes alive with the gentle warmth and brilliant sun of a comfortably clear and dry day-in sharp contrast to the misty wet season yet to come.