The important post-war veteran Taiwanese artist Read Lee was born in 1921 to a scholarly family in Jiangsu Province surrounded by poetry, literature, books, paintings, antiques and Chinese opera. They provided him with nourishment in Chinese culture and art. When the Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937, Read Lee went to Sichuan as an exiled student. He graduated from the Chongqing University in 1945 and came to Taiwan in 1948. In contrast to members of modern painting movements such as Fifth Moon Group and Ton Fon Art Group at the time, Read Lee did not receive professional art training. However, with his passion for literature and art, he started studying painting with veteran artist Mr. Chen Te-wang (1910-1984). During his eight years of study (1956-1964), Chen guided Read Lee in his exploration of space, which would last his entire life.

To Read Lee, creation was an endless conversation between man, “heaven” (nature) and “history”, involving a process of the condensation of learning and the sublimation of life. After mastering figuration, Read Lee turned to “abstraction” from 1973, creating layers of rich textures with vigorous brushwork and thick paint, and often using lines of poetry as titles. In 1983, Read Lee returned to the exploration of “dots” and the study of “modeling” in Chinese ink painting. Before starting his late series “Attribute of Emptiness” in 1989, Read Lee depicted his layered inner landscapes and images with powerful brushwork, dots and lines.