MA Paisui was born in Liaoning, China in 1909. In 1929, after he graduated from the Art Department of Liaoning Normal College, he worked as an art teacher in Liaoning and Beijing. With the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, he traveled along the East coast of China and painted the landscape that he saw. In 1949, he finally settled in Taiwan. He thereafter taught at National Taiwan Normal University for 27 years. After 1975, he lived and worked in New York. Ma passed away in Florida in 2003. The solid grounding in traditional Chinese ink painting helps Ma to enjoy the manipulation of colors and brushstrokes in his paintings. It’s worth noting here that watercolor landscape painting and traditional Chinese ink painting can be seen to share an impressionist approach. This allows Ma to translate with greater ease the main principles of traditional Chinese ink painting into the practice of Western watercolor painting, such as a composition structured around the contrast between black and white, or the division of the painted surface into three sections. His watercolor paintings are therefore full of the impressionistic charm of Chinese literati painting, and rich in color and emotion. He resorted to the methods of the multiple-panel painting to overcome the limitation of the paper size. Besides, in 1957, he edited the Illustrated Guide to Watercolor Painting Technique, which was included in the national curriculum in 1971 to be taught at the middle-school level. In 1979, he was awarded the Washington Gold Medal Award of the Sumi-e Society of America Annual Exhibition. Ma’s public collection includes Taipei Fine Art Museum, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts and National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts; his important international group exhibitions include Brooklyn Museum, New York in 1977 and Lincoln Center in New York in 1980. His important solo exhibitions include 3 shows at Asia Art Center in 1992, 1997, and 2018, and A Retrospective of Ma Pai-Sui at Ninety at National Museum of History, Taiwan in 1999. His recent retrospective exhibition is Journeys with Ink and Colors: An Exhibition of Donated Works by Ma Pai-Sui, organized by Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts and Life’s Footsteps: An Exhibition of Donated Works by Professor Ma Pai-Sui organized by National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in 2010.