In 1930s traditional China, a nucleus of modernist painters were born, thanks to the teaching at the School of Fine Art in Hangzhou, where some of the professors had studied in Europe. Today, three artists who attended there, are now considered pioneers of Chinese abstract art. They were Zao Wou-Ki (1920-2013), Chu Teh-Chun (1920-2014), who studied from 1935 to 1941, and Lee Chun-Shan (1912-1984) who taught from 1937 to 1946.

In 1949, eight years after the Japanese invasion (1937-1945) the defeat of Kuo-mintang and the seizure of power by Mao Zedong, more than a million Chinese left the continent to go to Taiwan, where the Chang Kai-Chek government had withdrawn. While Zao Wu-Ki left China a year earlier to settle in Paris, Chu Teh-Chun and Lee Chun-Shan moved to Taipei in 1949.

In 1950, fearing conflict with western China, the United States made the island an American protectorate. Through work displayed at the American Library in Taipei, artists discovered Western modern art, work filled with vitality from the New York school.

While the political regime of Chang Kai Chek focussed on maintaining Chinese tradition, these young exiled painters took an opposing view of such conservatism. The two most important Taiwanese avant-garde movements were born in 1956 and 1957. The Ton Fan group was founded by eight students of Lee Chun-Shan, and the Wuyeu group, also known as Fifth Moon, by some who had studied under Chu Teh-Chun.

In 1958, Zao Wou-Ki's stay in Hong Kong had a great impact on young Taiwanese artists who discovered, through the newspapers publishing his latest works that a compatriot who knew the modernity of Paris was following The Way of Abstraction.