Liu, Jun-cheng was born in Dalian, northeast China. He holds a BFA in traditional Chinese painting, an MFA in the oil painting from Luxun Academy of Fine Arts in China, and an MFA in painting from Texas A&M – Commerce. His work has been in private and institutional collections and exhibited nationwide. He taught at Middle Tennessee State University for three years before joined the faculty at Franklin and Marshall College in 1997. He is an associate professor of art, teaching drawing and painting, and Chinese ink painting.

Liu grew up during the Great Cultural Revolution, which has influence on whom he was and has become. His elementary school art teacher, Mr. Lin, Da-shu, taught him not only art, more importantly self-cultivation. In 1986, Robert Rauschenberg’s world tour exhibition in Beijing intrigued him with what he was then not quite familiar with, the \"individual point of view.\" Moreover, it gave tremendous impetus to his interest in contemporary concepts and approaches in painting. This awakening eventually brought him to the U.S. in 1992.

Most of his paintings made in the U.S. are reflections of conversations between him and so-called his shadow of self, about dislocation, the urge to feel the solidity of reality, and a story of an artist/teacher who is caught in between two great cultural and artistic traditions. A painter who grew up in the East and continues to chase his artistic dream in the West, Liu has also felt a strong feeling to bridge the cultural divide and to seek the common ground between the contemporary and the past, innovation and traditions through his art and teaching. His recent works deal with the contrast between dream and reality, identity and memory. The lengthy and demanding process of trompe l’oeil enables him to tour through the jungle of his thoughts and emotions, to feel the texture of his American experiences. It is more than a satisfaction of illusion or surface build-up; rather, it is a pursuit of an idealistic perfection that might exist only in dreams.