Jiyou Liu is the creator of a great pictural oeuvre, which combined realism with poetry. He got his interest in Graphic Arts through his father, Liu Kuiling, a famous animal and floral painter. In 1936 he started out at the Academy of Fine Arts in Tianjin, where he learned the finer points of traditional Chinese painting, but also Western painting. He started to combine these two styles of painting in his later work. Jiyou Liu became and remained a very successful Chinese painter until the 1980s.
In the late 1940s, at the end of the cultural revolution, Liu Jiyou additionally took on creating comics. He soon became one of the most important Chinese representatives in the genres. In 1949 he moved from his hometown to Peking, where he founded two publishing houses. In his comics, he used several themes, varying from revolutionary stories ('Letters with Plumes', 'The Poor Transform the Universe') to traditional stories ('Master Dongguo') and children's comics ('A Strange Journey').