Separate Continuities:
Art in Taiwan and Hong Kong
Basic Background – The Fifth Moon Group – Liu Kuo-sung (Liu Guosong) - The Oriental Painting Society - The Situation of Modernism - The Art of Taiwan in the 1970s - The Background of Hong Kong - Lui Show Kwan (Lü Shoukun) - Wucius Wong (Wang Wuxie) - Art and Artists - Luis Chan (Chen Fushan)
Basic Background
As early as 1945, Taiwan was recovered from the Japanese by the Nationalist (KMT) government.[1] Economically, Taiwan at this time had already undergone great development compared with 1895, and in some indices, Taiwan surpassed the mainland. However, regardless of how industrious they were, the original inhabitants of Taiwan, the early Taiwan locals, had won no real political power, but World War II was over, Taiwan was restored, and local people were hopeful about the future. Unfortunately, after the Nationalist government took over Taiwan, the elite from the mainland constituted a new class who regarded the local inhabitants with the same disdain as the Japanese had done before them. From the outset they failed to confer economic and political rights on the locals and this planted the seeds for lasting contradictions in the relations between the Taiwanese and the mainlanders, that were dramatically revealed by the February 28th Incident of 1947, in which the artist Chen Chengbo (1895-1947) was killed.
On 1 March 1950, Chiang Kai-shek resumed the post of president of the Republic of China. Importantly, the KMT regime gradually achieved stability and acquired the conditions for economic construction under conditions largely created by the difficult international cold war situation which then prevailed. At the same time as it modernized its military defences, the KMT set about placating dissatisfied locals by implementing land reforms, expanding the electorate’s rights and allowing greater numbers of locals to join the KMT. For reasons of mutual advantage, local businessmen and mainlanders in government maintained various links which promoted a relaxation in Taiwan’s political contradictions. With the implementation of constructive measures built on the foundations of industry and agriculture left by the Japanese, the Kuomintang regime brought stability to Taiwan that resulted in economic and other forms of development. In the international arena, because of the support of the USA, the seat of China in the United Nations was retained by the KMT government until August 1971, when it was replaced by the People’s Republic of China under the leadership of the CPC. Both governments claimed to represent the country located on either side of the Taiwan Strait, and so this change only represented a transfer in the credentials of the incumbent.
In terms of political values, the basic rationale for the cold war conflict was ideological opposition, and autocratic values obviously influenced the US control of Taiwan. In any case, Taiwan hoped to obtain the support of the USA and the US hoped to realize its cold war strategic goals through Taiwan. As a result, Western culture gradually percolated through the population and this was in stark contrast to the complete exclusion and thoroughgoing critique of Western culture being implemented on the mainland at that time. Although the KMT exercised a high degree of control over culture and the arts, as well as in the ideological sphere, there was never the uniformity in culture and the arts that existed on the mainland, as is evident from the existence in Taiwan of private publications and the prevalence of various Western modernist trends. The government in Taiwan did not require artists to fulfil specific criteria, as on the mainland, and artists were free to adopt any techniques or methods, although their use led to contradictions or conflicts from time to time.
Taiwan accepted the protection of the USA and so naturally could not oppose the influence of the culture of the USA or other Western capitalist countries. The development of art in Taiwan after 1949 thus saw the continuation of the earlier Western painting in Taiwan as well as of the Chinese modernist movement, while links with global artistic changes could be maintained.
In 1946, by virtue of the efforts of Yang Sanlang, Chen Chengbo, Liao Jichun (Liao Chi-ch’un), Chen Qingfen (Ch’en Ch’ing-fen), Chen Jin (Ch’en Chin), Lin Yushan (Lin Yü-shan), Guo Bochuan, Li Meishu, and Li Shiqiao (Li Shih-ch’iao), an all-Taiwan provincial art exhibition was held and Taiwanese artists began to set up their own art evaluation groups and organizations. However, the Taiwanese exhibition adopted as its main critical criteria the notion of Western and Oriental painting which prevailed in the period of the Japanese occupation and against the traditional background created by the KMT promotion of many guohua painters who had come to Taiwan, creativity and the opportunities for expression by young artists were greatly stifled. More complicated, from the perspective of ethnic politics, were those artists who had once painted in the ‘Oriental’ (Japanese) style and who at that time had to change the appearance of their works to something that could be called guohua. The guohua painters who had come from the mainland totally refused to recognize the ‘Oriental’ style and maintained a position similar to that of guohua painters like Fu Baoshi, who refused to accept that the Japanese-style ‘Oriental paintings’ which blended the Northern Song school and Western realist (xiesheng) techniques could in any way be called guohua and held them to be artistically inferior to traditional Chinese-style paintings, ‘southern paintings’ (nanhua) or ‘literati paintings’ (wenren hua). Up until 1956, ‘provincial exhibitions’ were obviously under the control of the guohua painters from the mainland and the members of the Tai-yang Art Association, but over time it became increasingly difficult for these two forces to foster the appearance of new art.
Obviously, the arrival of the US Seventh Fleet in Taiwan in 1950 meant that the art of New York rather than Japanese art began to exert influence on Taiwanese painters. We can see this sudden change in the works of Li Shiqiao and some other painters. At first, what was called modern art related to KMT ideology, and the newly established ‘Free China Artists Association’ went some of the way to fulfilling the KMT’s political goals of ‘opposing communism and resisting Russia’. The general policy of the journal New Art set up to promote the New Art Movement of Free China, despite its introduction of fauvism, the cubists and abstract art, was to wed the anti-communist political struggle to its vocabulary of ‘supporting freedom’.
The Fifth Moon Group
In 1956, several teacher-training graduates of the National Taiwan Normal University (previously the Taiwan Provincial Normal College) – Guo Yulun (Kuo Yu-lun), Li Fangzhi (Li Fang-chih), Liu Kuo-sung (Liu Guosong), Kuo Tung-jung (Guo Dongrong), Ch’en Ching-jung (Chen Jingrong), and Cheng Chiung-chuan (Zheng Qiongjuan) -- established the Fifth Moon Group and from May of that year they intended to hold annual exhibitions every year in that month. The leading figure in the group was Liu Kuo-sung. These young artists believed that the existing art lacked vitality and they drew their vigor and inspiration from modern Western art.
The Fifth Moon group was an organization that built on friendships and artistic aims formed during the earlier exhibition of classmates (‘Four Man Joint Show’), and the group was enthusiastically supported by their teacher Liao Jichun.
During his period of study in Japan, the influence of the fauvist style of his teacher Umehara Ryūzaburō not only influenced the style of Liao Jichun’s paintings, but also played a role in opening up Liao’s ideas about art, and so by 1962 he openly joined the Fifth Moon group and expressed his support for them.
The initial motivation for setting up the Fifth Moon group had been to oppose ‘the view of some local painters that graduates of Taiwan Normal University studied nothing practical and that their study of painting was a waste of time’. People usually thought of the graduates from Normal University as only being cut out for working as good teachers, who would ‘never move ahead as artists’. We can see that the birth of the Fifth Moon was not the result of a predetermined artistic ideology, but represented the demand of a group of young artists to acquire the possibility of being able to develop freely, and until their third exhibition the style of works of two of their members, Ch’en Ching-jung and Ku Fu-sheng (Gu Fusheng), remained naturalistically realist. This demonstrates that until 1959 the Fifth Moon was not simply a group of young artists imbued with a sense of freedom and tolerance, but also that its members did not subscribe to a unified set of ideas.
In contrast with early European modernism, abstract expressionism was better able to arouse a response among Chinese artists, because the free brush techniques and the elusive images of abstract expressionism suggested some of the attitudes of Chinese traditional calligraphy and its corresponding aesthetics. In 1961, the poet Yu Kwang-chung (Yu Guangzhong) used the term ‘abstract expressionism’ in his discussion of the work of the Fifth Moon group. He told painters that Western abstract artists had to various degrees been influenced by Oriental philosophy, and so Chinese painters naturally had an adequate basis to paint better than Western painters in this respect. Thus, Chinese artists should think calmly about how they could integrate the inner spirit realized through Chinese traditional painting methods and materials with the resulting artistic language created through oil painting or other Western materials.
The Fifth Moon Group and its exhibitions made a lasting impact on young people in Taiwan. From the time of the group’s third exhibition, new members included Han Xiangning and Zhuang Zhe. After 1961, Hu Qizhong, and Fong Chung-ray (Feng Zhongrui) also took part in a Fifth Moon Art exhibition. In 1957 these two painters had completed their military service in the navy where they had established a group called the Four Seas Artists Association, and this practical experience stimulated their intention to enter the more exciting world of modern art. Their joining the Fifth Moon Group meant that the membership was no longer solely depended on students from Taiwan Normal University; Fifth Moon had become an organization which ‘gave consideration to artistic ideas and achievements as the criteria for affiliation’. Liao Jichun, Sun Duoci, Ch’en T’ing-shih (Chen Tingshi), and Zhang Longyan were among those who later joined, and by the early 1960s the Fifth Moon had won a reputation for itself.
In 1962, the Fifth Moon held its annual exhibition in the National Gallery, located within the National Museum of History. This exhibition, titled Exhibition of Modern Paintings Travelling to America, had a decisive influence in Taiwan. It was a symbol that the efforts of the pioneers had won legitimacy and approval. Even more artists took part in the show, including Yuyu Yang (Yang Yingfeng), Wucius Wong (Wang Wuxie), Pansy Ng (Wu Puhui), and Peng Wants (Peng Wanchi). What was especially encouraging for young artists was that Liao Jichun, Lu Junzhi and Zhang Longyan were now all members of this pioneering team, and through the efforts of Zhang Longyan, it was now possible for these young artists to participate in the international São Paulo Biennial in Brazil. 1962 was a special year. Hu Shi, the icon of Chinese liberalism passed away suddenly, and the sea of people carrying his coffin to the cemetery on the day of his funeral were not merely mourning him, but also expressing their anxiety about the urgency of real problems. Li Ao began directing the philosophical barbs of his critical writing against the diehard tradition imposed in Taiwan. As Yu Guangzhong expressed it, he mercilessly ‘tore from wigs from people’s heads and toppled some idols from lofty positions’. Li Ao’s writings gathered a huge following as people from every walk of life reflected on the extent of their discontent with political restrictions. Generally speaking, ‘opposition to tradition’ became socially and politically omnipresent.
At the time of the Fifth Moon’s eighth exhibition, Yu Guangzhong called people’s attention to the fact that the group now transcended demarcation lines and had begun the transition to international art. In fact, after the eighth exhibition of the Fifth Moon in 1964, the members began to construct more obviously personal styles.
The Fifth Moon had clearly abandoned traditional Chinese painting methods, and traditional painting, which was an icon supported by official ideology, was beginning to be subverted totally by young artists. A logical phenomenon was when Western painters such as Hans Hartung (Germany), Mark Tobey (USA), and Georges Mathieu (France) emphasized the freedom characteristic of Chinese calligraphy, those Chinese painters defending the concept of abstract painting received encouragement. At the same time, they genuinely reflected on tradition and began to realize what valuable elements of traditional painting could be drawn upon and what precious things those conservative guohua painters had in fact discarded. Such introspection took place under the influence of international art trends and as part of the artists’ examination of their hopes and practice as they moved to position their own art in the international arena, and this had transformational significance.
Liu Kuo-sung (Liu Guosong)
Liu Kuo-sung was born in Bengbu county, Anhui province in 1932, and in 1938, because his father was killed in action during the war, he accompanied his mother into exile in Hubei, Shaanxi, Sichuan, Hunan and Jiangxi provinces, in turn. In 1948, he entered the school for offspring of the Nanjing National Revolutionary Army, and in the following year he went to Taiwan with that school and was assigned to the middle school attached to the Taiwan Provincial Normal College. In 1951, Liu Kuo-sung was admitted to the fine arts department of Taiwan Normal University, where he began studying art. In 1954, he participated in the dispute on questions of Japanese painting and traditional Chinese painting. In an article titled ‘Japanese Painting Is Not Traditional Chinese Painting’, Liu combed through the characteristics of Western painting and guohua, and proposed that Japanese painting ‘utilizes the materials and techniques of Chinese painting, combining them even more with the colours and composition of Western painting, thus creating a new form’, which is Japanese painting. Liu set up what he wanted to be a credible contrast between Japanese and Chinese painting: ‘The history of Japanese painting is brief and superficial, with a formal tendency to sumptuousness and novelty, but with a narrow range of subject matter. The spirit of Japanese art also lacks concern for loftiness of purpose and expansiveness of intellect’.[2]
Through his articles, Liu Kuo-sung sparked off incidents and controversies. At a seminar on art movements organized by the Taipei Documentation Committee, a speech on the problems faced by contemporary culture was delivered by the eminent Yang Chao-chia (Yang Zhaojia) (1892-1976), who had been a leader of nationalistic movements during the time of the Japanese occupation:
Originally art had proclaimed national enthusiasm and passion, but the Japanese, basing themselves assertively on a Japanese position, used oppressive, unequal, and repressive methods to force us to be like them, but the passions of the Taiwanese could not be influenced by them; on the contrary, in the arts we maintained our Han Chinese spirit and used the arts to express our nationalism…
Now everything has greatly changed and the situation is different from that during the Japanese occupation; in the past Japanese colonial policies were pernicious, but we could win some space for the existence of our culture, we were compelled to look to our national spirit, and we could even do so with a clear conscience. But now modern art might continue to exist, but literature is utterly neglected.
Yang Chao-chia was saying that national traditions must be extolled, but not according to predetermined criteria or by perpetuating an attitude of imitation; at the same time he was also suggesting that critics were even less worth discussing than the Japanese. Yang Chao-chia felt that it was a tragedy to simply protect orthodox guohua. If the majority of local Taiwanese painters were not announcing that their paintings were different from Japanese painters (such as Lin Yushan), then they were defending new ‘Taiwanese paintings’ on the basis of arguments for realism found in ancient Chinese art theory. Jin Run reminded his opponents that materials and methods were not the basis for judgment, and the spirit of the work should provide such criteria. Guo Xuehu borrowed from the Misty School first created by Yokoyama Taikan without feeling the need to have any Japanese examples, which showed that what was different in value between painting in Taiwan and mainland painting could be demonstrated in time.
Liu Kuo-sung’s position of attacking ‘Oriental painting’ at the same time as he defended the conservatism of the Tai-yang group was complex. In 1959, Liu issued an open letter to Liu Zhen, the minister of education, titled ‘A discussion of the province-wide art exhibition: Letter to minister of education Liu Zhen’, in which he called on educational authorities to pay attention to the group ‘strangling national culture and attacking the art of China’s national quintessence’. He argued that in the ‘traditional Chinese painting division’ (guohua bu) at the exhibition ‘more than half of the works were art that could never be found in China’s national historical tradition and that adorning the walls could all be described as Japanese-style paintings’.[3] On the other hand, he simultaneously criticized the strange conservatism and obstinacy of the members of the Tai-yang school for their hegemony and the judging panel of the provincial exhibition for lowering the standards. One year prior to this, Liu Kuo-sung began to give vent to his long accumulated discontent regarding the conservatism of the Tai-yang’s concepts of evaluation, and he criticized them for their Western painting exhibitions that never transcended the style of the impressionists. On one occasion, Liu Kuo-sung explained that true (what he called ‘pure’) painting had no ‘form’. He said: ‘If we raise the elements of painting to one hundred per cent, or reduce them to nil, pure painting will be able to achieve perfection of itself’. [4] In this way Liu Kuo-sung philosophically was able to simultaneously reject orthodox guohua painting and early modernist painting.
In a word, Liu and his confreres from the Fifth Moon group could no longer stand around patiently waiting for empty accolades, and had begun to move in the direction of undertaking concrete experiments in new art. At the beginning, Liu Kuo-sung may have been influenced by his background knowledge and in his works that approximated abstract painting he used literary titles, such as Scene of Fog after Rain. In 1960, Liu Kuo-sung gave greater thought to and spent more time creating abstract art, prior to which he had done his utmost to introduce fauvism, cubism, futurism and early modernism. He began to turn his back on the conception of a quintessential Chinese culture. He believed that those painters who insisted on the purity of guohua were the ones who had truly rejected tradition. He wanted painters to reduce the ‘images of objects’ (wuxiang) in their work and increase the art, so that art could acquire greater possibilities for abstract expression. He even pleaded the case for abstract art using the ancient Chinese formulation, ‘the empty and the tangible arise together, and the places where there is no painting become the realm of the most exquisite’. In the theory and tradition of Chinese painting, Liu began to search for formulations that lent support to abstract painting, regardless of what meaning they may have held for the ancients in their own time. Liu Kuo-sung’s purpose was already very clear; he hoped that Chinese artists could become true international artists, rather than being merely enthusiastic followers of Western art.
Until 1960, Liu Kuo-sung continued to use oil painting materials and applied gypsum to his canvases to achieve effects of texture, and these experiments were more forthright his than Chinese painting. In the fifth exhibition of the following year, people could see the results of Liu Kuo-sung’s experiments in using oils to approximate guohua. In 1961, the architect Wang Dahong expressed his criticism of the excessive use of materials to imitate the ancients in the field of architectural construction, and this may have given Liu Kuo-sung pause for thought about the question of the materials he was using. In 1962, Liu Kuo-sung returned to using traditional tools, to which he added the rubbing and the seal. Later, Liu continued to experiment, for example, by drawing the fibres from the paper using a thick ink brush, by scrunching up the paper and by applying the paper in strips and then removing the joins so that the paper retained its texture. He also used calligraphic strokes and affixed pieces of paper to express nature and the cosmos. At the same time, he used abstract brush and ink and large areas of wash to create effects that were quite unlike anything that could be achieved in abstract oil painting. Such expression and composition laid the foundations for his later Space series.
Liu Kuo-sung developed rapidly in the direction of modernized Chinese-style landscape paintings, and although he was instinctively oriented towards the traditional spirit, he was influenced by the trends of hard-edge painting; some people believed that his paintings were influenced by the geometric abstract forms of Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb. In 1969, influenced by the photographs of the earth taken by the eighth Apollo mission in 1968, Liu Kuo-sung began his series of paintings titled Which Is Earth? In May of that year, his ‘Space paintings’ won Marietta College’s ‘Trends International Art Exhibition’ prize, and this gave the artist great encouragement. By 1972, Liu had completed many ‘Space paintings’, and his traditional artistic interest, his understanding of hard-edge abstract works and the influence of the op-art fashionable in the USA at that time signified that Liu Kuo-sung was continuing to derive pleasure from producing such new paintings. In later artistic experiments, this mainland émigré painter from Taiwan used all methods he could conceive to present in his art the dichotomies of tradition and modernity, east and west, heaven and earth, and mankind and the cosmos.
The Oriental Painting Society
Because there was no way that international contacts could be completely prevented, modernism in Taiwan in the 1950s meant that organizations acting in the name of the ‘Oriental Art Exhibition’ became a response to the Fifth Moon group of painters. In November 1956, Li Yuanjia, Xiao Qin, Wu Hao, Ouyang Wenyuan, Xia Yang (Xia Zuxiang), Ho Kang (Huo Gang or Huo Xuegang), Chen Daoming, and Xiao Mingxian (Xiao Long) established the Oriental Painting Society. Because the authorities harboured suspicions of the political nature of modernist art, suspecting it of being ‘Communist art’, the Fifth Moon did not get approval from the civil authorities, and so this group switched to the name of the ‘Oriental Art Exhibition’. Young people wracked their brains for a name for their organization, and the word ‘Oriental’ exemplified a healthy nationalistic self-esteem, while adoption of the term ‘exhibition’ got around the ban on setting up organizations. These young people were students of Li Zhongsheng, an artist with studios on Andong Street [in Taibei]. Li had studied in Japan in his early years, and because he had been a member of the ‘Tokyo Avant-Garde Art Study Society’, he had been influenced by fairly radical art ideas and styles. Li had also participated in the first exhibition of the Storm Society, and in accepting futurist and surrealist styles, and he went much further than the others in the group who were limited to studying the impressionists and fauvists. Because of Li’s influence, the art of his students tended to be more radical than that of members of the Fifth Moon. At about the same time, Xiao Qin, who had won a Spanish art scholarship, was relaying European modernist art trends back to Taiwan and later he would even exhibit works from Taiwan overseas, which was another great boost to the self-confidence of young people. The boldness and innovation they demonstrated at their exhibitions made a deep impression. The manifesto of the Oriental Painting Society had, in fact, directly expressed the views of tradition held by the society’s members:
Our country’s traditional view of painting is basically completely identical with the view of modern world painting, and there are only slight differences regarding forms of expression. If can universally develop modern painting in our country, then China’s limitless artistic treasure must take its position among today’s world trends with a brand-new stance, and move towards the great road that endlessly changes with each passing day …[5]
The full title of the first ‘Oriental painting exhibition’ was ‘First Oriental Painting Exhibition: A Joint Show of Chinese and Spanish Modern Painters’. The joint exhibition came about because the organizers wanted to dispel the political suspicions of the authorities. At the same time, the participation of the Spanish painter Juan José Tharrats, Will Faber and Bouardo Alcoy was designed to show how Taiwanese painters were directly concerned about European modernism as it was developing. In the manifesto of the exhibition titled ‘Our Statement’, Xia Yang emphasized the importance of innovation and, in stressing how modern art was not in conflict with national characteristics but in fact grew out of them, he reminded people that traditional Chinese art concepts and modern art were not at all contradictory. In stark contrast with the view on the mainland that art must serve the masses, Xia Yang represented everyone in the group when he argued that the view of the relationship between and the masses was that ‘the masses must be transformed by art’ not that ‘the masses must transform art’. People discussed the works of the painters in terms of ‘the new objectivity’ (Neue Sächlichkeit, xinjiwu-zhuyi) (Wu Hao), ‘surrealism’ (Xia Yang, Jin Fan, Huo Gang), ‘expressionism’, ‘constructivism’ (Huang Boyong) and even ‘automaticity’, and invoking the names of Kandinsky (Li Yuanjia), Klee (Chen Daoming), and de Chirico (Ouyang Wenyuan), to demonstrate how they had gone far beyond the Fifth Moon, although critics also noted that some of their works revealed elements of ‘bronze inscriptions and oracle bone texts’ (Li Yuanjia), ‘Dunhuang murals’ (Wu Hao) and ‘folk art’ (Xiao Qin).
In the 1950s, Taiwanese artists found themselves in an environment dominated by the KMT dictatorship and political purges, but the members of the ‘Oriental Painting Exhibition’ successfully showed their works and post-war European modernism was introduced to China. By 1980, they had held their 15th exhibition, and had shows that toured Hong Kong, the Philippines, Australia, Spain, Italy, West Germany, and the USA.
In the 1960s, radical artists obviously did not want to be subjected to any formal restrictions and so the members of the Oriental Painting Society scoured the world in their search for opportunities to stage one-man shows. Xiao Qin went to Spain and took up Spanish citizenship, even though he joined with Italian artists to set up the Punto international art movement that made the notion of Oriental ‘quiescence’ its main principle. In 1962, works by Punto were also exhibited in Taiwan, but its artistic linguistic context was regarded as having made a complete break with China. Li Yuanjia and Ho Kang (Huo Gang) successively went to Italy, while Xia Yang and Xiao Mingxian went to Paris. During this time, the Oriental Painting Society and the equally important Modern Print Society had staged several joint exhibitions.[6] They had also recruited many new members, including Li Shi-chi (Li Xiqi), Shiy De Jin, Zhu Weibai, Lin Wenhan, Swallow Lin (Lin Yan), and Qin Song.
The Situation of Modernism
As a concept, modernist art became generally influential in Taiwan in the late 1950s, and at the 1957, 1959 and São Paulo Biennial shows Xiao Mingxian, Qin Song and Gu Fusheng successively won awards, which was encouraging for Taiwanese artists. In 1959 in ‘The Age of the Painting Society’, Xie Lifa made the proposal of establishing a contemporary Chinese art centre, to which 17 art societies and 145 artists responded in support, and xie even published magazine Modern Art with the intention of formally establishing an organization that would promote modern art. However, in the eyes of conservative officials and painters, modern art was subversive and revolutionary. At the same time the establishment of so many mass organizations was for the KMT, given its bitter experience, tantamount to submitting to a political trial of strength that could undermine social stability and provoke unrest; As an official arts organization, the ‘China Fine Arts Association’ adopted policies that entailed political surveillance and supervision. At the joint exhibition held simultaneously with the meeting proposing the establishment of the new art organization, two officials from the ‘China Fine Arts Association’, Liang Youming and Liang Zhongming brought a number of government students to do an on-the-spot investigation. After it identified some of Qin Song’s work as being ‘anti-Chiang Kai-shek’ and placed a ban on it, the organization decided to call a halt to its proposal.
The campaign against modern art also originated in conservative intellectual circles and so for various ideological and political reasons a section of Taiwan’s intelligentsia also participated in the politicization of art. When the discussion about modern art came into the open, Xu Fuguan, a scholar whose tireless research on traditional culture had won him the respect of Chiang Kai-shek, entered the fray and denounced modern art. In the dispute about modern art, there was a remarkable similarity in the logic used by Xu Fuguan and by conservative mainland intellectual and art officials in their approach to modern art.
Xu Fuguan’s superficial understanding and description of modern art articulated his obtuseness on contemporary culture and thought. Intellectually he was an essentialist and determinist, and so it was easy for him to come up with glib conclusions about modern art. Since the KMT had no use for modern art, and since modern art had a destructiveness that could result in social rebellion, Xu concluded that modernism ‘open up the way for a Communist world’.
Liu Kuo-sung refuted Xu Fuguan’s understanding and knowledge of modern art, and attacked Xu’s political conclusions:
All art contains ideas, or contains functions of consciousness. A monopoly on art and the formation of consciousness are the preconditions of an autocrat and in the arts it is the Communists who are the traditionalists.[7]
To show that the individualism of modern art was in conflict with the requirement of the Communist Party that art serve the people, Liu Kuo-sung quoted Mao Zedong’s statement in Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art that literature and art were only screws in the revolutionary machine and he argued strenuously that there was a yawning gap between modern art and the ideology of a political party. He rebuked Xu Fuguan for immorally placing the red cap of Communism on the head of modern art. In the subsequent debate, Liu Kuo-sung constantly defended abstract art, and Xu Fuguan quoted Herbert Read’s views on the connection between surrealism and communism by way of clarifying his argument that modern art was politically dangerous. He did not take into account that Herbert Read’s use of the concept of Communism had been a reaction to Stalinism. However, even though the concepts of communism, Stalinism and of the Communist Party needed to be differentiated conscientiously, Xu Fuguan’s basic target was obviously the Communist Party of China.
This was in the year after the editor-in-chief of Free China, Lei Zhen was arrested and it was not a favorable time for persons thought to have contacts with the Communist Party; political terror caused people to feel they had totally lost any security, and, moreover, the criticism was coming from a prominent figure in academic circles. In the conclusion of his article, Liu Kuo-sung touched on an issue that all those who were subject to political autocracy and had experienced political terror could understand:
All persons of conscience and intelligence find it difficult to defend their personal positions. The laws regulating intellectual life are subject to constant interference from external forces, enabling politics and ideological power, using every method and excuse to seep into every corner of cultural consciousness, distorting and corrupting its every function. This is the unprecedented suffering facing culture and thought.[8]
In fact, Liu Kuo-sung and other supporters of modern painting were genuinely concerned about the viability in society of both their art and their lives. This debate had touched on the fundamental possibilities of modern art as well as on the existence of artists, which was a situation largely analogous to that on the mainland from 1949 to the early 1980s. The Taiwan authorities’ condemnation of the activities of artists ironically linked them to the Communist Party and the international communist movement. This was a weird situation in which mainland artists were regarded as reactionary as soon as they adopted modernist language, and the activities of Taiwanese radical artists were regarded as communist subversion. In such a situation, only those who upheld freedom, as well as Westerners, could be of any assistance.
In this debate, people gradually came to have a greater understanding of abstract or modern art. What is historically noteworthy is that in resolving the political trial of strength between the KMT and the CPC in the international community the KMT made timely use of modern art as a tool so that modern art in Taiwan actually came to acquire official support and tacit approval.[9]
A statement by the Taiwanese scholar Xiao Qiongrui, in the concluding passage of his The Fifth Moon and the Oriental Art: The Development of the Chinese Art Modernization Movement in Post-War Taiwan, 1945-1970, is very apt in this context:
As for the theoretical concepts of ‘Oriental’ and ‘Chinese’ art that were flagged by the Fifth Moon and Oriental Art schools, these were major themes that had been pondered and explored by mainland painting circles from the late-Qing into the early-Republican years which had been transplanted to Taiwan with the move of the KMT government there, where they were perpetuated and developed and where they conflicted and melded with Taiwan’s original ‘new arts movement’. The years from the 1950s to the 1970s, from the essential observation point of the Taiwanese modern painting movement, can be regarded as a stage in the ‘Chinese fine arts modernization movement’ in which the notable achievement was the establishment of a firm foundation for the process of ‘learning Western techniques’.[10]
In the latter part of the 1960s, even though Western pop, op, hard-edge, conceptual and even eco art could be seen in the work of Taiwanese artists, their psychology remained oppressed and constrained. Even though American liberal concepts had been introduced to Taiwan through art, this province ruled by the KMT continued to lack liberty, while the modern artists and the cultural organizations which supported modern art were attacked and suppressed, the closure of the magazine Wen-hsing being a salient example. Such a reality not only explained the difficulties faced by modern artists engaged in artistic experiment, but also raised even more serious questions: What was the starting point and where was the basis of an artist’s exploration of artistic language? Taiwan and the mainland both had a uniform political ideology, but Taiwan’s economic development meant it maintained relations with the US and other Western countries, so that the authorities in Taiwan had no way of completely excluding Western culture and concepts. On many occasions the authorities in Taiwan also needed to rely on the support of Western ideology, in order to oppose the CPC. At the same time, the ‘rebellion’ and ‘revolutionary quality’ evinced by artistic liberalism were also regarded by the regime as intrinsically subversive. This inherent revolutionary character and external repression came into sharp conflict, as expressed in 1966 in a Dadaist manifesto published in the journal Theater edited by Huang Huacheng, a graduate of the fine arts department of Taiwan Normal University:
They do not allow tragedy and heroism, or feigned tragedy and heroism. They oppose the laws of abstraction and representation, and abandon them. They insinuate themselves in every trade, and plan reforms for them. They oppose metaphysics. They enjoy life’s corrupt aspects and study them. They fundamentally oppose painting and sculpture, concealing the reasons why. If art impairs our lives, then we must reject it….
In that same year Huang staged the 1966 Fall Exhibition of the Big Taipei School which was a Dadaist exhibition interspersed with narrative and commentary which stunned audiences.
Trends of the 1960s led design to separate from pure art, as was demonstrated by a number of exhibitions: the Black and White Exhibition of the fine arts department of Taiwan Normal University; the UP Exhibition staged by the National Taiwan College of the Arts’ art design department; the T’u-t’u Art Show of the fine arts department of Cultural University; and the Painting Beyond Painting Exhibition of the fine arts department of Taiwan Normal University. The 1970 Super-Exhibition summarized the trends of the preceding decade.
Working in a complex environment created by the political dictatorship and economic liberalism, Taiwan’s modern artists had neither wise support from the authorities nor any ideological legitimacy or approved organizations, and so they looked abroad. This also explains why so many artists wanted to go to Europe, the USA or other Western countries to develop their art during the sixties. Nevertheless, the 1960s also provided the artistic foundations for the preliminary pluralism of the 1970s.
For the Kuomintang, 1971 was a tragic year, because the Republic of China’s seat and credentials in the UN were taken over by the People’s Republic of China, and the withdrawal of the ROC from the United Nations meant that the Nationalist government lost its legitimacy in the international community. In 1972, Nixon visited China, and China and the USA signed the Shanghai Communiqué which asserted that the People’s Republic of China was the sole representative of China, and that Taiwan was only a part of China. By 1979, the PRC and the USA had established formal diplomatic relations, and Taiwan’s official relationship with the US had come to an end. Many Western countries successively broke off relations with the Taiwan authorities and the number of international activities rapidly decreased. The São Paulo Biennial, the Paris International Youth Exhibition and some other international exhibitions no longer sent out invitations to Taiwan. Taiwanese modern art, which was so close in stylistic and philosophical trends to Euro-American modern art, lost the opportunity to participate in many international exhibitions which was a serious blow to modern artists.
The Art of Taiwan in the 1970s
Against the background of international crises, including the ‘Tiaoyu (Diaoyu) Islands campaign’ of April 1971, the problem for Taiwan intellectuals regarding the future of the island, the concerns of young people and the majority of the population concerning the destiny of Taiwan, and the spread of the literary movement focused on ‘nativist’ (xiangtu) consciousness, raised a number of questions for the art world: Who are we? What is Taiwan? Where are we headed? Writers, artists and growing numbers of intellectuals again looked back on Taiwan’s history and past, paying close attention to the reality surrounding them. At this time, artists in Taiwan could see plainly that the social situation in which they found themselves remained quite different from that in Europe and America. The sentiment of the American painter Andrew Wyeth began to influence many painters, although Taiwanese artists chose themes from the villages with which they were more familiar: scenes of decline imbued with a mood of melancholy. This phenomenon, dubbed the ‘nativist culture movement’, represented introspective soul-searching regarding the quest for Western modernism on the part of those intellectuals given to critical reflection.
The earliest appearance of a ‘nativist consciousness’ in the art world can be discovered in the thinking and art of Shiy De Jin (Xi Dejin, 1923-1981) after he returned to Taiwan from abroad in 1966. He had been a devotee of abstract painting in his early years before he left Taiwan to travel overseas. After returning to Taiwan, he told people:
Everything in Taiwan has changed rapidly during these few years. The old and beautiful temples have been dismantled and rebuilt, and the finely harved statues have been buffed up and repaired. The beautiful outskirts of the towns and cities are now filled with non-aesthetic apartment blocks and towering cement structures,… so I rush to paint an old peasant family courtyard under threat, because on the following day, it will be leveled by the bulldozer.[11]
Such an attitude expressed the complex and contradictory emotions to which artists were subject. He appreciated clearly the spirit of modern art, but he was saddened by time’s destruction of the material world being. Travelling down that same emotional road, amateur art (e.g., Wu Li Yuge), folk art (e.g., Hong Tong), and art depicting the sweat of the laboring farmers (e.g., Hong Ruilin) attracted attention. There works were plain, lacked decorative display, and demonstrated a refusal to resort to technical glibness or sleight of hand. At this juncture, people looked again at the works of the painters of the Japanese occupation period such as Ishikawa Kin’ichirō and Ni Jianghuai and reappraised their work, readily seeing that they provided the requisite intellectual introspection and solace for the soul in the midst of suffering and contradictions. It is difficult to describe such spirit and emotions as a renovation in knowledge. In 1975, Y. J. Cho (Zhuo Yourui), a graduate of the fine arts department of Normal University, exhibited fifteen paintings depicting surreal plantains and these touched on symbols of Taiwan’s southern villages or expressed feminist themes which were obviously the result of psychological confusion with a loss of goals. For a student of Normal University, these could have simply been experiments in artistic language translated from art albums, catalogues or other media.
A sculptor who relied on an internalized nature that expressed devotion to his art, Ju Ming (Zhu Ming) was assessed by critics for good reason as being subjectively part of the ‘nativist movement’. However, his art was different in its approach to realism, amateur and folk. Ju Ming was born into a peasant family in 1938 and as a young man served as an apprentice of the folk woodblock master Li Jinchuan, but he did not simply develop into a new folk artist. In 1968, he entered the studio of Yang Yingfeng, convener of the Modern Art Centre, and here his experience of practising taijiquan became a lasting source of inspiration for his later art. In 1976, at his first one-man exhibition in the National History Museum his work ‘Taiji’ aroused a strong response. He had first used an axe or a chisel to split the timber into the desired forms then without embellishing them he cast them in bronze. People felt that this technique was very natural and this natural quality was readily understood to be an element of the ‘nativist movement’, suggesting a return to native soil. The effect of not using carving and the rich vigor of the modeling succeeded in changing perceptions of sculpture. In subsequent experiments, Ju Ming retained his natural emotional stance, and this is important. His view that ‘changes to nature came about from within nature itself’ was an attitude that come close to that of the ‘amateur’ (suren). He went on to say: ‘You must pay attention to the rules governing things, and approach life with an open heart. When the heart is pure, the mind is clear and you begin to see your own true nature’. In saying this, we feel that this was a response by Ju Ming to those experimental painters who were using the language of abstract expressionism to express the traditional Chinese spirit, as well as being a response to the ‘quietist’ attitude proposed by Xiao Qin and others in their early years.
The changes that took place in ink and wash painting cannot be so simply summarized. The issue of abstraction in this field arose during the 1960s and, because of the materials of brush and ink and regardless of whether or not there was a long historical tradition on the mainland, ink and wash continued to attract many painters to conduct thorough experiments in the medium. In 1968, the Chinese Ink Society was established with Cheng Shan-hsi (Zheng Shanxi), He Huaishuo, Chu Ge, Huang Zhaohu and Lo Ch’ing (Luo Qing) as its members, and this group naturally played a role in promoting the ink and wash abstract movement. Gradually, many painters’ works demonstrated new and different styles. Ch’en Ch’i-k’uan (Chen Qikuan), born in 1921, made calligraphy the basis for his response to trends in abstract painting and later he became fascinated by ornamentation. Jiang Zhaoshen, born in 1925, retained a passion for traditional taste (quwei) in his landscape paintings, although in his brushwork we can easily discern traces of his ‘Oriental’ style. Li Qimao, born in 1931, fully utilized the unique qualities of black ink and water so that the figural elements in his active delineation completely avoided the interference of line as much as possible. Chu Ge had complete command over the meaning of abstraction yet his individual artistic taste had all the makings of the scholar-painter. Cheng Shan-hsi produced works in the 1970s with a marked simplicity. He Huaishuo in his ink and wash landscape paintings of the 1970s clearly benefited from the tradition of realist sketching and his style and expression revealed that he had no interest in the abstract grand narrative. Lo Ch’ing, in the handling of his details imbued with traditional taste, abruptly added surrealist content, so that his works often dispelled any initial sense of intimacy that they might otherwise have aroused in audiences. Later, Yu Chengyao completed his stylized mountain and water landscapes using painstakingly short brush strokes, while preserving the ‘imaginative conception’ (yijing) of traditional landscape paintings in their composition and atmosphere, but this painter who had a military background completed his works by relying on a method that was akin to sketching.
Critics in Taiwan, as on the mainland, seem to have had a very clear view of the international subject (zhutixing) but consumed their energies in the constant exploration of native entities. In its November 1978 issue, the journal Lion Art devoted its space to introducing artists of Chinese origin. The editors, by introducing artists working outside China - Zao Wou-ki (Zhao Wuji), Chou Wen-chung (Zhou Wenzhong), and I. M. Pei (Bei Yuming) – wanted to provide more profound introspection on the question of what constitutes the entity of culture, and the editors reminded readers that ‘there is no need to rely on the fact that they have earned international reputations to satisfy one’s own desires to prove the greatness of Chinese culture’. It can be seen, that it was already problematic to include those artists who had left Taiwan at an early date within the art history of Taiwan, and people might ask what role they could play in Taiwanese art after leaving. It was similarly awkward to evaluate the work of those artists, such as Chen Jingrong, Xie Xiaode, and Xia Yang, who lived in the USA. In their works of extreme photo-realism it was hard to determine a unique emotion that was any different from that evoked by photography. Moreover, what connection with Taiwan did their work have? It must be pointed out that in the 1970s the Taiwanese artists working abroad were an influence on young painters working on the mainland during the early years of the reform and opening, and young artists who had just escaped from the nightmare of the Cultural Revolution were deeply impressed by the paintings of Xia Yang, C. J. Yao (Yao Qingzhang), and Szeto Keung (Situ Qiang) which they saw reproduced in art magazines, and the prints of Shiou-ping Liao (Liao Xiuping) were a major early inspiration for mainland artists. Here we can also add that the abstract watercolors painted by Liu Kuo-sung after he went to work in Hong Kong in the 1970s were an ongoing influence and inspiration for the mainland ink and wash paintings of cultural critique of the 1980s as well as for later abstract watercolor painting that experimented in artistic language.
The invisible forces of history seemed to have intentionally chosen the end of a decade to bring about a major change. The Kaohsiung ‘Formosa’ Incident of December 1979 ushered in a new era of politics in Taiwan, and all possibilities began to surface from then on and were realized one by one in the 1980s. In that year, the Taiwanese artist Xie Deqing working in the USA initiated his performance plan called ‘one year’s self-imprisonment’.
In 1983, the Taipei Municipal Art Museum was established and the earlier art phenomena gradually began to reveal their post-modern character. In fact, for Taiwanese artists, the 1980s saw the thorough transformation of the simple pondering steeped in inertia regarding east-west questions pursued in an atmosphere devoid of freedom. The lifting of martial law in 1987 consigned autocracy to the past in Taiwan, as the economic and political system saw the formation of a brand-new social structure. So many topics which had previously been contentious, such as ‘Oriental painting’ (targeting Japan), ‘true guohua’ (targeting traditional guohua from the mainland), ‘Western painting’ (targeting conservative realism) and ‘modern art’ (the relationship between Western and Eastern painting), were issues relegated to the past, and the question arose: What perspective could Taiwanese artists adopt to express the content they perceived and contemplated?
At the same time as the government engaged in cultural and art projects such constructing galleries and museums, market and commercial forces entered the world of art through galleries and the like, strengthening market trends in Taiwan. Even though many art groups appeared in the 1980s, their objectives were complex and various. Narrow and tender nativism had also become passé and such works were crammed into commercial galleries. The ‘age of the gallery’ which began in the mid-1970s had finally made many early artists rich at last. It now fell to the younger generation of artists to ponder Taiwan’s new political issues, question the flood of excessive materialism, experience the new urban life, be concerned about the environment and the new problems mankind faced and search for the newly emerging Taiwan consciousness. In any case, the macroscopic narrative of the universe, the dual polarities concerned with West and East or with nativism and modernity, and the philosophical stance of essentialism all began to disappear completely. Artists no longer insisted on positing circular ‘either-or’ paradigms within self-enclosed systems of thought and began to truly experience and utilize the lives and the world that the older generation of artists could once have only hoped for. They believed that a new era of self-reliance and self-support had dawned, as they grasped all the possibilities for examining politics, society and Taiwan’s future. Regardless of people’s opinions about these issues, in general people had won the freedoms extended by the democratic social system and, even though absolute freedom would begin to present each artist with new issues, the possibilities for Taiwan seemed unlimited.
The Background of Hong Kong
Up until 1949, art in Hong Kong followed different directions shaped by mainland artists. Traditional painting, which began with the imperial loyalists who after the 1911 Revolution fled from the mainland to Hong Kong, was perpetuated with the establishment in 1926 by Wong Po Yeh (erroneously and commonly transliterated as Huang Banruo, but hereafter referred to using his zi as Huang Bore, 1901-1968) of a Hong Kong Branch of the Guangdong Chinese Painting Research Society. It was maintained by the efforts of a number of painters who firmly upheld the traditional arts. There was also an extension of the activities of the painters of the Lingnan School of Guangdong, and there was a strand of political art created by left-wing print makers. Almost all the members of these three different trends in art came from the mainland and from 1911 to 1949 and local artists in Hong Kong remained dispersed and isolated. The Hong Kong Arts Society had been established by Western expats in 1925, but very few local Hong Kong artists – Luis Chan (Chen Fushan) being a lucky exception – were invited to participate. Certainly, during this time, thanks to the efforts of local residents and artists, a number of art schools were set up, art groups emerged, and there were increasingly frequent art exhibitions. However, following the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War in 1937, the colony of Hong Kong lost its social stability. At first, people regarded this free port as a sanctuary, but very quickly, Hong Kong found itself occupied by the Japanese (1941). The end of the War in 1945 did not bring a return to stability in Hong Kong, because the outbreak of the civil war between the Kuomintang and the Communists turned Hong Kong into a haven for many people fleeing areas of fighting. After the KMT had been thoroughly defeated and fled to Taiwan and painters who had been sympathetic towards and actively working for the Communist Party returned to the mainland, stability also returned to Hong Kong.
As a colonial city, Hong Kong was usually regarded as not having its own individuality. For various reasons people would come to live for a time there, so they could have little concern for its cultural identity and image. After 1949, almost all politically radical left-wing artists had returned to the mainland and Western painters were few in number, so it was difficult for artists to combine forces. Over a long period of time, the traditional calligraphers and artists mingled gradually with painters of the Lingnan School and the congenial coexistence of these two groups formed the basic environment for art in Hong Kong.
The art scene was subject to every influence, some of which made an impact, as can be seen from painters’ works. However, the vigor of Hong Kong art in the 1950s derived from Western modernism. 1956 saw the founding of the journal Wenyi Xinchao, which introduced modernism. Later, Lui Show Kwan (Lü Shoukun), Kwang Yeu Ting (Kuang Yaoding), and Bai Lian took part in the joint exhibition of members of the Hong Kong Artists Association, whose aims and exhibitions of revealed distinct modernist trends, with modern works by artists from the US and the UK included in their shows. In 1957, Ding Yanyong and Chen Shiwen, two artists who had come to Hong Kong from the mainland and who had some experience of Western artistic attitudes in their acceptance of abstract art, set up the New Asia Academy Art Department, to which they invited Zao Wou-ki (Zhao Wuji) and C. C. Wang (Wang Jiqian) to teach art. Even though Zhao and Wang did not advocate modernism in their lectures, their artistic expression exerted a palpable influence among Hong Kong artists. In the spring of the following year, Zao Wou-ki lectured at the New Asia Academy on ‘the current situation and trends in world art’, and at the same time he held a show of his own abstract works which aroused great interest among Hong Kong artists. In 1958 the Modern Literature and Fine Arts Association was established. Its president was Wucius Wong (Wang Wuxie), and its members were William Yeh (Ye Weilian), Kun Nan, Lu Yin, Li Yinghao, Pan Chaoshi, Hon Chi-fun (Han Zhixun), Cheung Yee (Zhang Yi), Van Lau (Wen Lou), Jackson Yu (You Shaozeng, 1911-1999), Guo Wenji, King Chia-lun (Jin Jialun), and Lin Zhenhui. They published their own journals, Xin Sichao (founded in 1959) and Haowang-jiao (founded in 1963), in order to express their own artistic ideas and promote Hong Kong’s modernist movement. In 1960, 1962 and 1964, they staged the Hong Kong International Painting Salon which was one of the indicators that modern artists in Hong Kong were consciously involved in modern artistic creation.
In 1964, these artists and several friends set up the Zhongyuan Painting Society, and its members met and held exhibitions at the Sanji Art Gallery. In form and style, the works these painters and sculptors exhibited were close to Western art of the time. With the exception of Wucius Wong, they used materials like silk screen printing, acrylics and airbrush and experimented with various types of expression to demonstrate that Hong Kong artists were as bold as international modernists. At the same time, they attempted to demonstrate the identity of Hong Kong artists through their retracing of traditional art, in the hope of ‘being independent of world trends, while not turning their back on world trends, so that the road they travelled would be that of Hong Kong art’.[12]
As a free port, Hong Kong accepted information and influences from all countries and regions. Hong Kong artists, like the modernists in Taiwan, were gradually influenced by New York’s abstract expressionism, and like Taiwan’s modern painters, Hong Kong painters also regarded abstract painting as an art form that related to their own traditions. In this way, it only required further conceptual adjustments to traditional Chinese painting, which was already mutating, for new vigor to be injected into guohua. Prior to this, the majority of painters had been gratified by the return of most of the obstreperous left-wing painters to the mainland, and only the traditional calligraphers and painters or those reluctantly compelled to produce new guohua in the style of the Lingnan School had trouble finding new inspiration; abstract expressionism satisfied the curiosity and self-esteem of painters in the traditional Chinese style and they were very willing to use their familiar materials to experiment in creating new paintings. During the 1960s, Hong Kong artists initiated their own modernism.
It was in 1960, in fact, that the First Hong Kong International Salon Painting Exhibition served as the prelude for the legitimization of Hong Kong modernist painting, and the Hong Kong painters Pansy Ng and Lui Show Kwan exhibited abstract paintings that demonstrated obvious influences of the styles of Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and Zao Wou-ki.
Lui Show Kwan (Lü Shoukun)
The importance of Lui Show Kwan (1919-1975) lies in the fact that he was the first Hong Kong painter to attract international attention, and his experiments with traditional materials made him one of the first ink and wash painters to move towards abstract experimentation. In 1948, Lui Show Kwan moved to Hong Kong from Guangzhou. As a young boy, his father’s commercial calligraphy and painting shop had an imperceptible influence on him, but the copies he made of ancient paintings were chaotic and the genres encompassed landscapes, flowers and birds, as well as fish and insects, while he worked both in the meticulous gongbi and the impressionistic xieyi styles. Such training did not accord with the tradition, but it did leave ample room for Lui Show Kwan’s later revolution. In order to earn a living, Lui Show Kwan first went to work in a small shipping company in the Yaumatei district of Hong Kong, and he was only able to paint in his spare time. In 1954, he held his first one-man exhibition, and his use of free textured chapped brushstrokes (cunca) and wash as well as his close attention to depicting light clearly demonstrated that he was not interested in merely imitating nature or transcribing tradition in his landscape paintings. By the late-1950s Lui was already boldly using brush and ink, sketching in the contours of objects with bold and free brush strokes, even though his compositions were already close to abstraction. In 1960, he frankly made use of the concept of ‘abstraction’, to designate his actually abstract shuimo paintings, and he regarded such bold behaviour as absolutely natural. Although he conscientiously studied Western art, even translating Herbert Read’s The Meaning of Art into Chinese with his friend Li Xipeng, he still felt that in the expression of traditional ink and brush painting he could discern such an abstract spirit. In many of his ink and wash paintings that approximate the abstract, he retained the use of symbols derived from nature even if he disregarded whether those touches allowed others to discern the objects he was painting. In 1962, Lui held his second one-man exhibition, and the abstract ink and wash paintings he exhibited greatly enhanced his influence and reputation. Lui Show Kwan can be described as the earliest painter of experimental ink and wash, in that he achieved international recognition for his structuring of the inherent possibilities of Chinese traditional painting. As early as 1954, he had joined the Hong Kong Fine Arts Society and later, together with Li Yanshan and Zhao Shao’ang they set up the China Fine Arts Society. Subsequently, with Ding Yanyong, Li Xipeng, Li Yanshan, Huang Bore, Yang Shanshen, and Zhao Shao’ang, he set up the Seven-man Painting Society. In 1966, he finally left the company where he worked and became a lecturer in the department of architecture of the University of Hong Kong and at the same time presided over an ink and wash painting course at the extramural graduate school of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He was a very effective teacher and in 1968 one of his students founded the In Tao (Yuan Dao) Art Association; two years later, another student organized the One Man Society. Everyone knew that these were the results of Lui Show Kwan’s influence.
As a painter with enthusiasm for art, Lui Show Kwan moved back and forth between traditional and modern art, his purpose was to bring a more enduring and total understanding to his art, so that while he could experience the artistic conception (quwei) of the ancients he was also enthusiastically interested in the expression of Franz Kline. During the process of using his brush to conduct his abstract experiments, Lui Show Kwan had none of the political burdens that afflicted painters in Taiwan and on the mainland, nor did he have to endure the pressure of fierce attacks from traditionalists. In this way, Lui Show Kwan was able to implement successfully a revolution in ink and wash painting through his understanding of the artistic conception (quwei) of tradition, the art of calligraphy and Zen Buddhist thought.
Wucius Wong (Wang Wuxie)
One of those who participated in Lui Show Kwan’s extramural classes in ink and wash painting at the Chinese University of Hong Kong was Wucius Wong. Originally, in 1958, Wucius Wong (b.1936) had been a student of Lui Show Kwan. Born in Dongguan, Guangdong province, Wong had an English primary and middle school education after reaching Hong Kong. In 1957, Wucius Wong joined the Hong Kong Fine Arts Society, and he began to enter works in the society’s annual exhibitions. His experience studying guohua from Lui Show Kwan was extremely important for his art career and, in 1958, together with Cheung Yee (Zhang Yi), Van Lau and Hon Chi-fun (Han Zhixun), he set up the Modern Literature and Art Society, as well as increasing his participation in social activities. Although in 1960 he became one of the organizers of the First Hong Kong International Painter Salon, the appeal for him of American art saw him resolutely head off to the United States in 1961. At the Columbus Art Institute in Ohio and the Maryland Institute in Maryland, Wucius Wong studied abstract expressionism and modern design. In 1966, he returned to Hong Kong to teach design and gained experience when he was responsible for exhibiting modern art for the Art Museum of the Urban Council. In 1974, he was a lecturer in the ‘design department’ at the Hong Kong Institute of Technology.
As a painter, Wucius Wong had experience of realism in his early years; as a poetry aficionado, he revealed an acute sensitivity to the differences between Western language and Eastern spirit, and turned back to examine Song dynasty landscape painting, especially that of Dong Yuan and Juran. As a Chinese, he understood the transcendental inner world of Ni Yunlin. When these key elements were combined with Western abstractionism and modern design philosophy, he felt that there was enormous space for expansion in the realm of ink and wash painting. Design philosophy provided Wucius Wong with the rational framework that could sustain a vast natural narrative, and while the composition of the landscape paintings of the Northern Song period could fill that space, the grand vistas of nature could not unfold limitlessly if the appearance of natural things contained dispersed focal points of perspective. However, for Wucius Wong, design and its aesthetics provided an effective basis of expression for the limitlessness of nature, and to some extent, Wucius Wong’s abstract paintings were an evocation and crystallization of the design philosophy extended to landscape paintings, which enabled people to see another physical aspect of the spirit of nature: in vast and empty space, the complexity of nature is endlessly manifested and controlled by an invisible rationale. Such an aesthetic psychology gave prominent expression to the attitude of China’s ancient artists and because his pictures so effectively maintained this communication, Wucius Wong’s works serve as a signifier of experimental ink and wash. Wucius Wong’s experiments in ink and wash were earlier than many ink and wash painters on the mainland of the late-1980s.
In the 1970s Hong Kong and Taiwan became the parts of China that successfully accepted the challenge of Western civilization. Although Wucius Wong went through a long process of concern about whether he should be regarded as a Westerner or as a Chinese within a structure of civilization, his acceptance was not dependant on any Western or Chinese conceptual criteria, international criteria as part of a globalized cultural community. When Wucius Wong painted landscape paintings of the Chinese type in oils, he made his ‘paintings of mountains and rivers’ as Eastern as possible, yet when he was painting in Chinese ink and wash, he strove to give these works the special qualities of Western art. This demonstrates that Wucius Wong was unwilling to allow his art to become a dependency of either the West or of tradition. He wanted to create his own unique paintings. Wucius Wong’s teaching and achievements in design also influenced students such as Kan Tai-keung (Jin Daiqiang) and have had a lasting impact on design in Hong Kong.
Art and Artists
The In Tao Art Association (Yuan Dao Huahui) was founded in 1968, and the name of the organization revealed that its members had faith in traditional philosophy and artistic thought. Most of the group’s members were students from the extramural ink and wash classes conducted by Lui Show Kwan at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who obviously accepted Lui’s teachings and took up experimental ink painting in response to the challenge of Western modernism. Their experiments were not subject to any pressure from politics, and in 1968, 1970 and 1972 they separately held exhibitions of their own ink and wash works, while at the same time they organized monthly forums at which they introduced their new artistic concepts and these had a great influence in Hong Kong. The following painters took part in the In-Tao Art Association: Lawrence Tam (Tan Zhicheng), Beatrice Ts’o (Zhang Jiahui), Irene Chou (Zhou Lüyun), Weng Debei, Tan Manyu (Tan Duan), Ng Yiu-chung (Wu Yaozhong), Wong Wangfai (Wang Honghui), Lee Wai-on (Li Wei’an), Deng Xirong, Pan Yizhao, and He Chonghua. Chui Tze-hung (Xu Zixiong) joined at the time of the second art exhibition.
In October 1970, the One Art Society was established. Again, all its members had been students in Lui Show Kwan’s extramural ink and wash painting courses at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The first group of 15 members, including Cheng Wee-kwok (Zheng Weiguo), Zheng Guowei, and Zhai Shiyao, were later joined by Huang Wenlong, Koo Mei (Gu Mei), Kan Tai-keung, and others. Irene Chou and Ng Yiu-chung from the In-Tao Art Association also later joined. The Chinese name of the One Art Society was taken from an idea expressed by Shitao (‘the method is established, and within a single painting’; fa yu he li, li yu yi hua), these young artists hoping to heed the message of this ancient innovative artistic thinker. In the number of exhibitions staged and in the duration of the group’s activities, the One Art group even surpassed the In-Tao Art Association, and the untiring efforts in ink and wash of these painters over several decades meant that these students and their teachers were jointly responsible for creating ‘an ink and wash’ era in Hong Kong. In November of that year, an exhibition of young Hong Kong artists of the 1970s was staged at the Hong Kong Museum and Art Gallery, at which were shown modern ink and wash works by nine artists – Irene Chou, Wong Wangfai, Kan Tai-keung, Chui Tze-hung (Xu Zixiong), Ng Yiu-chung, Lawrence Tam (Tan Zhicheng), and Leung Kui-ting (Liang Juting). In 1972, as many as 48 modern ink and wash painters took part in the Grand Exhibition of Chinese Ink Painting, including artists from both Hong Kong and Taiwan, showing that ink and wash had developed to form the prevailing climate in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
The development of modern ink and wash in Hong Kong was related to Liu Kuo-sung’s move in 1971 to that city, where Liu took up a post teaching art at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Until he returned to Taiwan to retire in 1992, Liu’s creative work and teaching influenced many young Chinese ink painters in Hong Kong. In 1975, the graduates of Liu’s ‘diploma course in modern ink and wash painting’ staged an exhibition of modern ink paintings at the Hong Kong Arts Centre, and among those who participated were Chen Chunmei, Zhuo Hongduo and Zheng Huijun. In the following year, they held a second exhibition of ink works. By 1977, Li Xuzhong and Li Shuyi, art department students who had taken part in both exhibitions, established the Modern Ink Painting Association, which for many years to come would promote experiments in ink and wash painting in Hong Kong.
Luis Chan (Chen Fushan)
Among all the painters in Hong Kong using Western materials to execute their works, Luis Chan is absolutely unique. Luis Chan’s (1905-1995) early aquarelle works evoked the impact of Western painters on the Chinese littoral - Hong Kong, Macao and Guangzhou, from the 19th century onwards, and his bold if obvious expression seemed to bear no traces of any tradition. We can well imagine that in this period that the education and influences in Luis Chan’s painting were completely Western: perspective, shading and free brush strokes were used to express vividly the scenes with which the painter was familiar on a daily basis. In 1934, he joined the Hong Kong Fine Arts Society, which provided him with more opportunities to understood Western painting; in 1935, he held his first one-man exhibition of paintings.
During the 1940s and even in the 1950s, artists retained a monochrome grey treatment of the subject matter in their watercolor paintings. The situation with oil painting was very similar, and Luis Chan’s early understanding of oil painting was imbued with physicality. He daubed the pigment thickly on his canvases and even though the structure of his subjects gave him the opportunity to use colour lavishly, he also attempted to better understand the more delicate relationships in blending colours. At all times, Luis Chan intentionally or subconsciously retained his own melancholy mood.
In the early 1960s, Chan’s style of expression wavered between vivid realism (Happy Valley, 1960) and abstract motifs with a free play of unconscious brush and ink, but the painter’s attention was undoubtedly moving towards a clearer future path: a fixation on the inner mirage. In Tragedy, a work he completed in 1968, a melancholic tone controls this anxious scene. The dramatic import of this painting might be problematic, but the mood and images in the painting clearly convey the inner narrative that the painter held true. Direct intuition initiated his concern for, and expression of, particular images, so we can overlook the initial motivation behind his painting. Luis Chan has this to tell us: ‘I never anticipate what I will see, but try to find new things (images) from within it. I never mentally store up images to paint. They (the images) appear then drive my intuition’.
Luis Chan never stopped offering up his mental mirages to us, something quite different from those artists who maintain a unified style. In Luis Chan’s paintings are we able to see a formal consistency or do we see the continuous expression of a particular concept? In his essay ‘A discussion from the realists to the abstractionists’, Luis Chan touched on his own art:
During the initial stages when I was trying to paint in the new style, I tried using cubist and surreal forms in my paintings, but later realized that I was constrained by my modeling and so totally opted for abstraction. At the same time, I also wanted to continue in my realist style. In this there was no point in switching to fauvism or expressionism, because those working in or fond of the new style would mostly be able to see my purely abstract paintings and, on the other hand, those fond of the realistic style would not be able to look at my works and feel familiar with them.
Luis Chan’s work did not belong to an art school of any period, and he was a painter who followed his own soul. He always felt that he was pursuing his inner visions, even though those visions were hazy and unclear.
In the 1970s the scale and content of exhibitions were impressive and these large joint exhibitions signalled the rise and prosperity of Hong Kong in the contemporary art world. These shows included: Grand Exhibition of Chinese Ink Painting (1972, Hong Kong Museum and Art Gallery), Contemporary Hong Kong Art Exhibition (1972, Hong Kong Museum and Art Gallery), Art Exhibition ’76 (1976, University of Hong Kong Fung Ping Shan Museum), and the annual exhibitions of the Urban Council Fine Arts Awards Winners held at the Hong Kong Museum of Art from 1976 onwards. In 1974, the Hong Kong Visual Arts Association was established. Its members accepted the view of Bai Zijue, a lecturer at the University of Hong Kong that the association was to promote comprehensive art technologies and abilities. Members were not limited to oil painting or ink and wash, but could be involved in artistic experiments in accordance with their own interests in any field and this opened up new space for contemporary art in Hong Kong. In 1976, the Hong Kong Arts Centre opened, and this enabled Hong Kong to serve as a centre for more regional artistic activities, and in 1984 the Urban Council and the Hong Kong Museum of Art supported the landmark Open Exhibition of Contemporary Sculpture which made it clear that the Hong Kong government encouraged the development of innovative public sculpture, and provided local sculptors with space and opportunities for their work. The completion in 1989 of the Hong Kong Cultural Centre further promoted Hong Kong as an international centre art centre.
NOTES:
[1] On 1 September 1945, the government of the Republic of China in Chongqing established the Taiwan Province Executive Administrative Office and its chief executive was Chen Yi. On 17 October, the KMT 70th Army left for Taiwan, and accepted the surrender of the Japanese on 25 October. During the ceremony of surrender, Chen Yi said in the official speech: ‘Although Taiwan has now been recovered, we should express gratitude to the revolutionary martyrs and the soldiers of resistance who sacrificed their lives for the recovery of Taiwan’.
[2] Hsiao Ch’iung-jui (Xiao Qiongrui), The Fifth Moon and the Tung-yang: The Development of the Chinese Art Modernization Movement in Post-War Taiwan, 1945-1970 (Wuyue yu Dongfang: Zhongguo meishu xiandaihua yundong zai zhanhou Taiwan zhi fazhan, 1945-1970), Taipei: Ta Tung T’u-shu Ku-fen Yu-hsien Kung-ssu, 1990, p.153.
[3] Although their view lacked any knowledge of the historical and social history of art in Taiwan, at the time of the 15th provincial exhibition in 1960, the exhibition was actually organized into two sections: one was Chinese painting in the traditional sense, and the other was Japanese paintings or works approximating ‘oriental painting’.
[4] Lin Hsing-yu (Lin Xingyu), ‘Forty eventful years in Taiwan art’ (Taiwan meishu fengyun 40 nian), Zili wanbao Publishers, 1993, p.101.
[5] Hsiao Ch’iung-jui, op. cit., pp.298-299.
[6] The Modern Print Society was established in 1959. Its members used abstract shapes to eliminate thoroughly the dominant style of militant anti-Communist themes. Members included Yang Yingfeng, Ch’in Sung (Qin Song), Li Hsi-ch’i (Li Xiqi), Ch’en T’ing-shih (Chen Tingshi), Chiang Han-tung (Jiang Handong), Shih Hua (Shi Hua) and Chu Wei-pai (Zhu Weibai).
[7] Liu Kuo-sung, ‘Why define modern art as the enemy?’ (Wei shenme ba xiandai yishu hua gei diren?) From: Hsiao Ch’iung-jui, op. cit., p.318.
[8] Lin Hsing-yu (Lin Xingyu), ‘Forty eventful years in Taiwan art’ (Taiwan meishu fengyun 40 nian), Zili wanbao Publishers, 1993, p.111.
[9] In 1961, Liu Kuo-sung published ‘Modern art and Communist Russian art theory’ (Xiandai yishu yu Fei-E de wenyi lilun) in the 48th issue of Wen-hsing. In this article he introduced and analyzed the suppression of artistic freedom in the Soviet Union and countries in the communist camp. In 1963, he rewrote this article, adding a section titled ‘Be vigilant towards the artistic united front of the communist bandits’, and he also provided some classified documentation on Taiwan’s participation in the Sao Paolo Biennial of 1959. These documents shed light on the cultural struggle waged in international society by the KMT and the CPC, and how through modern art the KMT succeeded in having the right credentials to participate in the show.
[10] Hsiao Ch’iung-jui, op. cit., p.415.
[11] The Taiwan Modern Art Environment, 1945-1995 (1945-1995 Taiwan xiandai meishu shengtai), Taipei: Taipei Municipal Art Gallery, 1995, pp.147-148.
[12] Wucius Wong, ‘The expansion of modern art in Hong Kong over the past decade’ (Jin shinian Xianggang xiandai yishu zhi kuozhan), Ming Pao, no.121, in Zhu Qi, A History of Fine Arts in Hong Kong (Xianggang meishu shi), Hong Kong: Joint Publishing Company, 2005, p.171.