After a single glance at Lee Yi-hong's scroll paintings, one knows he is a Chinese painter of the old school. His towering cliffs, rolling waves and miniature humans clearly identify his genre as shuimo (landscapes). After a second glance, doubts arise however. Indeed, the longer one looks at the works in Lee's latest exhibition `Infinite Cosmos -- Infinite Buddhism,' the more modern they seem. One might even wonder whether they were painted by a Chinese artist.
Lee is Chinese; he was born in Tainan in 1941 and graduated from the National Academy of Arts in 1966.
"Like all artists of my generation I undertook a thorough study of classical Chinese painting, first at the academy and later as a student of the famous painter and calligrapher Chiang Chao-shen. Chiang was himself a student of the last Ching Emperor's uncle." As Lee talks about his life and work, his conversation is peppered with quotes from Tang and Sung dynasty shuimo artists. Asked to place his art in historical context however, he replies without hesitation, "Absolutely modern."
"The brushstrokes I used for `Quiet Meditation' are much broader than those found in classical works, whilst in Arhats amongst the Pines, I wanted to experiment with covering every inch of the paper. Shuimo makes great use of unpainted spaces. Space on the canvas but feeling in the stomach."
Lee makes little use of the symbolic language found throughout Chinese painting. Pines, trees that resist the cold and do not shed their needles, symbolize longevity, steadfastness and self-discipline. Bodhi trees, like those in Lee's `Bodhi Path,' represent the road to enlightenment. Caves, like Juewang Cave, Lion Mountain, are a habitual haunt of good-natured spirits and hermits.
Wandering around his own exhibition at the Lungshan Gallery, the artist points out many of his favorite locations around Taiwan. In addition to Mt. Lion, Lee identifies numerous seemingly abstract scenes: a tree in the grounds of a local monastery or a cliff on the coast road south of Su-ao.
Cliffs figure prominently in this series, their majesty and permanence contrasting sharply with the almost insignificant human figures meditating beneath. Buddhism teaches that all earthly phenomena are impermanent however, and cautions against "clinging to the unreal as real." This was never clearer than during the 921 earthquake, which, after depriving Lee of his creative impulses for several weeks, became a new source of inspiration.
"I didn't want to paint rent earth and shattered lives though, I could capture those with my camera," says Lee, whose photography has also won numerous awards. His main post-earthquake work, `Compassionate Peak,' is intentionally ambiguous, perhaps depicting a farmer, perhaps a monk. Lee is interested to see if the raised levels of religious compassion and communal cohesion observed since the disaster will be long-term additions to Taiwan's social climate that had been lurching towards unfettered materialism.
"Chinese art, like Chinese Mahayana Buddhism, is more usually interested in Bodhisattvas, particularly the Bodhisattva Guanyin. Guanyin took a vow of compassion and abandoned her own pursuit of enlightenment and salvation to assist in `ferrying the myriad living beings across the sea of suffering to the other shore of Nirvana.' I chose to paint arhats because they are at an earlier stage of spiritual cultivation, and therefore much nearer to us."
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