Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog could well be the title of any number of the paintings in this fine exhibition by the young Taiwanese artist Liu Wen-ter (劉文德). The same dog, with its hallmark red tongue and cheeky eye, is the subject of almost all of them. Liu's even had people coming to his show inquiring about the best diet for their pets. But the truth is these are pictures of a very high artistic quality.
Liu was spotted as an important emerging artist some years ago when he won a scholarship for a year's study in the UK. Earlier this year the Taipei Museum of Fine Arts purchased one of his pictures. On the basis of this new exhibition he's someone to watch -- and perhaps even to invest in.
Liu's work so far has fallen into three categories -- on-going series, as he considers them. First came abstracts, then dogs, then people in hot springs. He had a one-man show last year of his hot-spring paintings -- evocative blues and greens, with the human figures looking simultaneously wistful and slightly absurd. Now it's the turn of the dogs.
What the paintings in both these latter categories have in common is a playfulness deep down in the artist's creative personality. Some might consider the pictures cute, but they're really far from that. What they do, instead, is play with the idea of cuteness. The predominant feeling they prompt is an amusement in the artist at the very idea of his own strange fascinations.
The paintings are largely executed in Chinese inks on rice paper, but the end result is much more substantial than this suggests. Firstly, the rice paper is bulked up by the use of many layers, each of a slightly different shade. And secondly, other coloring materials are added, notably acrylic, which gives a striking acidic sharpness to several of the larger works.
The harmonics within each painting are very distinctive. Here, you feel, is an artist who doesn't approach his work conceptually. The concept -- always the dog, and the same dog -- is after all unlikely to arouse much excitement in itself. But the treatment has such integrity that you quickly see that the subject is really a pretext for the exploration of what most interests this painter, and perhaps all the best artists -- namely color, texture, form.
Liu, who lives and works in Taipei, says that he was attracted to the work of two British artists during his stay in the UK -- David Hockney and Francis Bacon. Liu's essential playfulness, plus his use of every-day subject-matter, makes a fascination with Hockney easy to understand, entirely individual though Liu's style is. A strong difference is Liu's seeming lack of interest in light in this dog series. But Bacon's gruesomely manic paintings, you'd have thought, could hardly be further from Liu's saliva-dripping canines with an eye on the next cookie.
If there's anything Liu's work is reminiscent of in Western art, it's the late paper cut-outs of Matisse. But he still remains highly distinctive and very much his own master. All the larger works come with frames specially chosen by the artist, integrated into the color harmonics of the paintings, and effectively inseparable from them.
Money isn't everything, as they say, but collecting paintings by young artists can turn into a profitable exercise. The prices of the larger pictures in this exhibition range from NT$30,000 to NT$120,000, with some small color sketches as little as NT$2,500. One day, they could selling for a fortune. More importantly, they are very beautiful things in themselves, with their genial lightness of being capable of putting you in a good mood on many a cloudy Taipei morning.
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