VIEW THIS PAGE Chen Cheng-po’s (陳澄波) artistic career ended at the beginning of the White Terror period. Chen, who was born in Chiayi just before Japan’s annexation of Taiwan in 1895, favored tranquil pastoral scenes in his impressionistic canvases. His painting Street of Chiayi (嘉義街外) was the first work by a Taiwanese artist to be exhibited at Japan’s Empire Art Exhibition, in 1926, and back home he wielded considerable influence over Taiwan’s burgeoning art scene. A few weeks after the 228 Incident, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) troops seized and executed him in front of a train station.
The Taipei Fine Arts Museum’s (TFAM) recently opened exhibit Jewels of 25 Years Museum Collection (25年典藏精粹) includes two of Chen’s pre-World War II paintings, Soochow (蘇州) and Street Scene on a Summer Day (夏日街景). By placing both works immediately at the beginning of the exhibit, which spaces 31 paintings and three sculptures throughout seven rooms on its second floor, TFAM directs the viewer’s attention to how art and politics interacted during Taiwan’s colorful past. Organized for the most part chronologically, from the middle of the Japanese colonial period to the 1990s, the pieces on display were chosen from among the 4,000 works in the museum’s possession because, according to the exhibit’s literature, they “illustrate the development of Taiwan’s art history.”
This show does just that. But in the process it also reveals how two occupying powers, through a policy of acculturation, imposed their aesthetic views on Taiwanese artists, resulting in a repetition of styles and lack of innovation — especially when compared to the artistic movements flourishing in European painting that found their center in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s, in American painting centered around New York after the 1950s and up to the 1970s, and in Taiwanese painting just before and after the lifting of martial law in 1987.
The early works on display were a product of or were influenced by the Taiwan Art Exhibition, or Taiten, a public exhibition that was held annually starting in 1927. The exhibition, which was later renamed the Taiwan Governor-General’s Art Exhibition, or Futen, was aimed at promoting the cultural superiority of Japanese art, and Chinese calligraphy and ink painting were conspicuously absent because the colonial government wanted its Taiwanese subjects to follow the methods of Japanese painting, then a combination of traditional Japanese styles and Western realism known as nihonga.
These Japanese-derived methods are clearly discernable in Chen Chin’s (陳進) Leisurely (悠閒) and Lin Chih-chu’s (林之助) Recess (小閒). Adhering to the bijinga (美人畫, “painting of beautiful women”) technique of representing women popular in Japan, Chen Chin’s light brushstrokes and alluring colors show a woman reclining in a drawing room. The three waitresses in Lin’s canvas are dressed in dark-toned navy uniforms and idle around a stove in a coffee shop, evoking the uncomplicated composition so loved by Japanese art critics of the time.
Although Taiwanese artists under imperial rule were expected to strictly conform to a Japanese aesthetic, their work is notable for its focus on Taiwan’s scenery. Lin Yu-shan’s (林玉山) detailed portrayal of a farmer with water buffalo in On the Way Home (歸途), Kuo Hsueh-hu’s (郭雪湖) colorful depiction of Taipei’s famous Dihua Street (迪化街) during the Lunar New Year in Festival on South Street (南街殷賑) and Huang Tu-shui’s (黃土水) combination of traditional folk art with modern sculptural elements in Sakya all employ the Japanese attention to detail and vibrant color while showing a concern for Taiwan’s folk culture and landscapes. All trained in Japan or by Japanese artists, Lin, Kuo and Huang won top honors at the Taiten several times.
Regime change after World War II witnessed a return to Chinese aesthetic mores in the cultural field. The KMT continued where the Japanese left off with a policy of controlling the creation and consumption of art through exhibitions and education. During the first three decades of KMT rule, local artists were forced to submit to Chinese aesthetic standards if they wanted to show their work at exhibitions, and artists trained in the orthodox literati traditions of ink painting and calligraphy gained recognition at these exhibitions. The Japanese-era use of Western realism with a focus on Taiwanese scenes was replaced by ink paintings of imaginary landscapes in China and calligraphy.
Apart from some interesting calligraphy-inspired modernist works by Chinese artists — Chen Ting-shi’s (陳庭詩) Lust of Life (生之慾) is a notable work of abstraction that blends a Chinese aesthetic with modern visual elements — the appeal of most of the calligraphy and ink paintings on display is limited to the small cadre of experts who have been trained to appreciate them. Although most viewers will probably move through these rooms quickly, the martial law-era works provide a stark contrast to the paintings from the Japanese colonial period and direct the viewer’s attention to the momentous changes that took place in Taiwan’s cultural sphere.
If the earlier Japanese and Nationalist periods feature works copying foreign styles imposed from above, the works in the exhibit covering the post-martial law era are notable for their innovation and originality in representation. The imaginary renderings of a lost land (China) by an earlier generation give way to a political and historical awakening among contemporary artists and a focus on the place they currently inhabit (Taiwan).
Yang Mao-ling’s (楊茂林) ironic diptych Zealandia Memorandum L9301 (熱蘭遮紀事 L9301) displays two impressionistic portraits of Taiwan’s European and Asian colonial past, while Wu Tien-chang (吳天章) openly portrays the many phases of Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) rule in Five Phases of President Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國的五個時期). Fire (火) by Huang Chin-ho (黃進河) raises taike (台客) to high art. The blue flip-flops might be absent, but the flora of rural Taiwan, betel nut beauties and the paper houses constructed for burning in folk rituals are present and rendered in chromatic yellows, green and purple.
Hou Chun-ming’s (侯俊明) wood-block print series combines the ancient tradition of placing Buddhist text beside religious folk images. In God’s Searching (搜神), he retains the typology but replaces the religious iconography with sexually explicit (and often violent) images rendered in comic book simplicity. Chen Chieh-jen’s (陳界仁) black-and-white video installation Lingchi — Echoes of a Historical Photograph (凌遲考:一張歷史照片的迴音) recreates a photograph of a form of torture common at the end of the Qing Dynasty and acts as a commentary on colonization and the gaze of the oppressor.
Interestingly, the post-martial law art is displayed before the martial law-era art, creating a jarring contrast between the vibrancy and originality of the former and the second-hand feel of the latter. While the Jewels of 25 Years Museum Collection does not explicitly suggest that authoritarian regimes — at least in Taiwan’s case — stifle innovation in art, it is difficult to imagine that it was not organized with this thought in mind. VIEW THIS PAGE
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