One foot in the East, one in the West

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Many Taiwanese artists undergo a remarkable aesthetic shift after studying or traveling in the US or Europe. The principles of Chinese art in which they were originally trained, however, often prove to be implacable.

Painter Chu Teh-chun (朱德群) moved to France in the early 1950s where he was influenced by Nicolas de Stael’s abstract geometric strips of impasto color. Chu combined Stael’s style with calligraphy. Lee Tsai-chien (李再鈐) traveled to Europe in the 1970s to study Chinese sculpture, but returned to Taiwan with notes for a book on ancient Greek art (which he later published) and a mind full of the teachings of Plato, which inspired his monumental sculptures.

The Age of Writing Poems and Indulging in Wine — Calligraphy and Paintings by Chiang I-han (詩酒年華—姜一涵書畫展), currently on display at the National Museum of History, shows

that Chiang I-han (姜一涵), 83, belongs in this artistic milieu. In his work, modernism meets Chinese calligraphy and landscape painting.

Chiang’s early paintings closely adhere to the latter tradition, in which trees, mountains and enclosed compounds are rendered in great detail and serve as emblems of self-cultivation and nature’s perfection. But Chiang’s interest in calligraphy and ink painting was as much academic as it was artistic.

Han researched Chinese art at Kansas State and Princeton universities in the early 1970s.

A retrospective of Piet Mondrian’s work that Chiang saw at the Guggenheim Museum in 1973 was a turning point for the artist. Mondrian’s paintings were an aesthetic revelation for Chiang. The bold primary colors and geometrical shapes contrasted with the detailed and literary Chinese ink paintings he had studied and created up to that point.

“I went [to the Guggenheim] to look at his paintings every day for two weeks,” Chiang said in an interview with the Taipei Times. “I wanted to approach the paintings directly without the intermediary of essays or teachers.”

He went on to study Western modernists for the decade that he lived and worked in the US.

Chiang said he viewed the work of impressionist masters such as Gauguin and Cezanne and later the surrealist forms of Joan Miro as a means of broadening the scope of his art, free of contextual interference.

Akin to Chu’s landscapes, Chiang employs the thick, black brushstrokes that characterise calligraphy. But whereas Chu broadened his palette (and canvas size), Chiang retained a degree of Mondrian-inspired simplicity, of form and color. It is a style that Chiang’s friends have suggested resembles the work of children. Looking at the controlled brushstrokes of the pictures currently on display, however, reveals an artist in complete control of his medium.

Green on Green (疊翠) is an abstract landscape with broad, black brushstrokes that are tinged at the edges with beams of gray wash, interspersed here and there with dapples of vermilion, acid green and brown. The violence of the brushstrokes is startling and differs significantly from the meditative landscapes found in Chiang’s earlier work.

Rhythms of Mountains and Sunset (夕陽山外山) is a serene expressionist study of nature. The orange-red sun in the top-right corner shines on charcoal-colored mountains, with the snow-capped peak of one reflecting the sunshine. Blotches of green-brown paint, presumably signifying leaves, are sprinkled across the lower part of the canvas, suggesting the presence of a light breeze. It is a landscape reduced to its most elementary colors and outlines.