Taiwanese tapestry

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Introduced to Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period, comics were suppressed for much of the Martial Law era because they were thought to corrupt the nation’s youth. And yet, there remained an underground fanbase of avid readers. Comics took on new life after the lifting of Martial Law — exemplified by the ubiquity of 24-hour chain stores that opened in the early 1990s.

The medium gained respectability in 2000 when the National Museum of History (國立歷史博物館) mounted an exhibit titled A Celebration of Taiwan Comics (漫畫史特輯), at which then-president Chen Shui-bian

(陳水扁) was heard to say, “I love Taiwan, but I love comics even more.”

Born 52 years ago in Kaohsiung County, Lee Ming-tse (李明則) grew up reading martial arts comics (武俠), which heavily influenced his visual language. A selection of Lee’s work completed over the past two years is currently on display at Main Trend Gallery (大趨勢畫廊).

Working in a similar vein to other Taiwanese artists of his generation such as Yang Mao-lin (楊茂林) and Hou Chun-ming (侯俊明), Lee’s paintings offer a glimpse of contemporary society through the use of traditional folk and religious imagery rendered in a comic book style. But whereas Hou’s wood-block prints explore desire and Yang’s sculptures of fairy tales examine consumerism, Lee’s canvases offer a pastiche of Taiwan’s history, culture and identity.

The triptych New Zuoying Landscape (新左營山水) is representative of how Lee uses different modes of representation to illustrate the hybridity of Taiwan’s culture. He said that the painting was inspired by the discovery of an archaeological site found during the construction of the High Speed Rail’s Zuoying Station (高鐵左營車站).

Dozens of androgynous figures are pictured in all manner of dress and undress, some wearing clothing characteristic of the martial arts comics that Lee devoured as a child, while others appear in skimpy shorts and bras as though taken from the pages of Next Magazine (壹週刊). Mountains and trees resembling those found in Chinese landscape painting (山水畫) punctuate the canvas along with Japanese architecture, temples, modern furniture and designer bags.

The Japanese architecture, Chinese landscape painting, comic book figures and Western consumer items, unsystematically arranged on a canvas that includes an archeological find, underscore Lee’s point that a conglomeration of influences shaped Taiwan’s cultural identity, and each influence can only be understood in the context of the others.

Lee’s use of diverse styles also reflects his democratic approach to art. In the monumental seven-panel I Love Taiwan and Love Southern Taiwan Even More (我愛台灣更愛南台灣), he takes two genres — highbrow Chinese landscape painting as his background, which is populated by lowbrow martial arts comic book figures — and links them with wildly expressive calligraphic brush strokes. The figures are rendered in black with white outlines suggestive of shadow puppetry and gezai opera (歌仔戲) — both of which remain popular forms of entertainment.

Although Taiwanese art has been influenced by many cultures — whether Chinese literati painting, American consumer culture or comics — these disparate elements have been assimilated. The way in which Lee combines these different styles in his paintings gives equal weight to the influences that made Taiwan’s culture Taiwanese.