A portrait of Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙) by the famous Taiwanese painter Li Mei-shu (李梅樹), set in a frame made by well known sculptor Huang Kui-lee (黃龜李), has been discarded as garbage, thrown away, and is now lost for ever.
"We have handed the case over to the ethics department," Sansia Township Administration Chief Secretary Chan Yi-shu (詹亦樹) said.
The size 30 painting -- painting size in Taiwan has traditionally been determined by the size of a postcard, with a painting the size of one postcard being a size one, a painting the size of 30 postcards a size 30, and so on -- has been valued between NT$8 million (US$243,000) to NT$9 million.
PHOTOS: CHENG SHU-TING, TAIPEI TIMES
Postcard counting is traditionally also included when calculating prices: In Li's case, one of his size 1 paintings once sold for NT$400,000, which means that a size 30 painting by him might sell for 30 times that price, or as much NT$12 million.
During the 1950s and 1960s, Li painted a series of portraits of Sun and former dictator Chiang Kai-shek (
The county council has treated the paintings as valuable pieces of art that are now hanging on the its walls.
The portrait of Sun has also faired fairly well at Sansia Elementary School, but a few years ago, their portrait of Chiang was "improved" to the point were it lost much of its semblance to Chiang.
That painting has now been given to the Li Mei-shu Memorial Gallery.
The two paintings at Sansia Township Government have fared worse. The portrait of the dictator was lost several years ago, while Sun's portrait was stored inappropriately -- it was cracked and full of holes, and the frame had began to rot away.
Prior to the inauguration of the new township mayor in March this year, another picture of Sun was hung in its place in the auditorium and it was sent to a Sansia frame maker for restoration.
Although that was seven months ago, the township administration didn't seem to be in a hurry to get the painting back; when asked, the reply was that it had been sent to a frame maker for restoration.
"That old painting of Sun Yat-sen? I threw that away a long time ago,"the framemaker said. "When they sent it over, it was so full of holes after having been thrown around during transport that the guy from the township office who brought it said we'd just as well throw it away."
He said he dumped it at the local garbage dump, and that it probably had been incinerated at the Shulin incinerator.
When told that it was a Li Mei-shu painting, he said, "If I'd known that, I'd have kept it."
After seven months, the township administration still thought the painting was being restored, completely unaware that the person they'd sent to have it restored had taken it upon himself to determine the fate of a painting by one of Taiwan's greatest masters.
Li's son, Li Chin-kuan (
"When my father made these paintings, he didn't sign them since that would have been disrespectful to the portrayed giants," he said.
He said he knew the portrait of Chiang had disappeared years ago but had done nothing about it at the time.
But when he learned of the decayed state of Sun's portrait, he wrote the township administration to offer help restoring it and even keeping it in the memorial gallery.
Li Mei-shu was born in 1902 in Sansia. In March, 1929, he was admitted to the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, and he never abandoned the realism he learned there. From 1947 through 1982, he chaired the Reconstruction Committee of Sansia Zushi Temple where he created what has been called a "Temple to East Asian Art."
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching