“Every child is an angel until he is dragged down from heaven by adults' worries,” Chu said.
Another popular work, the long-running Uptown Singles, portrays four avant-garde women and their earnest pursuit of love amid traditional expectations of gender subservience.
In one telling episode, the four fashionably dressed women hold their heads up high as they parade a man tied to a leash like a dog.
In another, one of the women ejects a succession of suitors from her door and then observes tartly: “Whether we should love men or ourselves more remains a lingering question.”
Chu, who began his cartoon career in 1988 when Taiwan was just beginning its own tortuous transition from one-party dictatorship to freewheeling democracy, says politics plays second fiddle in most peoples' lives.
Self-fulfillment and raising healthy children are far more important, he said.
He says that the new Hangzhou museum, to be built next to picturesque West Lake, will present a wide array of his cartoons and sculptures, including a toilet shaped as a whale's mouth and a doorknob that looks like a person.
“I want to show that humor can be immersed into daily lives,” he said. “I want to cheer up the many among us who have enough hardship as it is.”
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