The National Museum of History said it would display a work by well-known Chinese painter Chang Dai-chien (張大千) next month, entitled Ancient Cypress Trees.
The museum said yesterday that the painting was valued at more than NT$100 million (US$3.1 million). It depicts a grove of cypresses.
The painting hung in a corner of a conference room at the Control Yuan for almost 40 years, but Control Yuan President Wang Chien-shien decided in July to donate it to the museum to provide a better environment and allow more people to view it.
The decision came after another painting by Chang sold for more than NT$100 million at a recent auction. That made the Control Yuan realize it should find a safer home for the painting.
Chang was born in Sichuan, China, and died in Taiwan in 1983 at the age of 85.
He is considered one of the best Chinese artists of the 20th century. Chang started out painting Chinese landscapes, but by the 1960s, was also renowned as a modern impressionist and expressionist painter.
Museum officials said they used Chang’s own preference when deciding where to display the painting.
“We chose the third floor, because it was the artist’s favorite location for painting when he was alive,” a museum curator said.
Chang loved to paint the lotuses in the pond near the museum.
Ancient Cypress Trees was painted when Chang lived at his Bade Garden (Garden of Eight Virtues) home in Mogi das Cruzes, Brazil, the museum said.
Large in scale, with a somber composition and sublime aspiration, the piece attests to a period in Chang’s creative life in which he invented the splash color technique and further utilized it to depict flowers, rocks, and trees, experts say.
“Viewers cannot but be amazed by Chang’s blending of the traditional and the contemporary as well as his idiosyncratic invention of artistic vocabulary,” the curator said.
Chang’s two-story home in Shihlin — which he called the “Abode of Maya” — was donated to the nearby National Palace Museum after his death and has been preserved as a memorial to the artist and his work. Tours can be arrange through the palace musuem.
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
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
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