Following in the footsteps of some of the most famous artists who have ever lived, an oil painting by Taiwanese Chen Ming-shun (陳明順) is on show at an exhibition at the Grand Palace in Paris.
Chen said on Monday that he was informed by the Salon of Independent Artists that his work entitled Happiness, which features a rooster, a hen and eight chickens, is hanging side-by-side with world-renowned paintings.
The salon has held annual exhibitions in Paris since 1884, and it originally promoted avant-garde art. Its first exhibition in 1884 featured works from Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cezanne and Paul Gauguin.
Photo: CNA
Chen rose from humble beginnings, coming from a farming family. He used his background to great advantage, depicting elements often seen in rural areas — ducks, chickens and geese — on his canvases.
Chen said he has always loved to draw and doodle.
He said that when he was a child, one of his classmates purchased stationery using money his mother had earned by selling betel nut leaves.
The classmate bought a blank sketchbook and asked Chen to draw some pictures, Chen said.
“I drew until there were no blank pages left.
However my actions led to my classmate getting a beating from his parents,” Chen said, adding that this experience from his childhood left a deep impression on him.
Chen said his interest in oil painting arose from a collection of pictures by Dutch Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder, which Chen’s older sister — who was studying in Taipei at the time — brought home for him.
After taking some sketching classes, he enrolled in the department of advertising at a vocational high school, he said, adding that he had not stopped drawing since then.
Aside from a period from 1994 to 2010, when Chen also ran a hostel, causing his output to decline somewhat, he said that he often used chickens as the primary subject of his paintings.
Chen said he knew everything there was to know about chickens, having raised them and been with them day and night for more than four decades, adding that he was surprised his work had been chosen by the salon to appear at the prestigious exhibition.
“I wish to thank all of the art teachers who instructed me and to dedicate this honor to them,” he said.
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:
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