"The bases for artistic ideas can be many and various. But to me, the most important thing is a national basis, a traditional orientation," said Lee Hsi-chi (
In Ten Aspects of My Artistic Life (浮生十帖), Lee's current exhibition at the National Museum of History (國立歷史博物館), the 64-year-old painter is showing his latest experiments with rearrangeable plates on which his pet medium -- lacquer -- is used to bring life to a limited variety of colors presented on a metal surface.
PHOTO COURTESY OF NMH
Pleasure, stimulation, monologue, understanding, sadness, an unscarred heart, new worries, happiness, brilliance and dynamism are the subjects of the ten large-format works. The composition of the works, however, is in flux, because they are each made up of several modular rectangular plates. Lee will rearrange them a couple of times during the course of the exhibition to give them a new appearance.
PHOTO COURTESY OF NMH
Creating paintings that can be rearranged is an idea Lee has worked on for a decade. Playing a Tangram puzzle he bought as a souvenir in Japan on a sleepless night gave him the idea that paintings could also be moved around like this.
Later when traveling in China's Hubei province, Lee was thrilled by its famous traditional lacquer artefacts. The lacquer objects are left to dry in extreme temperatures, resulting in a cracked surface that is then rubbed smooth.
The cobweb of cracks fascinated Lee, who saw a way of giving the rigid painted surface an organic aspect.
He went to Fuzhou in China, also an important lacquer center, where he learn the whole lacquer process. China is the place Lee often finds his artistic inspiration, while many younger artists have turned to things more "local" or "Taiwanese."
"Artists of my generation favor the `Chinese sentiments.' Nowadays Taiwanese are much influenced by politics. Art has become a political language.
"Art should stay untouched by political trends. It is best if artists reflect local qualities visually. Expressing the `regional' can make really great works. But they should lift the quality of their works to international standards," Lee said.
Lee has been active since the 1950s, teaming up with Yuyu Yang (
Over the past 20 years, Lee has devoted himself to expanding the frontiers of painting. His Great Calligraphy series, which detached the meaning from Chinese characters and treated the brush strokes as individual symbols, marked his highest achievement in this style.
Also on show is Lee's late 1990s series A Passage to Solitary Darkness, Memories of the Far and Re-orientation , the last being Lee's best-known series.
Re-orientation was a follow-up to the much earlier Orientation, which applied pop-art ideas to Chinese imagery, and Post-orientation, similarly dealing with Chinese calligraphy.
What: Ten Aspects of My Artistic Life -- Lee Hsi-chi solo exhibition
Where: National Museum of History, No. 49, Nan-hai Rd., Taipei.
When: until Feb. 3
Under pressure, President William Lai (賴清德) has enacted his first cabinet reshuffle. Whether it will be enough to staunch the bleeding remains to be seen. Cabinet members in the Executive Yuan almost always end up as sacrificial lambs, especially those appointed early in a president’s term. When presidents are under pressure, the cabinet is reshuffled. This is not unique to any party or president; this is the custom. This is the case in many democracies, especially parliamentary ones. In Taiwan, constitutionally the president presides over the heads of the five branches of government, each of which is confusingly translated as “president”
Sept. 1 to Sept. 7 In 1899, Kozaburo Hirai became the first documented Japanese to wed a Taiwanese under colonial rule. The soldier was partly motivated by the government’s policy of assimilating the Taiwanese population through intermarriage. While his friends and family disapproved and even mocked him, the marriage endured. By 1930, when his story appeared in Tales of Virtuous Deeds in Taiwan, Hirai had settled in his wife’s rural Changhua hometown, farming the land and integrating into local society. Similarly, Aiko Fujii, who married into the prominent Wufeng Lin Family (霧峰林家) in 1927, quickly learned Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) and
The Venice Film Festival kicked off with the world premiere of Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia Wednesday night on the Lido. The opening ceremony of the festival also saw Francis Ford Coppola presenting filmmaker Werner Herzog with a lifetime achievement prize. The 82nd edition of the glamorous international film festival is playing host to many Hollywood stars, including George Clooney, Julia Roberts and Dwayne Johnson, and famed auteurs, from Guillermo del Toro to Kathryn Bigelow, who all have films debuting over the next 10 days. The conflict in Gaza has also already been an everpresent topic both outside the festival’s walls, where
The low voter turnout for the referendum on Aug. 23 shows that many Taiwanese are apathetic about nuclear energy, but there are long-term energy stakes involved that the public needs to grasp Taiwan faces an energy trilemma: soaring AI-driven demand, pressure to cut carbon and reliance on fragile fuel imports. But the nuclear referendum on Aug. 23 showed how little this registered with voters, many of whom neither see the long game nor grasp the stakes. Volunteer referendum worker Vivian Chen (陳薇安) put it bluntly: “I’ve seen many people asking what they’re voting for when they arrive to vote. They cast their vote without even doing any research.” Imagine Taiwanese voters invited to a poker table. The bet looked simple — yes or no — yet most never showed. More than two-thirds of those
RSS