Taiwanese painter Lu Yu-ming (呂游銘), who is known in the US and Japan for his surrealist and impressionist oil paintings of cats, has in recent years achieved recognition at home following his return to Taiwan’s art scene, with a biographical documentary about him, titled An Odyssey of Dreams (童夢), set to be shown in cinemas in Taiwan this month.
Lu, 66, was born in Taipei’s Wanhua District (萬華) and grew up during the Martial Law era, during which the authoritarian regime of the then-Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) ruled the nation under a state of emergency, strictly censoring the media and punishing dissidents as traitors.
“Repressive rule and an educational system obsessed with degrees and financial success greatly limited artistic creativity, and not being able to paint to my heart’s content was a major factor in my decision to leave Taiwan in 1983 to become a painter in the US,” he said.
Lu said he was fortunate to meet Cheng Ming-ching (鄭明進), an art teacher at his elementary school, who discovered his interest in painting and tutored him daily on basic techniques.
“Other students studied for the entire day, but he let me study half the day and practice painting in the other half. Cheng was a great educator who encouraged me to develop freely,” Lu said.
However, in general, most families and educators tried to steer students to more profitable jobs, which was contrary to his inclinations, Lu said.
Recounting his time at junior-high school, Lu said the dean of students would recite Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) “12 Principles for the Youth” at morning meetings, with the last principle being “helping others is happiness.”
He said he saw a teacher beating a student and made a sketch of the incident, with the title “beating people is happiness,” which circulated among his classmates.
“They had a good laugh, but I got a reprimand,” Lu said.
He was employed as a designer with a focus on space-saving arrangements, which he said kept him out of trouble because it “did not involve thought,” but added that there was a lack of respect for intellectual property rights, with the government being one of its chief violators.
However, as soon as he started painting, he faced censorship and restrictions by the authorities, such as a ban on any five-pointed stars in his pictures of the night sky, because of their association with communism, Lu said.
Lu said one of his illustrations that was published in a newspaper also drew complaints, because some unnamed reader traced the lines of the painting into the shape of the communist hammer and sickle.
“That was my experience with White Terror’s shadow,” he said.
After listening to a speech by former US president Ronald Reagan saying every person has a right to pursue happiness and the US is a place of opportunity that welcomes people with faith in themselves and their creativity, he decided to become a painter in the US, Lu said.
Since then, he has been painting at his home in San Francisco, Lu said, adding that every year he drives across the US in a van filled with his work to attend art festivals in Chicago and New York, a trip that takes him on a two-month journey on which the documentary focuses.
His most popular paintings belong to the A Woman and a Cat series, which sold well in the US, Europe and Japan, Lu said, adding that after being prompted by Cheng, he decided to make art in Taiwan again.
“I feel I owe something to this place and I should contribute to the nation,” he said.
His participation in the Taiwanese art scene in 2012 produced the Golden Tripod-award-winning art book If You Want to Paint, Paint, and You Will Be Good at Painting (想畫就畫就能畫), a biography that portrays how Cheng inspired him to become a painter, as well as everyday life in Taiwan during the 1960s.
Young Taiwanese should not rashly commit themselves to anything, Lu said.
“Before starting something, young people should think about how passionate they are about it and whether it is worth the price. You should do something only when you are sure that you are able and willing, because in life we are denied the luxury of knowing how things will turn out,” he said.
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