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Vocal, local and proud of it
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文 / 布萊克‧卡特 (阿布)
J.C. Kuo (郭振昌) likes to talk. Whether it’s history, politics, folklore, religion, art, psychology, philosophy, love, marriage or money, the energetic 59-year-old painter will expound on the subject and then pretend he didn’t want to.
“Telling all these stories has made my throat sore,” he jokes while walking through his biggest exhibition to date, showing through September 21 (2008) at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.
“I’ll tell you about this one,” he says, pointing at a piece and launching into a comparison of Greek mythology’s Sisyphus and the Chinese folk legend of Hsing Tien. In two works from last year, Kuo has replaced Sisyphus’ stone with a shiny pink balloon, making his task seem even more pointless. A 1993 painting shows a more traditional view of the headless giant Hsing Tien — ardently raging with axe and shield in hand after the Yellow Emperor, feeling threatened by the giant, buried his head in a mountain.
Kuo is obviously pleased with the show, which fills the entire top floor of the museum. Some 137 paintings span the 18 years since he was finally able to quit his day job and paint full-time.
“I spent three and a half years preparing for this exhibit,” he says. “After it was up I didn’t leave my house for a week.”
He particularly likes the walkway overlooking the lobby of the museum, a space many artists find challenging to fill. Kuo has made it a highlight of the show.
As visitors come up the stairs — or this being Taipei, more likely wait for the escalator to deliver their ambulophobic selves to the top floor — their attention is drawn to the 16-meter wide “Totem and Taboo” (2001), the exhibition’s title piece. Presented on a single wall for the first time, it comprises eight large paintings framed by 160 smaller printed images of people, famous and otherwise, each crowned with a halo. Black-and-white textbook headshots of Confucius, the First Emperor, Herodotus and Karl Marx are interspersed with color prints of strangers Kuo photographed on the street.
This is a recurring theme in Kuo’s paintings: He draws little distinction between the street peddler, the factory owner, the politician, the scholar, the deity. All are equally empowered to change themselves, their country, or the world.
Kuo’s penchant for storytelling shows through in his paintings. He employs a signature medley of heavy line, photorealist detail and colorful flourishes to describe figures and scenes common in tacky romance novels, newspapers and classical literature. Some narratives are well-known; others are invented. Most are a mix of the two.
The newer pieces increasingly include cartoon stickers, receipts, newspaper clippings and cheap plastic beads that are stuck to the canvas, but the influence of American pop artist Robert Rauschenberg’s “combines” is also evident in earlier works. Fabric and wood are common embellishments. “China Impression” (2002) features several CDs and even a laserdisc of “Jane Fonda’s New Workout,” leading the inquisitive viewer to contemplate: What on earth is a Taiwanese man doing with a 1985 copy of “Jane Fonda’s New Workout”?
Kuo is adamant that excepting the obvious bits and bobs attached to the pieces, the work is done entirely by hand, mostly in acrylics, without an airbrush or the help of assistants.
He often draws small sketches first, then has slides made and projects them onto a canvas. After tracing the lines, he fills the spaces between them with paint. Some parts are based on magazine clippings, some from photographs he takes himself, and others have an abstract, ornamental quality. His bold black lines — the most recognizable feature of Kuo’s work — “come both first and last,” he says. When the painting is almost complete he retraces them, building up to the desired weight and opacity.
Becoming a professional artist wasn’t easy for Kuo. His father wanted him to be a doctor and he says he was just a few points short of testing into medical school at National Taiwan University. His father relented and he studied under painter Lee Chun-shan (李仲生), producing fluid, almost surrealist pieces that to some extent mimicked his mentor. Lee advised him to develop a strong personal style before attending an art school, and Kuo painted for several years before entering the Department of Fine Arts at the Chinese Culture College (now Chinese Culture University).
After graduating he struggled to support himself as an artist, at times “nearly starving to death.” Bread and milk powder became the staples of his diet.
“At one point I dropped to 102 pounds [46kg],” he says now, a little proudly.
In 1974 Kuo received a grant from the US Asia Foundation to study Taiwanese folk art. He became a vocal member and critic of the Nativist Movement of the 1970s, arguing that in preserving Taiwanese traditions it was important not to overly romanticize the country life that so many people were trying to escape. Having grown up in Lukang, Changhua County — one of Taiwan’s oldest towns, famous for its folk art — Kuo accepted that gaudy neon lighting and cheap concrete temples were just as Taiwanese as the folk archetypes en vogue with artists at the time.
Chia Chi Jason Wang (王嘉驥), an old friend of Kuo and curator of the current exhibit, has written that Kuo developed much of his current style during an arduous period when he both painted and worked as general manager of Choice Printing company. He left the job in 1989 and has since spent his afternoons and evenings working at his studio in Taipei’s Songshan District.
Kuo says he “only paints about 20 pieces a year,” but judging from the execution and scale of the works shown, that is plenty, even for someone as animated as he is. His paintings seem to be bursting with energy — perhaps he has an excess of it after giving up his Jane Fonda video.
The painting style Kuo developed in the late 1970s and 1980s melds low-brow with high-brow, rural with metropolitan, and traditional with modern. While this basic aesthetic may be almost passé, Kuo has at least two things going for him that many others don’t. First, he’s steadfastly Taiwanese in a country that sometimes seems to have the memory of a goldfish; and second, his paintings look good even if you drop all the references.
The combination helps explain why viewers at the museum include children shouting “Waaa!” and running up to point out a colorful mask painted over the face of a child, teenage students quizzing each other about who’s who in the paintings, and older people carefully staring at the works, hands joined behind their backs. It’s easy to imagine them wondering: “What exactly is Taiwan, anyway?”
By Blake Carter
CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
Revised version of an article published in Taiwan News on Friday, July 18, 2008 |
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