文 / 高志仁
The leading artist among Taiwan’s first Western-style painters continues to fascinate viewers.
In April this year, an international symposium on the preservation of cultural heritage in tropical Southeast Asia was held in Bangkok, Thailand. One of the invited speakers was Spanish art conservationist Ioseba Soraluze from the Art Technological Conservation and Restoration Section at the Art Center of Cheng Shiu University in southern Taiwan’s Kaohsiung City. Soraluze spoke on the restoration of works by Taiwanese artist Chen Cheng-po (陳澄波, 1895–1947). As Chen’s grandson Chen Li-po (陳立栢) listened to the English-language presentation, he began to feel uneasy. Here was a foreign scholar giving an English-language presentation in a foreign country on preserving his grandfather’s artistic legacy, and Chen Li-po wondered about Taiwan’s dedication to taking care of its own cultural treasures. “The future of our culture depends solely on our own efforts,” says Chen Li-po, director of the Chen Cheng-po Cultural Foundation. The foundation was established in 1999 in Chiayi City, southern Taiwan—the artist’s hometown—to promote the development of Taiwanese art. “We must shape the subtlety and richness of our own culture so that we can really develop our presence in the international community,” Chen Li-po says. His father Chen Tsung-kuang (陳重光), Chen Cheng-po’s eldest son, serves as chairman of the foundation.
For historian Hsiao Chong-ray (蕭瓊瑞), the name Chen Cheng-po is synonymous with fine arts in Taiwan. This is due to the artistic achievements and passion of the senior Chen, who was among the first of Taiwan’s Western-style painters, as well as to the artist’s dedication to the promotion of art, Hsiao says. Hsiao is an art history expert at National Cheng Kung University in Tainan, southern Taiwan and the editor-in-chief of an 18-volume series titled The Complete Works of Chen Cheng-po. The series is being released jointly by the Chen Cheng-po Cultural Foundation and the Institute of Taiwan History at Academia Sinica, the country’s foremost research institution. “The true Chen Cheng-po research is just about to begin,” Hsiao writes in the general preface to the series.
Publication of the landmark book series is scheduled for completion in 2014, when a major series of events will be held to commemorate the 120th anniversary of the artist’s birth. The celebration will include painting exhibitions held in Taiwan, Japan and mainland China as the painter lived in each country for many years, as well as productions about the artist’s life, possibly in the form of a film or stage and television shows. The exhibitions will display newly restored works by Chen Cheng-po from the thousands of works in ink, oil, pastel, pencil and watercolor that are the focus of preservation efforts currently underway at Cheng Shiu and the artifact conservation office at National Taiwan Normal University’s Department of Fine Arts.
Two Backgrounds
Chen Cheng-po grew up in a time when private, traditional Chinese tutorship was giving way to modern public schooling. “The two educational backgrounds gave him a distinct Han Chinese ethnic consciousness,” art critic Chen Yu-jen (陳譽仁) says, “and also helped him become familiar with modern disciplines including fine arts.” By the same token, Chen Cheng-po’s art training and painting style progressed through a mixture of Eastern and Western influences.
In 1924, Chen Cheng-po moved to Japan to study at an art school, and in 1926, his work Chiayi Street was chosen for the Imperial Fine Arts Exhibition held in Tokyo, making him the first Taiwanese painter to be selected for the show. The following year his oil painting Street Scene on a Summer Day (1927) was also selected for the Japanese show.
Two years later, in 1929, after completing his academic study in Japan, Chen moved to mainland China to teach at several art schools in Shanghai. His creations from this period reflect his research into and the subsequent influence of traditional Chinese landscape painting. A noted example is the work Fresh Flow (1929), which “uses the typical format of ancient Chinese painting to divide the background and foreground with a river,” Chen Yu-jen says. According to Hsiao, the spatial arrangement of Fresh Flow is reminiscent of classical representations of northern China’s solid landscape, in which distance is suggested through positional relationships rather than the dark or light colors often used in Western painting. During Chen Cheng-po’s stay in Shanghai, he also produced a number of nudes, some of which echo the 19th-century French salon motif of the figure of the goddess Venus lying on the sea, Chen Yu-jen says. “The naked woman was perhaps drawn from life, but the setting was obviously based on imagination,” the art critic explains. “The French imagery in the painting is quite intriguing.” Hsiao points out that Chen Cheng-po’s Shanghai period, during which he kept up active exchanges with both traditional and modern painters, saw many works created “in a Modernist vein.”
In 1933, as Sino-Japanese hostilities grew more intense in Shanghai, Chen Cheng-po returned to his hometown in Chiayi. The move led to the painter’s eventual re-emergence as a mature artist with his own unique style, but not before a brief phase of self-doubt in the mid-1930s. “I’m afraid that my work’s selection for the imperial exhibition and my fame occurred too early in my life,” the artist said in an interview with a local newspaper at the time. “If I’d had a longer learning period, I could have gone beyond my current state and reached greater perfection.” With such anxieties weighing on his mind, the artist busied himself instead with the affairs of the Taiyang Art Association, a group he formed in 1934 with seven other native Taiwanese, or Taiwan-born Japanese painters. The association represented the most prominent painters on the island during the period of Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945), and in its first year established the annual Taiyang Art Exhibition—a major fine arts show that rivaled the government-sponsored Taiwan Exhibition.
In the company of fellow Taiyang painters, Chen Cheng-po began visiting Danshui in northern Taiwan, where the artists would draw from nature. “Probably thanks to the scenery at Danshui and Chen’s persistent efforts, the brushstrokes and composition of his painting improved and he eventually developed a new style,” Chen Yu-jen says, citing Hill from 1936 as a masterpiece from this period. At the top of the canvas is the red-brick Presbyterian high school with Danshui’s rural landscape filling the rest of the scene. In contrast to Street Scene on a Summer Day, which features an empty foreground typical of Chen’s earlier works, the new style seen in Hill uses lively details such as winding footpaths through paddy fields and a house’s open door to tell a story, Chen Yu-jen says. The art critic, echoing other researchers, says the work was an indirect response to local politics, as the school was at odds with the colonial government at the time, yet the octagonal tower of the educational institution is prominent at the top of the image. “[The school] stands as a spiritual symbol just as in the West the church bell tower usually looks down on all the other buildings in a town,” Chen Yu-jen notes.
In a way, Chen Cheng-po has become a significant artistic and historical symbol, and one subject to increasingly subtle interpretations. “He is a complex painter who was born in Japanese-ruled Taiwan and embraced ethnic Han consciousness, but these factors did not prevent him from absorbing modern art trends,” Chen Yu-jen says. The art critic notes Chen Cheng-po’s substantial exchanges with artists from Japan and China, despite the political rift between the two countries. “There seemed to be an independent art world where artists from different countries could interact freely with one another,” Chen Yu-jen says.
Still, Chen Cheng-po’s native roots became the central motif and motivation for his work. Hsiao cites the painter’s personality, his knowledge of traditional Chinese art and Taiwan’s unique environment as three major factors contributing to the painter’s artistic achievement, with the last one being the most decisive. “Taiwan’s specific natural and cultural environments gave Chen Cheng-po’s works a ‘wild’ beauty and … a kind of intensity to the point of distortion. Such qualities can’t be found in all Taiwanese painters, but are usually evident in those who show particularly strong grassroots or nativist inclinations,” Hsiao explains. The professor argues that this local inspiration is quite obvious in Chen Cheng-po’s later works such as his depictions of Danshui, which feature a mixture of Western and local buildings plus luxurious green trees. The images display “typical aspects of Taiwanese culture, such as the combination of harmony and agitation, conflict and reconciliation,” Hsiao says. “My father not only painted, held exhibitions and organized art groups,” Chen Tsung-kuang recalls, “but also showed great concern toward his students and common people.”
Eclipsed by Politics
For many years, Chen Cheng-po’s influence in local art development was overshadowed by politics, however, and his work was largely unknown to his fellow Taiwanese. In March 1947, Chen Cheng-po, as a representative of the Chiayi City Council, was shot dead during a popular uprising against the Kuomintang government, which had taken over Taiwan at the end of World War II. For decades after the incident, the painter’s name was taboo, a situation that adversely affected recognition of his artistic achievements.
It was not until the late 1970s that the artist’s works began to be exhibited again in Taipei. Historian Hsiao considers it unfair to identify the painter primarily as a “political victim,” however. “Descriptions of Chen are usually full of political connotations such as him being ‘innocent,’ ‘romantic’ or ‘brave,’” art critic Chen Yu-jen says. “While these terms draw attention to Chen’s personal tragedy, they compromise the complexity of his creative endeavors.” Neither should the circumstances of Chen Cheng-po’s death or his history as a social activist be allowed to eclipse his ability as a professional artist, Hsiao says. After all, that artistry is why the painter’s work continues to fascinate viewers today.
Since the early 1990s, a number of Chen Cheng-po’s paintings have sold at auction for record prices for a Taiwanese artist, some in the millions of US dollars. The great majority of Chen Cheng-po’s artwork is held by the Chen family, however, and they wish to see more of the works restored and made available for public display.
In March this year, along with publication of the third volume of The Complete Works of Chen Cheng-po, the Chen family donated two paintings—one of a masked nude and the other a still-life of a vase of red and white flowers—to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. Chen Li-po hopes to see more museums and other art institutions in Taiwan devote greater resources to promoting local heritage instead of focusing too much on foreign art. “It’s not just about hanging a painting on the wall,” he says, “but also about building exhibition mechanisms and developing interpretations.”
Indeed, Chen Cheng-po’s artwork still has much to say. Neither of the two paintings donated to the Taipei museum are landscapes, the genre that contributed the most to the artist’s reputation, although they are no less integral to his artistic development. In a review of the painting of the masked woman, Hsiao says that the image has a surreal quality. “It’s quite unusual for one of Taiwan’s first-generation oil painters to go beyond realism toward a more imaginary world,” the professor notes. It seems that there is more to be learned from Chen Cheng-po’s work, just as his fellow Taiwanese have more to learn about their own land.
(Taiwan Review Vol.61 Byline:PAT GAO Publication Date:08/01/2012) |
