From Doctor to Artist: Shee's All That!

At first glance, the tall, well-dressed and mild-mannered Shee (also known as Samuel C. Shih) doesn't seem like an artist, but rather a gentleman with a strong Japanese air to him. His living room is extremely sparse and tidy, and apart from the paintings on his wall, you can't see a drop of color anywhere. This makes it hard for a visitor to imagine that this is where a painter works ten hours a day, making some 50 oil paintings a year.

"In my studio in America I have white carpet on the floor too!" says Shee, displaying a concern for cleanliness that rivals any surgeon. There's no doubt that the 30 years that Shee spent as a doctor have made this man, who now refers to himself as "the painter Shee," markedly different from other painters. Since he picked up a paintbrush eight years ago, Shee has adopted his own "three no's policy": no participation in competitions, no memberships in art associations, and no joint exhibitions. He's a loner in the art world who doesn't exchange opinions with other artists or socialize with them. It's no surprise that not many people have heard of him.

Yet within just two years after embarking on his new career as a self-taught painter; Shee had completed 100 large oil paintings, and used his own money to put on gallery exhibitions, to put out a catalog of his work, and to establish a private museum. Any small encouragement he received just em-boldened him to press ahead. People were startled by his ardent desire to create and disseminate his work.

At the same time, his work is quite unique: dreamy soft landscapes like Monet's with sharp, abstract, eye-catching colors. When he paints people, the beautiful women of his paintings always have clear and bright eyes that are overly large for their faces. When he paints reflections in water, the reflections are clearer than what they are reflecting. Things in the background of his paintings might be overly large, and things in the foreground overly small. . . .

"Who is Manet?" "What's perspective?" "How do you sketch?" Even after Shee had resolved to change careers, and even after he had exhibited his work, he would still frequently ask questions such as these that betrayed a shocking ignorance about art.

This is hardly surprising, since before Shee was 55 he hadn't had much contact with art, let alone created any of it himself.

So why did he decide to paint? "Back then, when old friends got together, they would discuss what they were going to do when they retired. Some said that they wanted to fish; others wanted to play golf. Me, I decided to fool around with something that I had previously had little opportunity to be around." And that's how he became an artist. But perhaps there are some hints from earlier in Shee's life that make the sudden transformation not seem entirely out of the blue.

Shee was born at the end of 1927 in Changhua, Taiwan, to a well-known Changhua family. He received a Japanese education. His father, a school principal, had the prestige of education and the money of the landed gentry, but believed firmly in a Spartan-style education, and was very strict with his children. In order to escape his father's castigations and beatings, Shee from an early age learned how to make quick exits.

Shee was the third of five children, and the only one who would argue with their father. And because he was diligent and thorough in performing his duties, his gentle mother often requested his aid. Even before Shee had turned ten years old, she was already entrusting him with sensitive tasks that she was too embarrassed to do herself, such as collecting a debt from a tenant farmer. "Looking back on it, I have a lot of regrets. It was as if I never had a childhood!"

At Yuanlin Secondary School, Shee enjoyed mathematics, and he was intent upon becoming a mathematician. But then one foggy early morning when he was a high school senior, a small train bringing commuting students to school was in an accident. Many of Shee's classmates were killed or seriously injured. Shee had taken that train nearly every school day for six years, but oddly enough, the previous night he had stayed at the home of a friend in Yuanlin, so wasn't on the train that day.

"When I saw my classmates-with their legs broken and arms injured, with flesh and blood exposed-and thought how lucky I had been," Shee recalls, "I resolved almost immediately to cast aside my plans to study mathematics and to study medicine instead." Although the study of medicine was arduous, once he had made the choice, he had neither complaints nor regrets.

After studying for seven years at Kaohsiung Medical College and then performing his military service, Shee went to America to be an intern in surgery at the New Jersey Medical School. There he would encounter an experience that would also change his life.

"It was a procedure for breast cancer," Shee recalls. "First I had to cut out a small section of the tumor and give it to the pathologist to look at under the microscope, who would be able to tell me in three minutes whether it was a benign or cancerous tumor. If it were cancerous, the lymph nodes would have to be entirely removed; if it was benign then only the affected tissue would have to be removed."

As a perfectionist, Shee found it hard to reconcile himself with the idea of turning his patient's life over to someone else. What if the pathologist's conclusion was wrong, and the decision about what to cut out was based on error? Therefore, he asked the hospital to let him change departments for a while, so that he could learn pathology skills himself before returning to surgery.

Little did he expect to find the world under the microscope so intriguing-its circles, stars, sickles and other myriad shapes; it wrigglers and squashers; its transformations and breakouts; the propagation of cells and the attempts of opposing cells to invade or eat each other up; even the death throes of cells. Life's hidden cellular struggles were being played out on a microscope's small glass slide. Whoever could correctly read this play of the cells through the microscope could save a patient's life. Half a year later, Shee decided to give up surgery and become a pathologist.

In Shee's third year in America, because of his outstanding performance, he was selected to pursue further study at the Mayo Clinic. This was a rare honor for an overseas Chinese in America. Shee made the most of the opportunity, studying nuclear medicine. Five years later, he had obtained qualifications in anatomical pathology, clinical pathology and nuclear medicine. Moreover, for his new method of determining the longevity of red blood cells, he won a Young Investigator Award from the American Society of Nuclear Medicine.

While he was at the Mayo Clinic, there was another unexpected incident that would prove to have a big effect on Shee. In 1969 he came back to Taiwan to visit his parents, and in his status as an outstanding young scholar, he met with Chiang Ching-kuo, who was then vice-premier. Chiang Ching-kuo asked him for his opinion about the quality of medical care in the ROC and the ROC's medical system. Shee gave him a full assessment, whereupon Chiang invited Shee to return and participate in revolutionizing medicine in Taiwan. Shee couldn't refuse on the spot, but at heart he was unwilling. As a result of this incident, Shee didn't return to Taiwan for more than a decade after he went back to America. It got to the point where he didn't even dare answer his family's letters and telephone calls.

"During the era of the 'white terror,' it was anybody's guess what the 'strong man' was thinking," says Shee, who was worried that Chiang Ching-kuo would think: "If you're not willing to help me, you must be my enemy!" What's more, Shee had a classmate at Yuanlin High who was imprisoned for many years for writing a thesis that was considered "inappropriate." This terrified Shee, who was accustomed to being critical about affairs in Taiwan with his friends. Moreover, with Shee living away from his homeland for so long, none of his three children could speak Chinese. They didn't like visiting Taiwan, and they all married people born in the US. This is a source of much regret for Shee.

After leaving the Mayo Clinic, Shee moved to the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Eventually he became the first person of non-European ancestry to become head of pathology at the hospital and the director of its pathology lab.

After serving as the lab director for eight years, in order to improve operations in the lab, which employed more than 100 people, Shee took two days off a week from his busy schedule to study for an MBA at Northwestern University in Chicago, a three-hour drive away. It shows how much professional ambition he had.

Yet fate was laughing at his ambition. When Shee led his department to become the hospital's biggest money maker and best-known department, the resulting flow of money that came into the department became a problem, causing a dilemma for the hospital, which was set up to be non-profit. The federal government even began to suspect that the hospital was using its non-profit status to evade taxes.

Shee urged the hospital administration to just turn the hospital into a for-profit institution, which would pay taxes and aggressively seek profits. But his suggestion was not heeded, and as a result Shee left the hospital and the state of Wisconsin, which he had served for 13 years. He moved to northern Illinois, where he established Vital Medical Laboratories, which provided services in pathology to hospitals, doctors and insurance companies.

Shee smoothly made the change from white-smocked lab doctor to entrepreneur and manager. In the early eighties, heeding the signs of the spread of AIDS, the quick-thinking Shee suggested that insurance companies carry out AIDS screening for those applying for insurance. This idea met with a huge response in the marketplace, and attracted the notice of the major pharmaceutical company Hoffman-LaRoche, which thought very highly of Shee's company and eventually acquired it.

After selling his company, Shee, who was only in his early fifties, traveled in America, China and Taiwan, and worked for a period as a medical and business consultant. But Shee, who had been through so many twists and turns of his career and seen so much, suddenly began to have some basic doubts about the meaning of life, coinciding with a period in which his father fell ill, Shee himself had some interpersonal disputes, and there were many man-made and natural disasters in society. Shee began to wonder what his own lifetime of struggle and pursuit of perfection had ultimately been for.

In search of answers, Shee began reading Laozi and the Buddhist sutras. He neither understood them nor dared to ask anyone about them. Finally, under his wife's direction, he began to seek comfort from reading the Bible.

Finding his way

"I remember that it was September 5, 1993," Shee recalls. On that day he walked into his neighborhood Presbyterian Church for the first time and asked the minister to baptize him. The minister asked why. "I had nowhere else to turn. I had to come!" replied Shee honestly.

In Shee's mind a baptism was just a ceremony of conversion. He hadn't expected that after the baptism he would feel that he had suddenly walked across a boundary, "with one step entering the Kingdom of God, never to waver again!"

"God said, why are you full of melancholy and suffering? I've already died on the cross for you, so that you can put down your own burdens." And suddenly Shee felt the relief of saying "I quit" and entrusting all to God! Three months after being baptized, he was suddenly inspired to pick up a paintbrush. From that moment on, his life has revolved around oil painting.

"I remember that my first painting was of water lilies," says Shee. On the one hand, ever since he was small he had loved a description by an ancient Chinese writer of how pure water lilies were, "touching the dirt and the mud, but not being stained by them." Moreover, water lilies bloomed in glorious profusion in the summer in parks where he often lingered. Unexpectedly, Shee's completed canvas, which was full of moving vitality, moved Shee himself to tears, and when his wife, who is an architect, returned home, she wondered where he had purchased such a lovely canvas.

This first painting gave him great confidence, in that he knew that it made him happy that he could paint and create something. In just his second day of painting, Shee couldn't wait to declare that he had "dropped medicine for art." Kmowing that time is precious, and that he was already 55, he immediately embraced his new self, and determined not to waste a single day.

Thinking back on it today, Shee says frankly that he could be so firm about his decision because his children had already grown up, and because he himself had already served as a doctor and entrepreneur for so many years and had accumulated a nice nest egg. He no longer needed to labor, and had come to a phase of his life where it was time to do something for himself.

One of Shee's "soulmates," Gloria Groom, curator at the Art Institute of Chicago and an expert in modern French art, compares Shee to Gauguin, one of the masters of French impressionism. Gauguin was also self-taught and had likewise given up a well paying career (as a stockbroker). Like Gauguin, Shee makes vibrant use of color to draw images from imagination. Yet Shee did not stake everything on a single throw of the dice, as did Gauguin. Whereas Gau-guin, a man obsessed, abandoned his wife and child, Shee, secure in the knowledge that he had completed his life's duties, sought to liberate himself from life's shackles.

Because Shee feels that he doesn't have much time left, he isn't willing to spend time to study with a teacher: He says: "You don't paint with your hand, you paint with your mind." "Don't be afraid, and don't worry about right and wrong, just let your instincts guide your brush." "The proportion of things in the background and the foreground aren't accurate? It doesn't matter. By painting the images that float up in the mind, you will always move people more than you would by painting realistically!"

At one exhibition an old Jewish-American professor had this to say about his work: Not having had any formal training, Shee paints without being confined by any set rules or methods. He lacks a grounding in the techniques of sketching, and the colors that fill his works clash. Yet still he is able to create harmonious and aesthetically pleasing works!

Shee laughs and says that there are people who ask what style of painter he is, and what number phase is his current period. "I don't care about labels like abstract, impressionist, or concrete. I'm not like those who have been painting since they were small, and have had time to slowly grope their way forward in periods. All my styles and periods have come at once!" He may be depicting a misty, overwhelmingly beautiful pool of water lilies; he may be reflecting upon the struggles of life, or expressing wrathful indignation or loneliness in his "Meditation" series; or he may be painting a peaceful setting sun or the bliss of a pair of mandarin ducks playing in the water. No matter, in Shee's rendering all of them show a unique living rhythm.

The 30 years Shee spent as a doctor have left a deep impression on his art. In Alien Life, he uses thick green paint and strong lines to depict a womb. Within the womb are small beads of color that represent the eggs, ready to go, charged with great vitality.

"I recall that when I first moved into pathology, it was partly because I was very sharp with those patterns and images that put the world's myriad forms of infection into focus," says Shee. "These visual forms are symptoms of disease, and once I saw one of them, I would almost certainly never forget it." That strange world that was revealed to him back then under the microscope is now being transformed by a painter's ideas and imagination into paintings, achieving a kind of redemption.

Dr. Gloria Groom points to the "healing characteristics" of Shee's work: "Shee's art is not about being sick-the symptoms and degeneration of disease-but rather about healing. His paintings are comforting, art that expresses hope and joy."

Groom believes that the processes of art and medicine are very similar: they share the three stages of observation, diagnosis, and treatment. Shee's art is rooted in careful observation about the world, to which he offers a sincere response and treatment, allowing people who see his work to be liberated from their anxieties and tribulations.

Experts may have this take on Shee's work, but what about ordinary people? Chen Hsu-mei, formerly director of curriculum at Chinling Girls' High School who studied traditional Chinese painting, is one of Shee's great admirers. She says that Shee's paintings reveal "tremendous energy." First she developed an appreciation for Shee's paintings, and then she gradually got to know Shee the person. She has discovered that the former reflect the latter: "Shee is a very positive, active and confident person, and his paintings give viewers a sense of encouragement and excitement. "

Shee himself describes his paintings as having been "divinely inspired." Their spirit and energy are entirely the beneficent gifts of God.

"Before I paint, I always first kneel down in prayer. It may sound weird, but after prayer a steady stream of images always come to mind, and the desire to capture them and give them shape prods me on, so that the brush never leaves my hand and I keep painting." When he is inspired, Shee may paint all day and well into the night. Sometimes, he'll wake up in the middle of the night, get dressed and paint until daybreak so as to convey what he saw in his dreams.

"When I pray, I always say, 'God, please give me strength and wisdom. Let me make better works, and spread love and hope in the world. These works are yours. I am just a tool in your hands. Let my work bring glory to you.'"

Although spirituality and divine inspiration have always been part of his art, Shee used to avoid talking about these aspects. But then about four years ago, after Shee published an autobiography, when he attended a publication party for the book in Taipei, a middle-aged woman who was a stranger to Shee looked at the book for about half an hour before suddenly throwing it down in anger: "You are a Christian. Why don't you have the courage to acknowledge that!"

"How did she know that I was Christian? What right did she have to scold me in public?" Several years later Shee still doesn't understand. Nevertheless, since then Shee has let rationality and the constraints of the mundane world fade in importance. He has gradually opened the door to his heart, and decided never again to conceal his spiritual path, and his works, overflowing with love and beauty, have become more mature and above-board.

Shee shows deep gratitude for his Providential gift, and he is always hoping to make a bigger contribution. Thirty years ago, Shee missed out on an opportunity to use medicine to give something back to his native Taiwan, so today he is using art to make a contribution to what he calls his "culturally impoverished motherland." Apart from establishing a museum in Chicago, he has also established studios in Paris and Taipei. He spends several months every year in his homeland. The rest of the year he travels on the world stage as a "Taiwanese painter," speaking and exhibiting in the hope of building a "culture of excellence" for Taiwan.

Yet could a gift from God disappear like the mist in a dream? If one day he were without inspiration, what would Shee do?

"I've never thought about that." With great conviction Shee says that if that day ever came God would arrange another path for him to take. Formerly a consultant who would advise people about their career plans, Shee is now content to let God guide his life, letting his natural potential flow out, with no need to make plans himself.

Fortunately, Shee's creativity has flowed uninterrupted for eight years now. His work has moved many people, and his international reputation is gradually growing. People of the world whose spirits hunger for something more, cast off your shackles and enjoy his works of art!

p.088

A pure white Virgin Mary, a Jesus with ruby-red blood, and a God that, like a green world, gives life to everything. Shee's Biblical references all merge together, and each brushstroke is full of deep meaning. (photo by Jimmy Lin)

p.090

In Waltz a flock of ducks are playing in the water, concretely depicting Shee's abundant creativity.

p.091

Though depicting the lonely chill of dusk, there is a serenity to the sadness of Autumn Nocturne.

p.092

Shee's "Meditation" series was well received when it was exhibited in Japan. This painting's bright colors don't seem to be from the world of men, but rather give people a start as if they had a glimpse of Heaven.

p.093

We Alone, depicting beautiful and fragrant flowers, is one of Shee's still life paintings.

p.094

When the pianist Chen Yu-hsiang was in America, Shee once bought a Steinway piano for her and paid for her to have lessons with a famous teacher. Shee's painting Lady Steinway is in reference to this.