Discovering the Soul in the Wood

A lifelong ambition

“I furtively took a sliver of wood that was on the table and put it into my mouth. The moment I swallowed it, I resolved that I would devote my life to woodworking.”

“I am a child of a salt worker, a true native of the Tainan countryside.” Chen Chi-tsun was born in Lu’ermen, and he didn’t speak Mandarin before he entered elementary school. His great joy was doodling. “When my mother saw a pig I had drawn, she was delighted and called for my father to come and look.” It is only because the tender sprouts of his interest in art were not crushed at a young age that Chen has attained his success today. “I am forever grateful for my parents’ encourage­ment,” he says.

“My desire to study carving was a little secret I shared with my father.” When Chen was in fifth grade, his father was on his deathbed, and he called Chi-tsun, who had recently broken his arm in a bicycle accident, to his side. Straining to speak, he expressed his remorse at leaving his son. His young son, meanwhile, spoke of his own life ambition to work with wood.

(courtesy of Chen Chi-tsun)

Mastery through self-cultivation

“After my elementary-school graduation ceremony, I packed up a few items of clothing and left for Tainan with my uncle to start my apprenticeship.” The Guanghua Buddhist Statuary Store, whose carvers crafted in the Fuzhou style, is where Chen came to launch his carving dreams.

“In the Fuzhou carving tradition, you must apprentice for four years and three months before you can become a sculptor.” For more than three years, he toiled at sweeping the floor, preparing items for delivery to customers, and other menial tasks. He often was overcome by concerns that he wasn’t actually learning the craft. “In all honesty, I often thought about giving up.” One day, owing to a misunderstanding, the master scolded Chen harshly. An excitable 15- or 16-year-old, Chen immediately found tears running down his face. He ran to his little room, and his composure collapsed under a mound of perceived slights. Losing control, he covered his face and cried bitterly. Under the rules of his apprenticeship, missing a single day would have dis­quali­fied him from becoming a craftsman. Not only would he not have reached his intended goal, but he would have become an object of ridicule. “I couldn’t bring shame to my family.” Chen slowly calmed down, wiped away his tears, and quietly went downstairs and went back to work. “Being an apprentice is a grinding journey of self-cultivation.”

Small in years but big in ambition, a boy of action but few words, he was highly attentive and took great care in everything he did. “I always would sit down to sand right in the middle of them all, with the craftsmen carving on one side and the craftswomen outlining with chalk on the other. I would watch and quietly learn from them.” After a day of hard work, Chen would lie in his small attic room, staring at the ceiling, his mind awash with the various carving techniques he had witnessed that day. He would pretend that he himself was carving with them. It was only when the oldest apprentice left to do his military service that Chen finally got the chance to show what he was made of. His master, Lin Yishui, was astonished by his talent, and began to teach him personally. Less than a year later, more than four years after starting, Chen finally became a full-fledged craftsman. 

“My second great career mentor was Lin Liming, the second-generation proprietor of Renlexuan.” When Chen’s talents were becoming apparent, it was his good fortune to enter Renlexuan, Tainan’s highest-quality Buddhist statuary shop. Studying intensively under Lin, who was known as the “Third Master,” Chen would become lead carver at the shop just one year later.

“It seemed as if things were playing out under Buddha’s guidance.” Suddenly Chen opens a drawer, and it is as if he has opened a window onto wisdom. The drawer is full of vivid photographs of exquisite Buddhist statues, all amazing to Chen. These are the fruits of Chen’s vacation pilgrimages to temples throughout Taiwan—as far north as the Lingquan Temple on Mt. Yuemei in Keelung and as far south as the Chi Jin Mazu Temple in Kaohsiung. “Those trips north and south had a big impact on my subsequent craftsmanship.”

(courtesy of Chen Chi-tsun)

Success from broadened horizons

Never one to get stuck in a rut, Chen has always been ready to boldly take on new challenges. “I spent NT$65 to buy The Collected Works of Michelangelo,” he recalls of his youth. It was a time when information was less free flowing, and Chen felt that he had found a rare treasure. He immediately carved a new chop and imprinted it on the book to announce his ownership. The book’s explanations about sketching, realism and sculpting techniques broadened Chen’s horizons. He learned that Western aesthetics had much to offer. Ever since, Chen has combined the conventional with the modern and been comfortable with blending the forms, contents and spirits of different schools and traditions.   

“Success does not come entirely from innate talent. Rather, it also comes from skill that has to be accumulated slowly, bit by bit, through hard work.” In 1988 he took the top prize at the Tainan Fine Arts Exhibition. The following year he won the sculpture prize at the first annual Chimei Arts Awards. In 2019 he won the Taiwan Woodcarving Heritage Achievement Award, and that same year his fame spread overseas as he collected the first FLI Award of Arts in China and Taiwan, which is bestowed by an organization in Italy. Down to earth, Chen regards entering competitions as motivation to push himself to elevate his art.

(courtesy of Chen Chi-tsun)

Revealing a delicate spirit

“If you can’t move yourself, then how can you move someone else?” From the Buddhist statuary of his early period, Chen now draws on subject matter based on his own life experiences. The animating charm that he has given these sculptures makes them irresistible—works that viewers can easily connect to their own lives.

Statues he made of Koxinga that are now found in the collections of Japan’s Matsura Historical Museum and the Tainan Art Museum convey a great sense of energy and charm. They also demonstrate unmatched technical mastery. “I wanted to rehabilitate the image of that great marshal.” In 1999 Chen made use of his command of tradi­tional techniques to carve from native Taiwanese camphor the Heavenly Marshal Tian Peng, who according to Taoist belief is head of the four guards of Zi Wei, the Great Emperor of Middle Heaven. Chen engaged in rigor­ous textual research before carving Marshal Tian Peng. In his rendering the marshal has a pig’s face and human body—albeit featuring three heads and six arms, one of which bears an axe and another a halberd. The work conveys a sense of mighty righteousness that runs completely counter to the comic horndog caricature estab­lished by the classic novel Journey to the West. 

In a statue of the arhat Bakula, Chen breaks with convention by modeling the deity after an actual person. The approach allowed him to capture a less rarified and more intimate sense of benevolent wisdom. Carved in camphor wood, a statue of the Amitabha Buddha, a new work that Chen created in 2020, conveys a solemn and merci­ful spirit and a stoic charm. Seeming to have traveled thousands of years to live in the present day, the statue has clean and smooth lines that thoroughly highlight the warm texture of the wood and animate it with true spirit.

From his 1995 work Window, to 1997’s New Clothes, to 2004’s Laborer, Chen has demonstrated a mastery of Western aesthetics. Life provides the most moving of subject matter, and Chen excels at capturing the spirit of a moment to preserve for posterity—whether the subject is a child beside a window full of longing or a young girl smiling shyly.

(courtesy of Chen Chi-tsun)

True to his original goal

“Being named a ‘national treasure’ and winning a National Craft Achievement Award at my age, I feel really blessed. I want to work harder at giving back.” If the wood carving industry is to live on, it must grow strong and deep roots. With his unstinting generosity and willingness to share knowledge, Chen is working hard to pass down its legacy.

Known as the standard bearer of the Fuzhou school of Buddhist statuary, his works can be found in places of worship such as Kaohsiung’s Wenwu City God Temple, Tucheng’s Luerhmen Mazu Temple, Zuoying’s Karma Kagyu Monastery, and Lingyin Temple in Pingtung’s Wutaishan. Chen believes there is a distinct difference between mass-produced objects and purely handmade works of art. “Only carvings created slowly, cut by cut, have soul.”

At the 14th National Craft Achieve­ment Awards, Chen announced that he was donating a series of eight bronze statues to the National Taiwan Craft Research and Development Institute. “Taiwan has the best traditional crafts. We must treasure them and push them forward.” As the saying goes, a journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step. “I’m just focused on carving.” Throwing his ambitions into his craft, and attentive to the need to pass along an artistic legacy, Chen has never forgotten his original intentions as he confidently advances along the ambitious path he has charted for himself.

(courtesy of Chen Chi-tsun)

(courtesy of Chen Chi-tsun)

(courtesy of Chen Chi-tsun)

In his youth, Chen was an apprentice at the Guanghua Buddhist Statuary Store in Tainan. A diligent student of the craft, he has never been afraid of hard work. (courtesy of Chen Chi-tsun)

Minister of Culture Lee Yung-te (left) presents Chen with the National Craft Achievement Award, a rare and precious honor.

Chen Chi-tsun drew inspiration from his young daughter, recording scenes in her life from five to ten years of age. (courtesy of Chen Chi-tsun)

(courtesy of Chen Chi-tsun)

(courtesy of Chen Chi-tsun)

(courtesy of Chen Chi-tsun)

Chen has established a workshop in his own home, where his apprentices can study their craft and an artistic legacy can be passed along to future generations.

This awe-inspiring sculpture of the Marshal Koxinga, a tour de force of technical mastery, is animated with the three energies of Chinese medicine: vitality, essence and qi.