Liu Chin-tang: Descendant of Taiwan

In the year when the May Fourth movement was raging in China, a young Taiwanese art student about to graduate from the Tokyo Fine Arts College made up his mind to abandon his studies. With an artist's romanticism and naivete, he ventured alone by boat to Shanghai, hoping to meet Sun Yat-sen and become one of his followers. Although he was never able to meet Sun, he was destined to become close to Wang Fa-chin, an important KMT and national personage, who adopted him as a foster son. Carrying the sadness of a colonized Taiwanese and the aspiration to serve his motherland, Taiwan's Liu Chin-tang became China's Wang Yue-chih. With this, he embarked on a lifetime of dedication to the art reform movement in China. It was to be a short lifetime, and one of many changes.

Liu Chin-tang was a native of Taichung, Taiwan. He was born in 1894, the year before Taiwan was ceded to Japan. At the age of twenty he graduated from the teachers' education department of the Governor-General's Model Class in Japanese Education. Passing the first publicly-funded overseas education exam, he entered the Western painting department of the Tokyo Fine Arts College, where he became the first student from early Taiwan to study painting in Japan.

If they had spent all their lives in Taiwan, would their work have stopped at simple realistic landscapes? This is "Teh Sheng Gate in Peking," a work completed by Liu Chin-tang shortly after his graduation. Oil on canvas, 36.5×26.5, 1921--1923.

Back to the old country, not the old village

Western art was a relative newcomer to China at that time. Arriving in Peking, Wang Yue-chih heeded the direction of his foster father and returned to Tokyo to complete his degree before returning to Peking. He then entered Peking University, where the humanities flourished, to study Chinese literature. Afterward, he joined the "Apollo Society" organized by the Painters' Institute of the Peking Fine Arts College, where he emerged as an avant-garde figure.

The works of Taiwanese artists who studied at the Tokyo Fine Arts College at that time were subject to the stylistic influences of the impressionist school of the West. Combined with the independent, cordial nature of the Taiwanese people, this influence resulted in the fervent, uninhibited brush strokes displayed in Wang Yue-chih's paintings of Peking's scenery and people, and in his bold use of bright colors, which exude the tropical heat of a southern home town. What is different about his paintings, in that era of playfulness in oil painting, is that he had already started to use the black lines of traditional Chinese painting to outline his human figures, lending them the solemnity of a Chinese portrait. One may surmise that this Taiwanese artist pioneered many new trails in Western-style painting by Chinese artists.

For the next five years, Wang, filled with a spirit of altruistic involvement, entered the Education Ministry of the central government. On a trip to Japan to observe its art education, he saw that Japan's young post-war painters were experiencing great bewilderment trying to keep up with the many changes in Western artistic styles. He could not help but begin to wonder: How to imbue Western art with an Eastern flavor? How should art reflect ethnic aesthetics?

In "Woman Gazing at a Pair of Swallows Flying by the Window," Liu extended the length of the painting, put it in a traditional scroll format, and used black ink to outline the figures, thereby displaying Chinese sensitivities through oil painting. Oil on canvas, 180×69, 1928-1929.

A pair of flying swallows

Wang Yue-chih, who habitually dressed in a traditional white gown, had by 1936 set down firm roots in China and taken a wife. At the invitation of the traditional ink painting reformer Lin Feng-mian, he assumed a teaching position at the West Lake Art Academy, in an area noted for spectacular scenery. The many-splendored scenery of the West Lake region inspired him to take up the brush once more. Applying lucid, transparent-seeming colors and simple, straightforward compositions, he created a carefree series of small works called the "Scenes of West Lake." The West Lake in these paintings, with its long levee, small boats and one or two small trees, is explored with a few simple strokes of ink, drawing out the artistic conceptions of the traditional Chinese scholarly ink painting.

"A pair of swallows fly back to the nest, twittering at ease. The feeling of spring is, as always, wistfully sad. As dusk descends, the crescent moon spies the wealthy denizen, yearning bitterly, year upon year, as always without resolution." The girl in the painting, outlined with black brush strokes, has fixed a sidelong gaze at a pair of swallows flying unframed by clouds, as if to covertly reveal the painter's longing for his home town. The oil paintings of this period in Wang's life differ radically from those of his earlier period, structurally, stylistically, and thematically. Abandoning portrayals of landscapes and figures, he reached back to the profound poems of his days in the Chinese literature department at Peking University, using them as a grounding and an accompaniment to his paintings. Thus, we have the paintings "Woman Gazing at a Pair of Swallows Flying by the Window" and "Seventh Evening of the Seventh Moon," so lyrical, so suggestive of the literary realm.

The form of this painting is marked by its extended height, with a traditional silk border surrounding the canvas and adding space to the top and bottom. This use of the traditional ink-painting vertical scroll to frame a Western oil painting is completely original and unexpected. But a heavy, dense oil painting is not suited to be rolled up in a scroll. To address this problem, Wang Yue-chih thinned his paint, abandoning the layered brush strokes of normal oil painting in favor of a flat application of color. This painting, completed sixty years ago, is ahead of its time in its pronounced Chinese character. Artist Chiang Hsun, author of a book on Liu Chin-tang, says that his unique style is no less than "the single most successful example in recent Chinese art of the merging of Eastern and Western aesthetics."

24.5×30cm 1928-29 Even in a period of heavy historical burdens, the beauty of West Lake brought out bright and happy feelings in artists, as in Liu's "Scenes of West Lake, No. 2: White Dike." Watercolor on paper, 24.5×30, 1928-1929.

A political fugitive

Concluding a happy year in Hangchou, Wang Yue-chih returned to Peking to serve as president of the private Chinghua Art Academy, and as the Planning Chairman of the Peking Fine Arts College. According to the materials compiled by artist Hsieh Li-fa, Wang was subject at the time to the attacks of a faction of educators, while a newspaper went so far as to cite his Taiwanese background in accusing him as follows: "Wang is a Taiwanese originally named Liu Chin-tang. Because of a major offense he committed in Japan, he changed his name to Jung-feng and sneaked into China. Taking the surname of Wang Fa-chin, he changed his name to Yue-chih...." The passage of time has made it impossible to tell whether the account is true or false, but it does reveal the tragedy of the Taiwanese of that era, caught between Japan and China.

In addition to the agitation at the academy he headed, Wang was also implicated by association with his foster father Wang Fa-chin, whom political struggle had made into a wanted man. Wang Yue-chih was forced to flee with his entire family. Under this series of blows, the young man, who had fully embraced romantic devotion to the motherland, was finally able to clearly see historical reality and the perils of politics. Enthusiasm and romanticism were submerged under a deep anguish, re placed by the coldly rational and unembellished "Diary of Fugitive Days." It stands in sharp contrast to the unbridled vitality of the works of Chen Cheng-po, who, unlike Wang, had already returned to Taiwan by this time.

"The eye is looking at Taiwan," Liu told his students in explaining the eye in the palm of the hand in his painting "The Descendants of Taiwan." More than half a century later, Liu's soul is back in his home. Oil on raw silk fabric, 183.7×86.5, 1934.

The abandoned, resisting Japan

With the September 18 incident of 1931. Japan occupied the northeast of China and a flood of refugees arrived in Peking. Watching a great swath of northern China become a colony of Japan, Liu Chin-tang, who himself was born in the Japanese colony of Taiwan and grew up there for twenty years, painted the huge "Abandoned" and "The Descendants of Taiwan." In "Abandoned," a beggarly old man clenches a cane in one hand and a basket in the other. With lips tightly sealed, he gazes ahead, an embodiment of the millions of the world's abandoned. With the addition of three huge brush-stroke characters "The Abandoned People," Liu Chin-tang expressed the misery that had lain latent in his heart for so many years. Hsieh Li-fa has declared it to be China's first painting with an anti-Japanese consciousness.

In his signature work "The Descendants of Taiwan," Liu used a wolf's-hair brush and thinned oil paints applied to a coarsely woven silk canvas. The three women in the painting stand like statues in a temple, straight and imposing. The women on the right and left clasp their hands in prayer; the one in the center drags a globe from her right hand, while an eye stares out from the outturned palm of her dangling left hand. When students asked why there is an eye on her palm, Liu offered no explanation beyond "The eye is looking at Taiwan."

In 1937, after painting "The Descendants of Taiwan" and "Abandoned," Wang succumbed to a caecal infection and died at the age of 43 in Peking. Given his different status as a Taiwanese, the endless series of wars at the time ensured that he was quickly forgotten, despite the fact that his status in the art world and his contributions were on a par with the universally recognized Hsu Pei-hung. The chronology of the life of this Taiwanese emigrant was compiled by his third son Liu Yi, who spent two months piecing together newspaper stories from the 1920s and 30s.

We return only when Taiwan is recovered

"Taiwan has been lost for forty years, its abandoned people bereft of human sympathy. I send you home to plant the fields, for mother, seventy years old, has only her cane to lean on. Abroad and rootless for many a year, I look to the clouds' end, towards my old home. Why speak now of successes and failures, when next year I shall return to my family?" From Liu Chin-tang's poetry, one can see how the painter's life was pulled by many different forces: his curiosity about new culture, this romantic yearning for his motherland, and his nostalgia for the place he was born and grew up. The outer Wang Yue-chih is his life and ideals; the inner Liu Chin-tang is his nostalgia and sadness.

Although he rushed off to China and changed his name to Wang Yue-chih, he gave his eldest son the single name "Tai," as in Taiwan. He told his wife that they would never return to Taiwan as long as it was in the hands of the Japanese, that they would return only after Taiwan had been recovered. But in the end, he did not live long enough--Taiwan was retroceded only after his death. Today, half a century later, this painter who likened himself to the abandoned has finally gotten his wish. His spirit, along with "The Descendants of Taiwan" and more than forty other works, are coming home. The only question is whether the eye looking forth from the woman's hand will recognize the place.

[Picture Caption]

p.104

Is it Liu Chin-tang? Or Wang Yue-chih? Either name refers to a sensitive soul, albeit one tortured by the vagaries of history. (This photo was taken in 1936, a year before his death.)

p.106

If they had spent all their lives in Taiwan, would their work have stopped at simple realistic landscapes? This is "Teh Sheng Gate in Peking," a work completed by Liu Chin-tang shortly after his graduation. Oil on canvas, 36.5x26.5, 1921-1923

p.106

In "Woman Gazing at a Pair of Swallows Flying by the Window," Liu extended the length of the painting, put it in a traditional scroll format, and used black ink to outline the figures, thereby displaying Chinese sensitivities through oil painting. Oil on canvas, 180x69, 1928-1929

p.107

24.5x30cm 1928-29 Even in a period of heavy historical burdens, the beauty of West Lake brought out bright and happy feelings in artists, as in Liu's "Scenes of West Lake, No. 2: White Dike." Watercolor on paper, 24.5x30, 1928-1929

p.107

"The eye is looking at Taiwan," Liu told his students in explaining the eye in the palm of the hand in his painting "The Descendants of Taiwan." More than half a century later, Liu's soul is back in his home. Oil on raw silk fabric, 183.7x86.5, 1934