A turning point in Scotland
Making matters worse, after a year in business VT Artsalon was running several million NT dollars in the red, which only further added to Yao's pressures.
At this low ebb, Yao was selected to be a resident at the Glenfiddich Artists Village program in Scotland. He stayed at the distillery in Scotland for three months. The lives of artists often feature great epiphanies and dramatic changes of course, and this was a time when Yao's creative life took a big turn!
"Scotland seemed full of creatures from the spirit world," recalls Yao. He had been too consumed with trivial matters in Taiwan, where he felt like a glass of water that was constantly being stirred, always mixed up and disturbed. But the peace and quiet of Scotland let the water in his glass settle. What was rubbish floated to the surface, and his state of mind grew clear. Originally, he had planned to take photographs, but the distillery was surrounded by "a farm that was probably 100 times the size of Wu-ling Farm." Potential photographic subjects were all just sheep and cows, and these didn't interest Yao.
Then, late one night, he suddenly thought about how his father, shortly before he passed away, expressed the wish that Jui-chung would paint his portrait. Yao decided to take up the challenge of ink-wash painting, at which his father had excelled.
Lacking the proper materials, Yao made do with what was at hand, using ballpoint pens instead of brushes and oils instead of water colors. That in itself constituted a big shift from traditional Chinese landscapes. But Yao didn't stop there: he also didn't sign his work, didn't leave blank spaces, and didn't use ink pads or stippling. Moreover, by substituting Indian jute paper for soft Chinese art paper, he created a rough surface texture like the paintings in the Dun-huang Grottoes; and he filled the spaces that had traditionally been left blank with gold leaf. He thus completely overturned "Xie He's six rules for ink-wash landscapes."
In terms of subject matter, he also subverted the lofty character of traditional Chinese painting by inserting scenes from everyday life, such as glimpses of people playing mahjong or taking baths in hot springs. Then he added comic-book elements, which are common to the artistic vocabulary of those born in the 1960s. It was as if he was pulling down Chinese scholars' moral precepts about art. Consequently, he named the series in Chinese "forgetting the moral code" (though he gave it the English name "Wonderful," which is very close to how the Chinese characters sound). Says a laughing Yao: "The angry young man, after going into exile to be a shepherd like the Han--Dynasty mandarin Su Wu, begins to closely observe his inner feelings."
At the request of artist Chen Hui-jiao, the director of the Glenfiddich Artists Village Program in Taiwan, Yao sent photographs of the paintings back to Taiwan. Unexpectedly, collectors were so enthralled that they just went ahead and bought the paintings having only seen the photos. It was the first time a Taiwanese artist in a residency program abroad was able to sell all of the artworks produced there before even sending them back to Taiwan.
On the balcony of his rooftop studio in eastern Taipei, Yao flips through notebooks that contain his artistic insights and inspirations over many years. He has chosen to take a stand for marginal works of architecture, as opposed to celebrated works of contemporary architecture such as Taipei 101, which looms nearby.