When the Taipei Fine Arts Museum put on a show this February called a Retrospective Exhibition of Western Art by Early Painters on Taiwan, displaying the works of 24 Taiwanese painters and 12 Japanese painters of an earlier generation, officials worried the crowds would be so large they would spoil the museum's precisely controlled temperature and humidity, so they broke precedent by adopting a rule of "limited entry only."

A few months later, on May 12, the opening exhibition of the Heirloom Art Center, managed by Pai Hsing-san, director of the Consumer's Foundation, once again featured the superhot works of senior painters Li Shih-ch'iao, Yang San-lang, Hung Jui-lin et al.

In fact, the latest wave of enthusiasm is nothing more than the continuation of a vogue that has been sweeping the public for more than a year. If you want to understand the full force of the surge you should consider some figures first.

The going rate for an oil painting by Yang San-lang, the most famous of the older painters, was NT$18,000 per hao (one hao is about the size of a postcard) four years ago, NT$20,000 three years ago and NT$26,000 two years ago, when the market reaction was still so-so. Yet after a one-man retrospective exhibition of his was held last November at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, in cooperation with the Asian Arts Center and the East, Hsiung Shih and Impressions art galleries, who put out word that "prices are going up, so you'd better buy now," nearly 200 of his paintings were sold at the galleries over the next two or three months--not only was it a complete sellout, but potential buyers were being turned away empty-handed. And the price of his paintings had been cranked up, as originally planned, to NT$36,000 per hao as soon as the show was over.

In 1988 Li Ching-yang had been trying to raise money to build a memorial museum for his father, the painter Li Mei-shu, and he put on a one-man show of his father's works at the East Gallery called "The Beauty of Autumn Leaves." The 23 paintings displayed were worth NT$96 million at the time, but only four or five of them were sold and Li Ching-yang took the rest back.

Two years later the market is scorching hot. The Li Mei-shu memorial museum is practically a reality. The value of the artist's paintings is up to NT$120,000 a hao, but more than 80 percent of them are held by the museum and are not for sale!

At those rates, an average-sized painting of 30 hao or so runs about NT$3 or $4 million, the price of an apartment that many couples dream all their lives of owning. Perhaps someone will wonder, are there really that many people around with so much money who know how to appreciate fine art?

Whether they recognize fine art or not is hard to say. But in a fevered investment climate, it's easy to understand how people with money to burn would want to turn it into a commodity that will maintain its value and raise their social status at the same time, and many financial analysts and investment experts solemnly predict: two years ago it was real estate, last year it was the stock market, and the next big investment craze will be art!

It's true that traditional Chinese paintings, led by Chang Dai-ch'ien and P'u Hsin-yu, have fetched record prices at international auctions in New York and Hong Kong recently, a source of some pride to Chinese people everywhere. So why are the darlings of the new art investment craze on Taiwan not traditional Chinese paintings like theirs but the works of elder Taiwan artists who have no name recognition on the international market and are deemed "imitative" of late Western Impressionism?

The awakening of nativistic consciousness is the most important factor, of course.

Liu Huan-hsien, director of East Gallery, was one of the first to introduce works by the old painters to the marketplace. He recalls with a sigh that when they held exhibitions of their works ten years ago they were afraid to use the words hsiang-t'u (nativist, or localist) on the posters for fear of political repercussions, and that Ch'en Ch'eng-po, who was killed in the February 28 incident, was an artist whose works most galleries "refused to have anything to do with." Works by refined artists with international reputations dominated the market, while the younger generation was after contemporary abstracts and scorned the realistic style of the older Taiwanese painters. Li Shih-ch'iao, Li Mei-shu, Yang San-lang and their peers were the target of fierce attacks by young artists back then!

But with the change in value concepts brought about over the past three years by the lifting of martial law, people have begun looking back in search of the beauty of their native place.

"Don't just look at how prices for works by older painters have taken a 'triple jump.' That's because they started out practically at zero and have only just begun to climb uphill," says Liu Huan-hsien, director of the East Gallery.

Adds Lin Fu-nan, executive director of the Nan Gallery: "Traditional Chinese paintings are still the mainstay of the art market. They have a higher turnover and have reached a stable plateau in price. Also, most older Taiwanese painters worked in poverty all their lives, so the current market prices are a way of paying them back for all their hard work."

This belated remuneration is a source of mixed emotions to the painters themselves.

"People used to called me a poor devil. I couldn't give my paintings away. Every time I held an exhibition, I had to save up money for a long time, and when the show was over the money was gone. I was even afraid I couldn't marry off my daughter because I couldn't put together a dowry!" says 82-year-old Li Shih-ch'iao, smiling half in sadness, half in pride, as he sits in his narrow, little apartment added to the roof of an apartment building. "But now I give her paintings worth more than that big American-style house she lives in!"

Li Shih-ch'iao commands a going rate of NT$30,000 per hao now, but he isn't rushing to cash in on the superheated market and he opposes the tiny number of old painters who have been. Now that prices have gone up in his later years, he has been even more stingy with his works, parting with only five or six a year at most. He repeats over and over that painting is not like "selling sausages": he won't stoop to paint a picture without feeling, no matter how well it might sell!

Li's previously down-and-out career is no exception. Among older Taiwanese Western painters, those who passed most of their days in hardship and obscurity form a distinct majority. Now that times have changed and he and his friends have stepped into the spotlight of success, they can look back at the arduous road they have traveled with some satisfaction.

Although the 20 or so Taiwan painters of his generation have each striven in different artistic directions and achieved different results, the experiences they share in common are striking and numerous. Lin Fu-nan, who paints in a contemporary style himself but who collects many of their works, points out that the old painters were all born around the same time, received similar educations and experienced similarly abrupt changes in their careers--a certain degree of popularity at first, years of hardship and neglect and now a miraculous revival. They indeed form a more or less cohesive unit of value.

To consider the question in more detail, almost all of the painters concerned were born between 1900 and 1910, except for Chang Yi-hsiung and the miner painter Hung Jui-lin, who were born a little later. They grew up at a time when the Japanese were trying to use art education to pacify the restiveness of the population. Four teachers, in particular--Ishikawa Kinichirou, Gouhara Kotou, Kinoskita Seigai, and Shiotsuki Touho--made outstanding contributions toward the early spread of Western art on Taiwan.

Ishikawa Kinichirou, the most influential of the four, came to Taiwan twice and lived on the island for eighteen years, teaching at the Tohoku National Language School and the Tohoku Normal School. He had studied in France, concentrating on the Paris Impressionists, and he especially emphasized the importance of sketching from life. He encouraged his students to paint outdoor scenes with local color, and he took them on trips to the countryside on Sundays and holidays to capture what they saw.

Ishikawa's training and instruction took deep root in his students. Even today, the most moving element in the works of the older painters is their pure and evocative love of the countryside-- the washerwomen on the riverbanks by Li Shih-ch'iao, the city streets of Lan Yin-ting, or the aborigine folk scenes of Yen Shui-lung--which strikes a sympathetic chord with viewers at once.

Judged from the standpoint of the long-term investor--not in terms of the present but ten or even 100 years down the road--is the astonishing rise in demand for their paintings a sign of even better days to come or is it just a flash in the pan? People have different opinions, but only time will tell who is right and who is wrong.

Setting aside that question, let's take a look first at some of the more unusual phenomena produced by the current fever. Lin Fu-han has had several swaggering tycoons drop in and, without even looking at the paintings, say they want to buy up everything by a certain painter and then ask, "Now what kind of a discount can I get?"

"I didn't even feel like replying. I just wanted to boot them out the door!" Lin says its both mingled scorm and aushter. Those kinds of investors often have "interesting" backgrounds: some have just made a killing on the stock market and, oozing the self-satisfaction of a sharp investor, have come to gobble up another investment pie, while some have heard there was money to be made in the art market and want to buy "a bunch of paintings" to start their own gallery. And from the first of the year to date more than ten new galleries have opened up, each more swanky than the next, something unheard of in years.

On the down side, the recent political unrest, slack real estate prices and a bearish stock market have led to a clear drop in business for many galleries, so that ordering a painting and then returning it is not uncommon. What with all that, combined with the daily hue and cry in the newspapers about a recession, many galleries have returned to their forlorn and unfrequented days of the past. Will the art investment fever last? is a question deserving of special attention.

"The prices for pictures by the old painters are indeed unreasonable at present--much higher than for works by local painters of a similar class in other countries with a similar national income. If we put them through the test of the international market, the drop-out rate would be pretty high I'm afraid," says Huang Kuang-nan, director of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

Maintaining a similar opinion that "prices are high and ready to fall" is Su Wen-hsiung, president of the magazine Wealth. He says that whenever any investment craze takes shape "there are always people who are going to pay the price."

He points to the stock market as an example. "Some people really did earn a lot of money on the stock market, yet even more people got burned. But you don't have to be too concerned. You could say that the stock market craze gave young women and housewives all over Taiwan some initial concepts about family financial management and the national economy as a whole. That's something you can't learn even by going to class for ten years. So what's any different about art investment?"

On the other side, many galleries still insist that "of course prices will go up."

"Prices are determined by market supply and demand, and the works of artists who have passed away, like Li Mei-shu, Liao Chi-ch'un and Kuo Po-ch'un, are already hard to come by." Liu Huan-hsien says. "And the living older painters are getting on in years and aren't as productive as they used to be. Li Tze-fan?? passed away last year and the price of his paintings more than doubled overnight. Judging from examples like that, a continued boom in prices is surely possible."

Lin Fu-nan alleviates buyers' misgivings by assarting that "the international market isn't necessarily right." It has to be admitted that "Taiwan's oil paintings can't compare with those overseas in terms of quality and technique," but Lin stresses that purchasing power and domestic supply and demand are the main factors that determine price.

In Japan, for instance, paintings by "national treasure" Umehara Ryuzaburou sell for much higher prices than they do on the international market, higher even than Picassos. "So who says the Japanese have to buy paintings according to the international market price?" Lin asks.

Pai Hsing-san, director of the recently opened Heirloom Art Center, has found that the best-selling works of the old painters--besides pictures of mountains, water and fish, which are favorites with business firms because of their propitious connotations--are those depicting local people and places. Even though more of the old painters have traveled to Europe and North America in recent years, their paintings of Western scenes do not sell as well.

"Just think of whether or not you'd like to buy a picture of fields like the ones you walked hand in hand in with your first love when you were young. Especially now that the old painters are passing away and the rice paddies are disappearing, how can you put a price tag on precious emotions and memories like those?" Pai says with feeling.

Maybe emotional associations shouldn't be confused with timeless artistic values, but the renewed interest in the works of Taiwan's older painters has been welcome news for the local art world, which has been in something of a slump for more than a decade.

"We don't have to worry about people monopolizing artwork and manipulating prices like they do with stocks and real estate, because art investment is still in its infancy here and we're still early in the game," Lin says. "But the government should immediately set to work encouraging outstanding galleries, educating investors, according tax benefits and setting up reputable appraisal committees to form a healthy environment for development," he concludes.

[Picture Caption]

This portrait of a young woman by Li Mei-shu features soft shading and close attention to detail. His paintings are favorites with art investors.

Someone offered NT$40,000 for this painting as early as forty years ago. Today it is one of the treasures of the Li Mei-shu Memorial Museum. Li Ching-yang, the artist's son, stands at right.

Taiwan's three major art museums have been one of the main forces in bringing the works of local painters to public attention. Shown here is the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

Li Shih-ch'iao's bright and colorful pictures of flowers are highly popular with buyers.

Except for eating and sleeping, 82-year-old Li Shih-ch'iao devotes the rest of his time to painting, remaining as tirelessly creative as ever.

The Ting-hao commercial district is bristling with art galleries, and the Apollo Building is the most sought-after site.

The executive director of the Nan Gallery, Lin Fu-nan, believes that art investment is just getting off the ground and still has a bright future ahead of it.

A reunion of old friends who were once active together in the world of painting is a specially joyous occasion. From left to right are Li Shih-ch'iao, Ch'en Chin, Lin Yu-shan and Ch'en Chin's husband.

(photo courtesy of the East Gallery)

Now residing in Kaohsiung, Liu Ch'i-hsien visited Japan and France in his younger days and his paintings are known for their distinctive French tone. (Photo courtesy of the East Gallery)

Someone offered NT$40,000 for this painting as early as forty years ago. Today it is one of the treasures of the Li Mei-shu Memorial Museum. Li Ching-yang, the artist's son, stands at right.

Taiwan's three major art museums have been one of the main forces in bringing the works of local painters to public attention. Shown here is the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

Li Shih-ch'iao's bright and colorful pictures of flowers are highly popular with buyers.

Except for eating and sleeping, 82-year-old Li Shih-ch'iao devotes the rest of his time to painting, remaining as tirelessly creative as ever.

The Ting-hao commercial district is bristling with art galleries, and the Apollo Building is the most sought-after site.

The executive director of the Nan Gallery, Lin Fu-nan, believes that art investment is just getting off the ground and still has a bright future ahead of it.

A reunion of old friends who were once active together in the world of painting is a specially joyous occasion. From left to right are Li Shih-ch'iao, Ch'en Chin, Lin Yu-shan and Ch'en Chin's husband.

Now residing in Kaohsiung, Liu Ch'i-hsien visited Japan and France in his younger days and his paintings are known for their distinctive French tone. （Photo courtesy of the East Gallery）