Looking back at the tradition of artists’ societies in Taiwan, they have gone through four phases, which in general have run along two main streams: those which have followed international trends, and those which have been nurtured in local soil.

Poster celebrating the 15th anniversary of the founding of the Hantoo Art Group.

The “School of Paris” of the pre-WWI era sent reverberations around the globe. The tide reached Taiwan in 1924. It was the Japanese Occupation Era, and a passel of young Taiwanese painters were studying the latest in Western styles in the elite Japanese-language school set up by the Office of the Governor-General of Taiwan. Filled with youthful enthusiasm, they harbored great ambitions for art and hoped to become professional artists themselves. They wanted to express the beauty of Taiwan in their works and convey their love for this piece of the earth. Encouraged by their mentor, the Japanese artist Kin­ichiro Ishi­kawa, they formed Taiwan’s first painting society, the Qi­xing Hua­tan (Seven Stars Painting Forum). The seven founders were Ni Jiang­huai, Chen ­Zhiqi, Chen ­Chengpo, Chen Yin­yong, Chen Ying­sheng, Lan Yin­ding, and Chen Cheng­fan.

Founded in Tai­pei, the group took the city’s Mt. Qi­xing as their spiritual symbol, which is how they got their name. Ishi­kawa, who had participated in artists’ aggregations in Japan, felt that Taiwanese needed to independently promote an atmosphere conducive to art, and that organizing arts societies would be the best way. The Qi­xing Hua­tan’s appearance raised the curtain on the history of artists’ groups in Taiwan. At that time Western art in Taiwan was still the purview of a tiny elite, with most ordinary people equating the words “artist” and “starving.” In these circumstances, the Qi­xing Hua­tan had several substantive functions: It created a sense of belonging, encouraged exchanges of ideas, and organized exhibitions.

In 1927 there appeared a new group, the Taiwan Shui­cai Hua­hui (Taiwan Watercolor Painting Society), to promote that particular art form. In 1929, the Qi­xing Hua­tan disbanded, and some of its members then got together with Tai­nan’s Chi­yang Hui (Red Sun Association) to form the Chidao She (Red Island Society). It incorporated virtually every artist of note working in the field of Western art, and was the first organization to span both northern and southern Taiwan. Although the Chi­dao She dissolved in 1933, the Tai-Yang Art Association (alternatively known in English as the Tai­yang Fine Arts Association), which launched the next year, proved that arts groups could be built on a firm and lasting foundation: It remains in existence today as Taiwan’s oldest continuously operating artists’ collective.

The video installation work Paper Windmill by Yuan Guangming, a pioneer of video art in Taiwan.

The second wave of autonomous artists’ organizations came in the late 1950s and into the 1960s. Young people formed such societies as a means of combating the conservative stagnation of academe. Two representative ones were the Wu­yue Hua­hui (May Painting Society) and the Dong­fang Hua­hui (Orient Painting Society). Wu­yue, formed in 1957 by several graduates of the Department of Fine Arts at National Taiwan Normal University (including Liu Guo­song, Guo Dong­rong, and Li Fang­zhi), and taking its name from Paris’s “Salon de Mai,” drew on the salon’s experimental spirit and endeavored to promote “the modernization of Chinese painting.”

In that politically sensitive era, the successful formation of the Wu­yue and Dong­fang groups was the signal for others to follow suit. In 1959, Qin Song, Yang Ying­feng (a.k.a. Yuyu Yang), and other artists founded the Xian­dai­ban Hua­hui (Modern Edition Painting Society). In 1960, reacting against modern drawing and painting, ­Huang ­Hua­cheng and others started up the Da Tai­bei Hua­pai (Greater Tai­pei School), which extolled the concepts of Dadaism and Pop Art and advocated experimenting with mixed media. In 1967, Li Chang­jun and other graduates of National Taiwan Normal University formed the Hua­wai Hua­hui (“Beyond Painting” Painting Society). And in 1968, ­Zhuang ­Shihe and others launched the ­Nanbu Xian­dai Mei­shu Hui (Southern Taiwan Modern Art Association). Moreover, Li Zhong­sheng’s students established several associations of their own, and the so-called “Li Zhong­sheng School” became a major force in the development of abstract art in Taiwan, with Li himself earning the accolade “Father of Modern Art in Taiwan.”

Su Yuxian’s most representative work, Eyes, the Dropping Tears of the Moon, creates a counterintuitive image of a woman whose face, though covered in tears, retains its beauty.

The third wave of artists’ packs exploded onto the scene in the 1980s, exceeding past periods not only in sheer numbers but also in the scale of operations.

In 1982, four graduates of the Department of Fine Arts at Chinese Culture University (CCU)—Yang Mao­lin, Wu Tian­zhang, Ye Ziqi, and Lu Yi­zhong—organized the 101 Xian­dai Yi­shu Qun (101 Modern Art Group). They followed their forebears by issuing a manifesto, calling for “the creation of new types of graphic art of as yet unknown forms.” After the group broke up in 1984, some of its members went on to found the Tai­pei Hua­pai (Tai­pei School), advocating new art forms that would reflect political and social reality. This posture not only demonstrated that the group belonged to a new, youthful generation, it was an echo of the effervescent atmosphere of attention being given to social and political issues in Taiwan in the mid-1980s. (Taiwan was at that time soon to see the lifting of martial law—with its restrictions on political activity, autonomous civil society, speech, and press freedoms—which had been in place for almost 40 years). The Tai­pei Hua­pai also deliberately took a position in opposition to the intellectualized, dispassionate styles of Minimalism and Installation Art that some artists and academics had brought back to Taiwan after living and studying abroad.

The attacking strategy of the Taipei Huapai inspired numerous other CCU students to form artists’ clusters. Not only did these serve to tie the members together, but whenever possible they also disseminated their ideals to outsiders.

In 1998, Yang Mao­lin and Wu Tian­zhang went on to organize the Han­too Art Group, carrying their earlier activism of the 1980s into a new generation. Han­too is the most structured and organized of contemporary artists’ groups, and today, with the association still in existence, the older members have been able to add a layer of 30 years of friendship to their original challenge-the-system élan.

Besides the formation of artists’ associations, the 1980s also saw the appearance of groups whose emergence took the form of arts spaces. For example, Lian De­cheng, Fu Jia­hun and others founded Er­hao ­Gongyu (Apartment #2); Lai Chun­­chun opened the SOCA Xian­dai Yi­shu Gong­zuo­shi (SOCA Modern Art Workshop); and ­Huang Wen­hao, Liu Qing­tang, and Chen Hui­­qiao started a gallery called Yi­tong Gong­yuan (IT Park). There were no formal membership lists for these arts spaces; they have simply served as nuclei for like-minded friends who are “regulars.”

The rise of arts spaces was due to two main factors. First, at that time Taiwan had only limited resources devoted to art museums and other venues to display creative work. Secondly, artists wanted to open places free of the disruptive demands that commercial galleries, given their profit orientation, make on artists. These new spaces would be independent redoubts where people of similar views could gather—of, by, and for artists.

This model was subsequently reproduced several times. Examples of venues directly opened and operated by artists include, from the 1990s, the SLY Art Space, and after 2000: (i) the Open-Contemporary Art Center, organized by students from the Department of Fine Arts at National Taiwan University of Arts; (ii) the VT Art­salon, founded by curator Hu Chao­sheng and artists Yao Rui­zhong, Su ­Huiyu, and Wu Da­kun; and (iii) the FreeS Art Space, opened jointly by Audio-Visual Art Taiwan (AVAT) and the Han­too Art Group. The main advantage of such locations is that artists control their own voices and how they are presented. But they also have the extra benefit of being windows for international exchange: Bypassing the authorities in charge of art museums or commercial galleries, the spaces can be utilized by foreign artists who decide to come to Taiwan, or are invited by the space operators, to exhibit their works.

Venus 2, a work by Show Your Island Artist Group member Zhan Yufan. Wearing a leather jacket and holding a bomb, this tough, no-nonsense modern Venus is fighting off an attack from tiny soldiers.

Here in the 21st century, the consideration that is first and foremost when artists think about forming a new posse is: “Can forming a group generate new creative sparks?”

The quest to answer this query has been the motivation behind several contemporary experimental groups. Representative bodies include Wonder Boyz, formed by three graduate students (­Jiang Zhong­lun, Huang Yan­ying, and Su Yu­xian) at Tainan National University of the Arts; Luxury­Logico, founded by four graduates of the Institute of New Media Art at Tai­pei National University of the Arts (Lin Kun­ying, Chen Zhi­jian, and the brothers Zhang Geng­hao and Zhang Geng­hua); and the multi-­generational Xin­dian Boys, including four artists (­Zhuang Pu, Chen Shun­zhu, Su ­Huiyu, and Wu Dong­long) born in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, who united on the basis of their shared geographic location (the Tai­pei suburb of Xin­dian).

Through synergy, these groups are able to marshal even more artistic firepower. For example, Luxury­Logico’s Lin Kun­ying has a strong background in classical music, so in group creations he is mainly responsible for composing the score; Chen Zhi­jian, meanwhile, is adept at digital image production, Zhang Geng­hao writes computer programs, and Zhang Geng­hua brings expertise in three-dimensional installations. Luxury­­Logico not only participates in exhibitions, they are very active about working with the performance and drama communities. For instance, in 2012 they worked with a choreographer and an engineer at the Future Media Festival for a work that kneaded together interactive projections, lighting machinery, and dance postures/movements. And in 2013 they collaborated with new media practitioner Wang Jun­jie to create Taiwan’s first ever technological-media human-free play, Sin City. In such ways they have pioneered an operating model for an art assemblage that is quite different from anything done in the past.

­Zhuang Pu and Chen Shun­zhu have proposed similar concepts. The former of these two young-at-heart veterans of the arts world specializes in installation art, the latter in photography. After forming Xin­dian Boys with new media artist Su ­Huiyu and abstract painter Wu Dong­long, they found themselves having completely new experiences, because they decided to draw most of the inspiration for their collective work from the realm of daily life. Chen admits, “Only now do I feel that I genuinely know Xin­dian, a place where I have been living for over a decade.”

Chen Cheng-po, Changrong Girls High School Dormitory. This oil painting was completed in 1941.

The peaks of self-organization by artists in Taiwan started with the first wave under Japanese rule, followed by stages showcasing important collectives in the 1960s and 1980s. The most important feature of these groups—in addition to proposing new ideas to resist the narrow and conservative art establishments of their times—was that they had a profound impact on the development of art in Taiwan. They each set the bar for their respective eras, thereby raising it for their successors. It should be remembered, moreover, that although the four waves appear to be distinct phases, if you look further into the details you see that in fact there are hidden inheritances passed from one generation to the next.

For example, we can follow the threads from Taiwan’s first artists’ association, Qi­xing Hua­tan, to those of the 1950s and 1960s. Qi­xing member Chen ­Chengpo, during a stay in Shang­hai, participated in a group founded by mainland Chinese artists. One member of that group was Li Zhong­sheng, who came to Taiwan after World War II, and became the mentor of a whole generation of abstract painters. The influential Dong­fang Hua­hui was then founded by some of his students. The contemporaneous and equally influential Wu­yue Hua­hui, meanwhile, was inspired behind the scenes by Liao Ji­chun, an artist who had been very active in collectives under Japanese rule. Ni Jiang­huai was another Qi­xing member who played a key role in later regional groupings.

Although the members of Wu­yue and Dong­fang scattered to the four winds, they set an example after which the generation of the 1980s could pattern themselves. Wu Tian­zhang has said that he (along with Yang Mao­lin) was inspired to found Tai­pei School by Wu­yue and Dong­fang. Moreover, Tai­pei School and the Han­too Art Group (which is still in operation) triggered the formation of the youthful Show Your Island Artist Group.

There are currently 26 members in Show Your Island, with an average age of 30. They come from all over Taiwan, and each has his or her own style. These young artists, who all share the same dream of making a living from art, got to know one another via the “King Car Youth Oil Painting Prizes” awarded by the King Car Educational Foundation, and then went on to establish Show Your Island. They held their first collective exhibition in 2013, and this year plan to hold their second, steadily drawing public attention to their artistic achievements.

The new generation enjoys an arts scene of unprecedented vitality, with more artists, art schools, and exhibition venues than ever before. The problem now is that if young people on the cutting edge want to stand out from the crowd and attract public attention, they need to be more strategic. Forming associations generates mutual inspiration, raises the profiles and reputations of members, and gives artists greater confidence to pursue their favored creative direction. Groups have other effects too: information sharing, promotion toward overseas artist-in-residence programs, and so on.

The pluralistic island of Taiwan is glittering with creativity. For nearly a century, artists’ conglomerations have sprung up and flourished here. They have helped individual artists strive toward the realization of their dreams, and have added threads of richness and diversity to Taiwan’s colorful tapestry of fine arts.

Su Yuxian took the planets of our solar system as his theme in the work Universe Ping-Pong Balls.

LuxuryLogico members Lin Kunying (right), Chen Zhijian (left), Zhang Genghua (rear, second left), and Zhang Genghao (rear, second right).

Young people determined to become professional artists have formed Show Your Island Artist Group, which serves as a platform for exchanging ideas and staging exhibitions.

IT Park, a venue founded in 1988 by artists, for artists, has always maintained a policy of openness. The photo is of the founders and some of the regular participants.

(from right to left) Huang Yanying, Jiang Zhonglun, and Su Yuxian, the founders of Wonder Boyz.