Darwin sailed to the remote, unspoiled Galapagos Islands aboard HMS Beagle in 1835. Yang visited 171 years later. An amateur naturalist as well as a painter, Yang attempted to find and paint the creatures Darwin had described in his notebooks, including the marine iguana, the dancing blue-footed booby, the great frigate bird with its red gular sac, the flightless cormorant and the Galapagos penguin.

Yang, currently assistant director of NTNU's Cultural and Creative Industries Center, built his reputation painting still lifes before moving into ecological painting in the early 1980s. Yang's work has gradually evolved, passing through periods of traditional animal art and wildlife art before achieving its present-day focus on ecological art. These days, Yang is recognized in Taiwan as a pioneer in the field of eco-painting.

Anderson Yang is the kind of artist who explores the most remote places on Earth in person, then uses his work to promote environmental conservation. He brims with enthusiasm and insight, the latter nourished by a lonely childhood and the preteen years he spent in the mountains.

Yang, who believes that "the best and brightest should be given to the arts," delved into painting theories and techniques while still quite young. He then went on to combine the beauty of the arts with that of nature, opening up new possibilities for Taiwan's arts community.

A three-year-old's secret

Yang was born in Hualien's Meilun Township in 1956 to parents from Guangdong and Nanjing who had come to Taiwan in 1949. His three elder siblings were so much older-10 to 20 years-that Yang never played with them as a child. Instead, he sought his own entertainment. At the age of three, he used to take advantage of times his father went out for a chat by piling together chairs to make a path to the windowsill. Once there, the older neighborhood children would lift him through the window and take him around outside until a lookout warned his father was returning. Then they'd scramble to get him back up to the window and into the house.

One time, the warning came a little late and everyone panicked. Yang's playmates decided to send him across the roof of the chicken coop in an effort to get him home in time, but the thin roof couldn't support his weight and he fell through. It was this incident that brought the young Yang's adventurous temperament to the attention of a father who had thought him a quiet and obedient son.

In the wake of this mishap, Yang's mother, a teacher, bought him a small blackboard and chalk to help keep him entertained in the house. Several days later, she discovered that he'd used it to draw a picture of a car like that of an American priest who'd recently visited. A few days after that, she found drawings of three Amis tribeswomen in traditional garb. Yang's drawing showed the family that while they'd been out some Amis had come by to exchange work in the fields for old clothes.

When Yang was five, his family moved to Xindian, Taipei County, to run a chicken farm in the mountains. The land behind the 2,400-square-meter farm was uncultivated, uninhabited, and mountainous. Yang spent virtually every afternoon alone out back, catching crabs, shrimp, and guppies in mountain streams. When he was eight, his father passed away, the farm was shuttered, and the whole family moved into the city. Though brief, those three years in the mountains planted the seeds of a lifelong affinity for nature.

During the summer vacation following the fifth grade, Yang's second-eldest brother, who had noted the boy's talent for drawing, took him to Liang Danfeng's studio for training. Liang's children were about Yang's age, and he spent an enjoyable month studying pencil sketching and watercolors with them. Seeing Liang spend every day painting and entertaining his students with interesting stories, seemingly never doing any "proper work," Yang soon decided that he too wanted to be an "artist."

(facing page) Yang observed a mother swan for three hours on Lake Monger in Perth, Western Australia before painting this image. Less than 12 hours old, these down-covered cygnets have not yet developed waterproof feathers. At the first sign of a storm, they rush back to the nest with their mother and seek refuge under her feathers.

Jianguo High arts

Once the summer ended, Yang threw himself into cramming for the middle school entrance exams. By the time he enrolled at Taipei Fuhsing Private School, his siblings all had families of their own and his mother had been transferred to a teaching position in Pinglin. His mother only came home on weekends and holidays, so Yang lived essentially alone. He began listening to classical music to relieve the stress of a heavy workload, and took endless pleasure in making sketches of the album covers, which typically featured a portrait of a musician.

After testing into Taipei Municipal Jianguo High School, Yang again began studying with Liang. Six months later, Liang told him he needed to start studying on his own, without the crutch of a teacher revising his work. Determined to keep painting, in his freshman year of high school Yang assembled a group of like-minded peers and in 1972 established the Jianguo Fine Arts Club.

In those days, Jianguo used to give the rugby team a "nutrition subsidy" to help members buy eggs. Yang sought similar support for his own club. "The Fine Arts Club's paints are expensive. Why don't we have a subsidy?" he asked. Then-Principal Huang told him that the rugby team-known as the "black-shirt army"-brought honor to the school by winning the senior-high division of the provincial championship every year, and asked Yang if his group could do likewise. Spurred on by his principal's words, in the 11th grade Yang "defeated" students in the art program at Fu-Hsin Trade and Arts School to win first prize in a Taipei municipal drawing competition. He also claimed the NT$5,000 Principal Huang "owed" him.

But Yang also owed his victory to a Fu-Hsin teacher named Hu Qie. Hu had met Yang by chance when the latter was sketching in the botanical gardens. Recognizing Yang's talent, Hu began taking him places to sketch on holidays, helping the boy build a more solid foundation in his craft.

A regular winner of arts competitions, Yang set off a firestorm at home when he decided at age 17 to become a professional artist, then transferred from Jianguo's natural sciences division to its humanities division. His family couldn't understand why Yang, who earned good grades and had posted perfect scores on monthly math exams, would want to abandon a normal career path to paint. Yang had no better understanding of their point of view than they did of his. "Why is it that only those who do poorly in school go on to study painting? That's nuts. It should be the most talented people who are offered to the arts!"

(below) To promote the concept of ecological art, Yang and ecologist King Hen-biau together founded the Taipei Eco-Art Association in 1995. In 2007, they worked with Huang Shong, a professor with National Taiwan Normal University's Department of Life Science, to expand the association into a national organization-the Subtropical Eco-Art Association. They hope to use art to remind people of the fragility of the environment and the importance of conservation.

A golden age for watercolors

Professor Lee Quan-pui was to have a profound influence on Yang after the young man was admitted into his first-choice university program-fine arts at NTNU. "Professor Lee's watercolor style was so uninhibited and he was such a lively teacher," says Yang. "He really sparked his students' passion to create." Yang still fondly recalls Lee's poetic romanticism, easygoing manner, and craving to learn new things.

In those days, Taiwan was still under martial law and subject to severe restrictions on books. Going overseas was even more difficult. Taiwanese painters knew British painters like J. M. W. Turner, John Sell Cotman, and Thomas Girtin by name, but had virtually no chance to see the original works. In fact, most had had only glimpses of their work in volumes of watercolors that overseas Chinese classmates had purchased in Hong Kong. That changed when art magazines such as Lion Art and Artist began introducing the work of famous foreign artists such as the American realist Andrew Wyeth. The magazines broadened the perspective of local students and helped kick off Taiwan's 1975-85 golden age for watercolors.

Taiwanese Nativist literature was already fairly well developed in the 1970s, but local artists hadn't been exposed to the idea of using oxcarts, old homes, and other common elements of Taiwan's rural environment as subjects until 1977's Nativist literature debate kicked off the broader Nativist movement. In spite of the nativism in the air, Yang went his own way. He took as his subject matter "dead" objects from nature-the skulls of cows, fish specimens, withered limbs of trees, and the like-giving expression to the loneliness inside him by creating a "nature without vitality" composed of scenes of desiccated life.

Few people realize that Yang sees only with his left eye. His right has been very weak since his childhood, and cannot distinguish color, size, or shape. When he was sketching from nature as a kid, he never noticed anything unusual. But in his second year of university, he became infatuated with half-length portraits and discovered he could never draw the more distant shoulder of his model correctly. It was always too thick or too narrow. "I couldn't paint distance accurately," he says. "It was the first serious difficulty I'd encountered in my painting." Fortunately, his exceptional single-mindedness overcame his congenital shortcoming. Refusing to admit defeat, Yang kept painting.

(facing page) Yang visited the Galapagos Islands in 2006 to attempt to find and paint the creatures Darwin described. This painting depicts Darwin in his study, deep in thought.

The Grape King

In the 1980s, Yang saw William Henry Hunt's Primroses and Bird's Nest in a foreign-language book in Lee's house, and noted that Hunt's work differed from the indoor still lifes common in Taiwan. Hunt brought the entire natural world into his studio, drawing grapes, melons, vines, birds' nests.... Yang was moved and began painting verdant, fruit-filled orchard scenes, and taking fruits, vegetables, and potted flowers-living distillations of natural life-as the subjects of his still lifes, seeking to grasp the fleeting beauty of "still life" in the "now."

While pursuing his graduate degree in art at NTNU, Yang focused his research on 17th-century still-life styles in five European nations. To study how the European artists of several centuries ago used light in their compositions with fruit, Yang picked fruit in the middle of the night, arranged it under the tree with a fruit basket and lantern, and took photos. He also used to walk among fruit trees in the first light of dawn, and often traveled to the vineyards of Zhoulan Township, Miaoli County, to pick grapes and paint. Yang's masterful, detailed depictions of grapes in watercolor became something of a trademark, earning him the nickname "Grape King" from Taiwan's arts community and winning him a contract with the Lung Men Gallery at the age of just 27.

Yang's ecological observations have taken him across five continents and turned him into an accomplished nature photographer. On this page are photos he took in the Galapagos of marine iguanas (bottom left), a great frigate bird (center), and a blue-footed booby (top right).

Cross-strait watercolor studies

During this period, Chen Tung-yuan, a slightly older NTNU alumnus, gave Yang a UK-published history of watercolors he had purchased in Japan. Yang recalled that all the Chinese-language works on watercolors he'd seen while still a student looked like they had been cribbed from the same source, with some of them even taking bits out of context and compounding their errors. These memories gave rise to the thought that he should develop a thorough understanding of Western watercolor techniques and introduce them to Taiwan. After several years of hard work, he published Watercolors in 1985, a work that became a fantastic resource for students.

"When I got my hands on an original-language text, it was like discovering a new field and I was able to overturn a host of old, mistaken notions," says Yang. "The changes made me feel ignorant and panicky, but once I absorbed the new information, I began developing my own research model: trust the classics."

While writing Watercolors, Yang borrowed the Tate Gallery's Paint and Painting from George Zhang, the president of New Telecom Enterprise, an importer of painting supplies. The book, which covered the development of paints and pigments, spurred Yang's interest in the history of watercolors, watercolor pigments, and papermaking.

Yang then spent two years in the UK studying the works of watercolor masters in person. During this period, he also founded Watercolor magazine. Though it ran for only eight issues, the magazine's incisive analysis of watercolor techniques, appreciations of famous works, and educational Q&A section marked the start of the serious study of watercolor art in China and Taiwan.

Yang's ecological observations have taken him across five continents and turned him into an accomplished nature photographer. On this page are photos he took in the Galapagos of marine iguanas (bottom left), a great frigate bird (center), and a blue-footed booby (top right).

Turning to "ecological art"

In Paint and Painting Yang again encountered Hunt's Primroses and Bird's Nest. This time it made an even stronger impression. It could be argued that the painting not only broadened Yang's perspective, but also led him into the field of ecological painting.

"Hunt's work is representative of 19th-century watercolor still lifes," says Yang. "He transcended the limitations of the dazzling classical still life, replacing the heaviness of oils with the lighter, more carefree watercolors, and praised natural beauty like a pastoral poet." Eco-photographer Liu Yan-ming, who happened to be shooting a documentary on Yang at this time, strongly urged Yang to give painting birds a try.

By this time, Yang had become a major player in Taiwan's painting circles, and collectors had to wait at least three months to purchase one of his still lifes from a gallery. In spite of his success, Yang couldn't help wondering: "As much as everybody wants my work, won't the market eventually become saturated?" Eager to change his focus, in 1986 he began painting Taiwan's indigenous birds.

"I was interested in vividness and realism," says Yang. Forever fascinated by realism, Yang believes that pre-20th-century European painters were seeking to create the kind of "highly effective illusion" capable of deceiving viewers that Yang himself now pursues.

In 1988, Yang began receiving full financial support from Arthur Chiao, a middle-school classmate who happens to also be chairman of the Walsin Lihwa group. For the next 15 years, Yang lived only for his art and his ideals. Traveling with an assistant and high-end photographic equipment, he prowled the middle and upper tiers of Taiwan's mountain ranges, capturing how birds really lived in photographs and sketches. To avoid startling them, he and his assistant wore camouflage and waders, hid in camouflaged tents, and spent seven to eight hours at a time on riverbanks, in the weeds, or amongst the bushes.

Watercolors must be completed rapidly and cannot be revised. Yang, once known as the Grape King, uses his impeccable technique to create watercolors that are as sumptuous and richly colored as classic oils. His pieces are filled with a fruity fecundity and so detailed that they reveal the light dusting on the grapes.

Respecting nature

"For several years after I began painting birds, I ran into many difficulties collecting data because I didn't have the necessary experience," says Yang. "For example, I'd never seen a Formosan hill partridge in the wild. And while I'd caught a couple of quick glimpses of black eagles on riverbanks in the Fu-shan Botanical Garden, I'd never gotten a photograph close up." To fill in the gaps, when he first started working on birds, he borrowed photos from local photographers, raised caged birds, went birding, and took his own photos.

Yang stresses that, in terms of technique, ecological painting isn't very different from doing still lifes. In fact, the biggest difference is one of attitude. "In the past, painting was purely art. It didn't matter whether I painted one leaf more or one less. But eco-painting is different. Respect for nature has to take precedence."

For example, present-day bird species usually have nine to 11 primaries (the largest feathers on the edge of a bird's wing). You have to count them to get the actual number. You don't want even one too many or too few when you are painting them, and each has its own structure, color, and feeling of weight. For example, on most birds the inner sides of the remiges (wing feathers) are wide, and the outer narrow. Moreover, there are many kinds of feathers. In addition to the four varieties of remiges, there are also large and small coverts, rectrices, and ornamentals, not to mention seasonal and environmental variations.

"It's very scientific, based purely on observation," says Yang. "You can't plug in a formula and you can't just make it up." Yang says that the best approach is to study biology and anatomy, and learn to prepare specimens. While many artists are unwilling to take such an approach, it suits Yang's penchant for really digging into research.

At the same time, Yang admits that eco-painting has huge limitations. "But I like it. I like the classics, tradition, and precision, and I despise pointless 'free painting.'"

But Yang protests loudly when people discuss eco-painting in conjunction with photography, something he regards as an insult.

"Painting is fundamentally different from photography," he explains. The human eye and the camera lens see different things. For example, the eye automatically moderates high-contrast colors, but the camera does not. "Photographing a black person and a white one next to one another makes a horrible mess. If you try to get the black color right, the white looks deathly pale."

There's a similar problem with respect to depth of field. "A photo always has a single focal point," explains Yang. "If you focus on a bird's beak, the feathers are going to be out of focus. Focus on the claw in the foreground, and the one in the background will be out of focus. If you paint from photographs without observing living birds, you're lost."

(left) Eco-artist Anderson Yang paints birds brilliantly. These black-necked cranes (Grus nigricollis) on Mt. Dabao in China's Yunnan Province, based on photographs, are faithfully depicted. The painting softens the high contrast of photos, while varying the intensity of the color to enhance the atmospheric effect.

Awakening a love of Nature

Yang eventually gave up his university teaching position and steadily cut back on the production of his best-selling still lifes to devote himself more fully to eco-painting. Though in the quiet of the night he sometimes wondered about his choice, he remembered the Renaissance painter Albrecht Durer and other artists who brought a scientific perspective to their art. Such artists made a tremendous contribution to natural history and the botany of their day. Taiwan has such a rich ecosystem. How, he wondered, had artists managed to ignore it?

Western artists were never absent during the Age of Discovery, but in the past few Taiwanese artists took natural ecologies as their subject matter. With the Taiwanese environment worsening before our eyes, a regretful Yang says, "When I depict the natural world, my aim is to use the techniques of realism to reveal a no-longer-existent world-or perhaps I should say, 're-reveal' the perfect world that once existed."

Yang believes Taiwan urgently needs to train eco-painters who can use their art to foster concern for this piece of earth, and hopes that his own pioneering efforts will bear fruit.

In 1989, Yang held an exhibition of paintings of Taiwanese birds at the Howard Salon and published an album of his paintings. Though unexpected controversies resulted in both the arts and environmental conservation communities, they did nothing to cool his ardor for eco-painting. At the invitation of Chunghwa Post, he painted several stamps sets taking wildlife and natural scenes as their topics. These were very well received and inaugurated a new enthusiasm for stamps depicting Taiwan's ecology.

Yang's ecological observations have taken him across five continents and turned him into an accomplished nature photographer. On this page are photos he took in the Galapagos of marine iguanas (bottom left), a great frigate bird (center), and a blue-footed booby (top right).

Pushing the limits

While researching a series of stamps consisting of scenes of the Yangtze River, Yang and photographer Jason Chen traveled to the source of the Yangtze in Qinghai Province in July 1992. During their nearly two-week-long expedition, they feasted their eyes on glaciers, and sketched Tibetan antelopes and Tibetan wild asses. However, after suffering through blizzards and altitude sickness, one of the 13 members of the expedition died and others had to be carried out, including Yang himself, who suffered severe chest pain, bled from his nose and mouth, and nearly died from high-altitude pulmonary edema.

"The experience enabled me to let go, to develop a broader perspective on the world," says Yang. He sighs, but with a hint of pride. China's State Post Bureau had been planning the Yangtze stamp series for 10 years, but had had to delay it repeatedly because the riskiness of the project frightened artists away from it. Yang managed to complete it in just three months. He then traveled to the South Pole to see penguins and seals, to the North Pole to observe polar bears, to the upper reaches of the Amazon in search of its source (an expedition on which he encountered the rare hoatzin). The further his vision ranged, the more his love of nature deepened.

Following his work on Taiwan's extant and endangered bird species, in 1996 Yang began a five-year project painting the world's cranes. Supported by Winbond Electronics (a subsidiary of Walsin Lihwa), the project took him across five continents. In his introduction to Yang's Cranes of the World, Jim Harris, president of the International Crane Foundation, agreed that art is a powerful means of changing the world, and argued that Yang's paintings draw on tradition, science, and detailed personal observations and photographs to show cranes as they really are in the living world.

Yang says that 11 of the world's 15 crane species are currently teetering on the verge of extinction, and notes that cranes, which are able to nest in a variety of environments, are an important indicator of the health of a variety of ecosystems. In Eastern cultures, cranes symbolize longevity, loyalty, and a carefree nature, in addition to representing human fantasies of and desire for Heaven. "If the cranes were to disappear, we would lose more than one strand of the web of life," says Yang. "We would also lose a priceless symbol of beauty and our ideals."

Tanned, weather beaten, and perhaps a little frayed around the edges, Anderson Yang has turned a call from the wild depths of his being into an impetus to action and striven to present the mysteries of nature to his audience. His paintings weave together his deep love of both the arts and the natural world, stirring viewers' emotions and encouraging them to take a moment to reflect.