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