Before we begin to identify the shape and style of a building, its colors will have already come to our notice, forming our first impression of the architecture. While our modern world is ablaze with resplendent colors, tradi­tional buildings show a more limited range of hues, because builders used to take materials from natural sources near at hand. As a result, old buildings not only tend to look simple and unpretentious, but also seem integ­ral to the environments in which they are situated.

In the modern world, goods are transported from place to place with much more ease, and our lives are awash with modern and imported materials. Inevitably, diversity has become a defining trait of modern society. In this context, should we still adhere to time-honored traditions? Or should we embrace new fashions? It is often through experiencing conflicts that people find out how to coexist with each other in harmony.

The colors of Matsu

Nan’ao Village on Dongyin, one of the Matsu Islands, is a case in point. In 2017 the external walls of several of its old houses, which previously looked gray and unadorned, were painted in bright colors. Their dazzling new looks immediately attracted public attention, and led people to contemplate which colors best represented Matsu. Spurred on by this debate about color aesthetics, a team of experts specializing in landscape design, archi­tecture, interior design, and color theory visited the village and launched an environmental aesthetics project—“Colors of Matsu”—with a view to boosting local community development.

Matsu’s distinctive landscapes and culture guided the team’s quest for representative local colors. Drawing on the Swedish Natural Color System (NCS), they spent a whole year collecting natural and cultural colors in local places, and comparing them with color charts. They eventually whittled down their finds to 18 most representative colors, such as “Mussel Black,” “Lycoris Red,” and “Lighthouse White.”

House number designs like this utilize local colors. Rather than flaunting glaring hues, they become part of the local landscape. (courtesy of eatlovephoto.com)

The Colors of Matsu team used the Swedish Natural Color System to investigate the Matsu Islands’ representative colors.

Chemical dyes

It is actually a luxury of the modern age to be able to use scientific instruments to collect colors from the en­viron­ment and then choose desired colors from among a vast number of swatches in color charts. In fact, throughout much of human history, our ancestors didn’t have many colors to choose from.

In the pre-industrial era, painters—people who were particularly sensitive to color—had to learn about the available pigments and make the paints they needed for themselves before they could start to create art. Because pigments were mainly derived from soils, minerals, plants, and other organisms in nature, most colors were “local.”

However, things began to change when British chemist William Henry Perkin (1838–1907) seren­dipit­ously discovered the chemical dye “aniline purple” in 1856 while he was researching quinine. After that, more and more synthetic dyes were invented. Because they adhered better to substrates, were less prone to fading, and were cheaper to produce, chemical dyes rapidly replaced natural pigments.

Nevertheless, despite being convenient, chemical dyes, unlike traditional colors, do not offer any insights into the intimate connections between culture and ­nature.

Though we now enjoy access to all kinds of colors, we are moving further and further away from nature, and knowledge of pigments is confined to a few experts. It is only when we think about where we came from that we realize that nature, provider of the resources that support life in all its myriad forms, is always there to satisfy our querying minds.

With the help of the Colors of Matsu team, Nan’ao Village has returned to its previous unobtrusive looks. (courtesy of Toraton Creative Studio)

Seeking local answers

Take artist Hung Hao-lun for example. His father was a traditional temple artist. Growing up immersed in art, Hung studied fine art at university and went on to specialize in Western realism. One day in 2007, while looking at his own oil paintings, whose verisimilitude was reminiscent of Western masterpieces, he began to contemplate the question “Who am I?”

While reflecting on his own identity as a Taiwanese artist, Hung was inspired by the Yuan-Dynasty Chinese landscape painter Huang Gongwang (1269–1354), who made ochre pigments from the soil of his homeland. Hung realized that he needn’t look any further. The answer had always been right beneath his feet.   

Hung decided that he would emulate ancient artists and distill colors from the environment. For Hung, while Huang Gongwang’s colors are all available today as chemical dyes, these dyes say nothing about Huang’s love of his home area of Yushan in what is now China’s Jiangsu Province, nor about his wish to communicate this love to posterity through art. However, because there is no record of how exactly Huang produced his pigments, Hung could only trawl through vast numbers of domestic and international sources to work out how to reproduce them. He gleaned ideas from traditional methods used in China, Europe, India, and Japan, and collected raw materials in various places across Taiwan. By washing, filtering, drying, and grinding these materials, he has created more than a hundred different powdered pigments.

Hung Hao-lun, owner of Taiwan Primary Colors Studio, emulates ancient people by keeping his hair long, gardening, making paper, and producing natural pigments. Through art, he puts into practice the idea that humans are at one with their environment.

Earth colors

Ochre, derived from the earth beneath our feet, is the oldest family of colors in the history of art. Hung Hao-lun’s “Red Ochre”—distilled primarily from the mineral soils of the Taoyuan Plateau, Mt. Bagua in Changhua, and the Hsinchu Hills—dominates his “Earth Colors” series. But Taiwan’s incredibly diverse natural environment is full of other colors that never fail to amaze Hung. Among his discoveries are the “White” of Hualien’s marble and Kinmen’s china clay, the “Green” of the serpentinite rocks in the Hualian River, and the “Yellow” of the clay of Taitung’s Zhiben Hot Spring. “In the United States, soil is divided into 12 orders. We have 11 of these in Taiwan—all of them except for Gelisols,” Hung says.

Plants and other organisms in nature provide an even greater diversity of colors, such as the gold of the small carpetgrass (Arthraxon hispidus) and the happiness tree (Garcinia subelliptica), the dark blue, indigo, and dark green of the indigo plant (Indigofera tinctoria), the deep red of a secretion of lac insects, and the ivory black of charred pork bones. Hung takes us to a field adjacent to his studio, where he grows various plants he needs. He takes pride in these plants, as they provide evid­ence that his pigments are authentically local.

Through a process that involves washing, filtering, drying, and grinding, we can produce dark blue, indigo, and dark green dyes from the indigo plant.

Cultural diversity

Hung Hao-lun also has butterfly pea (Clitoria terna­tea) growing outside his studio. Common in Thailand and Malaysia, this perennial herbaceous legume has caught on in Taiwan in recent years because its blue flowers, rich in anthocyanins, make an excellent nat­ural dye. While people in Southeast Asia use the flowers as a food coloring, Hung uses them to make pigments for paints. The introduction of the butterfly pea reminds us that the colors we derive from the natural environment are not static.

People used to go to great lengths to obtain certain colors, but in the modern world, where technology, transportation, and information exchange have all made great strides, we enjoy ready access to almost all colors, no matter how rare they once were. The rich vari­ety of colors that surrounds us is a result of globaliza­tion, and of exchange and cross-fertilization between different cultures.

In our highly developed, commercialized urban ­areas, where people from various places and backgrounds congregate, in the absence of strict legal restrictions all kinds of colors are sure to proliferate. In Taipei City, for example, the National Palace Museum, the National ­Theater, and the National Concert Hall are decorated in the Qing imperial style (hexi caihua), using royal colors; the Presidential Office Building, built by the Japanese during the colonial era, is composed of red, white, and gray; the entirely white commercial buildings constructed in the postwar period demonstrate the influence of modernism; and of course, there are also buildings that combine residential and commercial purposes, with wall tiles, shop signs, awnings, and corrugated metal roofs of all sorts of colors and shapes.

Taiwanese people are used to the multicolored co­exist­ence of a great variety of modern building materials and textures, as well as of various industries and ethnic groups. “To put it positively, this is a manifestation of demo­cracy,” says Ling Zongkui, a cultural historian.

Countries that have a rich cultural history, like Japan, often exhibit strong preferences for certain colors, to the exclusion of others. But Taiwan, whose cultural fabric is shaped by immigrants from many different places, doesn’t really have any representative colors. This actually reflects the uniqueness of our culture and history. Despite its small size, Taiwan is an island that has embraced people of entirely different ethnic and social backgrounds over the past few centuries. Throughout this short time, the Taiwanese people have learned to coexist with each other, with no single group wielding absolute power. Taiwan’s history is one of human migration, and its prosperity consists in the harmonious co­exist­ence and mutual acceptance of its people. So, what are Taiwan’s colors? We can say that in a country that prides itself on diversity, all colors are indispensable.

A work from the Journeys Across Taiwan series. (courtesy of Hung Hao-lun, Taiwan Primary Colors Studio)

White Champaca 01.(courtesy of Hung Hao-lun, Taiwan Primary Colors Studio)

Longing for the Light—Wild Plants. (courtesy of Hung Hao-lun, Taiwan Primary Colors Studio)

Shanlinxi—The Faces of Plants. (courtesy of Hung Hao-lun, Taiwan Primary Colors Studio)

Pigments derived from nature remind us of Taiwan’s abundant natural resources and diverse cultural history.

“Using plants to draw plants, and local resources to represent local things”—it is here that artists demonstrate their poetic sensibility.