"The brush is my hand, painting is my life." Wang Shou-hsiun, now 75 and with a full head of silvery hair, is dressed simply. The first impression she gives is one of glowing beauty. She is like her paintings: There is an underlying vitality which makes it hard to take your eyes off her-or them.
Wang has truly had a lifetime of painting. Her career began very early; indeed she was painting from the earliest time she can remember. Moreover, it wasn't the usual childish doodling. Wang recalls herself as a little girl of no more than three or four years old. She was living with her stepmother's parents, and they doted on her. During the day Grandfather put out a small stool for her to sit on and instructed her at a table on the proper way to hold a brush when writing calligraphy, frequently withdrawing the brush from her grasp to check that the positioning of her wrist was steady. At night, as bedtime approached, she could always be found lying on the floor painting a "big girl." On a large piece of paper bigger than the child herself, she would draw in detail a mature woman, often giving her a different hair style, or different apparel. She painted like this for several years.
Why did she always paint women? No one ever asked her, and she herself cannot say. But she suggests that perhaps she subconsciously missed her natural mother, who died when Wang was only four months old.
Wang's unusual life may well be the result of her unusual upbringing. Her family hailed from Liaoning Province on the mainland, though she was born in Harbin. Her family was well connected, and her father once served as Minister of the Interior. They lived in a large house with an enormous courtyard, and servants floated around them like clouds. But, just like the character Lin Daiyu in Dream of the Red Chamber, who lost her mother at a young age and was sent to live with her grandmother, she always felt a sense of loneliness and not belonging. From the time she was small, "in virtually everything I saw or came across, I thought about the downside."
But perhaps it was this very environment which caused her to see that life is not always what it seems, and to use incredible will power to face the trials and tribulations fate dealt her.
A portrait of the artist as a young woman
Her stepmother, named Sun, who married Wang's father when Wang was just one year old, did not treat Wang badly. But Sun was not, after all, her own mother, and later had six children of her own to look after. At that time, the country was in crisis, and Wang's father, as a government official, was often transferred from one post to another. You can imagine how hard life was for Wang's stepmother. She has no complaints about her stepmother, but can't help thinking that if she had had her natural mother, would she not have been sent to school and university? Perhaps she wouldn't have married so young, and her life would not have been made up of so many painful episodes!
But if this were the case, would she be the painter that she is today?
"I probably still would have pursued a career in painting, because I have loved it ever since I was a child, and I put in a lot of hard work at it." Wang lapses into distant memories. But perhaps she would have painted a very different world.
Besides what she learned from her stepmother's parents, after Wang returned to her own home, her father hired a tutor for her who was also an accomplished painter. Besides teaching her the usual school subjects of Chinese, mathematics, and the like, he systematically introduced her to Chinese art, particularly calligraphy, drawing, and bronze and stone inscriptions. He guided her in learning calligraphy and painting, and gave her a solid foundation. She was a precocious student, as can be told by the fact that she would sometimes secretly alter her teacher's paintings, and even the teacher did not notice!
Later, she came to Taiwan. At that time her son had not yet become ill. She studied under the master Chinese painter Chang Ku-nien. Her teacher often asked her to paint the faces on human figures, and frequently told others that she was the most naturally gifted of all his students.
Wang lived with her grandmother as a child. The painting Grandmother was executed only later, from memory, at a time when Wang's son was suffering from serious illness. The realistic depiction of the compassionate eyes and nimble hands is unusual in the tradition of brush-and-ink painting.