On an early winter afternoon, a curtain of raindrops obscures the old gold mining town of Chiufen, adding to a sense of mystery. On quiet and narrow mountain roads, gusts of cool wet air hold the aroma of asphalt. Following the smell, we find our way to Chiu Hsi-hsun, the world's only asphalt painter.

The joys and satisfactions of the miners holding gold ore encompass the entire work, which describes the stories behind the pickaxe. The work also holds the countless memories of those companions who passed their days together-eating and sleeping, living and dying-underground.

Wartime childhood

Chiu Hsi-hsun was born in Kaohsiung in 1937. His father was a reporter. Because of US bombing raids during World War II, the Japanese instituted a policy of dispersal. When Chiu was six the whole family was moved to his maternal grandmother's house in Tunghsiao Township, Miaoli County. American and Japanese planes would frequently engage in dogfights overhead, and each time the aerial battles finished, the local residents would go to the waterside in search of aluminum and plexiglas. The pieces of aluminum could be cut and trimmed into rice spatulas, and the plexiglas could be turned into toys.

When Chiu was young, his elders would refer to the American soldiers as "red-haired barbarians," describing startling visages of red hair, blue eyes and big noses. Chiu, who had never seen an American, was skeptical. People didn't look like that, he thought. When he was six, a two-man American aircraft was shot down off the coast of Tunghsiao near the end of the year. Chiu went down to collect aluminum, and he saw a dying American who had not yet closed his eyes. It was then that Chiu finally believed in the expression "red-haired barbarian." He knelt there spellbound, gazing intently upon the first Western face he had ever seen. It wasn't until an older child took the American's gun and scurried off that Chiu finally snapped out of it.

The fires of war disrupt educations. During the Japanese era Chiu went to Tunghsiao Elementary School. When he reported as a new student, the teacher gave every new student a Japanese name. Before the teacher had even gotten through the 50 characters in the Japanese alphabet, the air-raid siren sounded and everyone hurriedly left the classrooms. On the following day, with the American bombing raids growing more and more frequent, the school cancelled classes.

A proprietor of a danzi noodle stand toiling in a market or in a city alleyway is a sight that many remember from childhood. Yet these stands are gradually dying out in the face of competition from a variety of fashionable new restaurants.

Three terms, three languages

After a few years of daily bombing raids, the school once again started classes. The Japanese had been defeated and had left Taiwan, and Chiu had been promoted directly to the fourth grade, which was being taught in Taiwanese by a local gentleman. The next term, with the arrival of the Nationalists in Taiwan, classes started being taught in Mandarin by a mainlander with a thick Cantonese accent: "We are all Chinese," he said. The following term there was another teacher from the mainland, who spoke with a heavy Sichuan accent. It was thus, coping with a variety of different accents, that the local boys and girls completed their Mandarin curriculum and finished elementary school. Chiu says regretfully: "I was taught three different languages in elementary school, but I didn't master any one of them."

Chiu found it hard to adapt at school but he liked to draw, and the school would often send him out for art competitions or to help paint posters. For his part, Chiu was always glad when he didn't have to go to class. Reluctantly he took and passed the test for night school at Taipei's Teyu High School. In Taipei he would spend his days wandering aimlessly. Once, he saw a pair of young lovers in the New Park. In the 1950s Taiwan was a very conservative society, and these lovers were sitting at either end of a bench. The boy's arm was extended, and his fingertips were lightly touching the girl's wrist-like a traditional Chinese doctor taking a patient's pulse. Chiu took this scene and turned it into a cartoon "Chinese Medical Love," which was published in Kunglun Pao.

In 1999 when Viagra's little blue pills came onto the market, Chiu felt that the media attention was excessive, so he painted this work. He didn't expect that the actual pill would get lifted, forcing him to paint one in its place.

Do dogs talk?

Back then drawing cartoons was truly a profession of "little pay and major danger." Chiu explains that there were few professional cartoonists, and that it was impossible to draw political cartoons. The government had decreed that officials of the level of mayor and higher could not be drawn and that officials below the level of mayor had to be drawn "in a positive light." This left little scope for creativity. If a cartoonist wasn't careful, the authorities could always trump up some charges.

In 1967 Chiu created "The Hero on the Ceiling," an eight-page comic for a children's periodical. It depicted a cartoonist's home with mice living in the ceiling. The cartoonist's dutiful cat caught a mouse in the ceiling every day. One young mouse, angry that his father had been eaten, covered himself with pesticide and told his fellow mice that he was sacrificing his life for the cause. According to plan, the cat died upon eating him. The surviving mice erected a bronze statue in his likeness and held a memorial service to honor this mouse hero.

The comic was intercepted by police officers from headquarters, who brought Chiu in for interrogation. The mouse was a symbol of darkness and evil, they suggested. Was he not encouraging the darker elements of society to resist the police? There were all sorts of ridiculous accusations, and Chiu's explanations didn't satisfy them. Eventually, Chiu escaped prison only with the help of some powerful connected people.

In 1967, Chiu became editor-in-chief of Cartoon Magazine. Apart from publishing his cartoons in newspapers and magazines, he also started to create ink-wash and oil paintings. In 1979, he published a cartoon with several dogs talking. The government censors sent it back, declaring that you can't have dogs talking in a cartoon. Pained, Chiu exclaims: "Just because you can't understand Picasso's art, you can't say it isn't art. Correspondingly, can people say that dogs can't talk just because we don't understand what they are saying?" In protest of the many restrictions placed on cartoons over a long period, Chiu angrily decided to stop making cartoons and changed professions, becoming an ink-wash and oil painter.

From his start with cartoons in high school to his angry abandonment of the field in middle age, Chiu spent more than two decades working as a cartoonist, publishing nearly 100 volumes of cartoons. At a time when Taiwan was awash with translated and copied cartoons, Chiu never stopped creating "cartoons of the native soil," which mostly described the lives of regular people in Taiwan.

Chiu's painting Al Fresco Taiwanese Opera. Recently, Chiu has been actively trying to make a record of dying professions in his art.

Inspiration on the road

Later on, Chiu shifted his focus to oil paintings. When he had just started to work in oils and was still groping to find a style, friends would describe one of his works as impressionist, another as realist. Chiu couldn't help but sigh: Whereas the history of painting was long, there were few materials that could be used-only water colors, oils, and inks, greatly restricting the medium's expressive power. And because art is valued for its originality, he was interested in being an innovator with materials and creating his own style.

On one spring afternoon in 1979, Chiu was out for a stroll near his home when he saw road repair workers applying hot asphalt to the road surface. With a little pushing and pressing, the potholed and pockmarked road became like new again. Suddenly, he had an epiphany and asked the road workers for some asphalt: If you spread asphalt on canvas, he wondered, what kind of painting style would you create? It turned out that Chiu couldn't control the lines. He did, however, make a few key discoveries: ordinary asphalt used for roads wouldn't stick well to canvas; if the temperature was too high, it would melt and change shape; if it was too cold, it would crack and peel off. Chiu would have to improve upon these shortcomings if he wanted to paint with it.

He conducted research with Kuo Tsung-tien, who had returned to Taiwan after earning his doctorate in America. They added a stabilizer to the asphalt so that it wouldn't melt when exposed to heat, and they added plastic so the asphalt would adhere better to canvas and not peel off. After four years of trial and error, they finally overcame the problem of peeling, and later still Chiu discovered that results were even better after adding hot-melt glue, which he still uses today.

Chiu declares: "When you heat asphalt, it has a thick and gooey liquid consistency that is hard to control but also allows for greater possibilities." When the asphalt cools, it becomes a solid, and it will only melt upon exposure to extremely high temperatures. Thus you must paint when the asphalt is hot, keeping a pot of it bubbling on a burner as you apply it to the canvas.

Master Yin Shun, from Chiu's series of portraits. The artist's inability to completely control the asphalt is one of asphalt painting's most appealing aspects. The asphalt itself creates many lines on its own, and these give the paintings a simple and unpretentious quality.

An aesthetic in the rough

What poses an even greater challenge is that unlike working with most pigments, which can be amended, added or erased during the creative process, asphalt paintings must be created at one go, without possibility for revision. What's more it must be splattered or dripped. It's a revisionless process similar to the "suspended wrists" of Chinese calligraphy. How to have "brush strokes" without a brush poses the greatest immediate difficulty.

Chiu has chosen spoons and palette knives as his main painting tools. To start, he usually takes a spoon and dips it in the asphalt, and then splatters it onto the canvas. Then he picks up a palette knife and makes thin lines by applying the knife at a high angle to the canvas and thick lines with the knife at a low angle.

In the past, when Chiu drew cartoons, the lines he made were fluid, yet after a while he couldn't help but feel that the works were becoming a little stiff and stale. But asphalt is quite different. A remarkably moldable substance, it has much potential. And the inability to completely control it is one of its most appealing aspects. The asphalt itself creates many lines on its own, and these give the paintings a simple and unpretentious quality. No wonder Chiu has become so thoroughly enamored of asphalt.

Interestingly, while we are used to seeing asphalt that is black due to its thickness, it turns into various shades of brown when diluted with solvent. Sometimes, Chiu adds pigment to give the asphalt "color." Viewers of his paintings discover that asphalt can be suave and clean, and can also be fresh and muscular. It can be as light as cicadas' wings and as heavy as collapsing clouds. And its thickness, three-dimensionality and bright blackness are all effects that oil painting cannot achieve.

In 1980, after careful consideration, Chiu had his first solo show of asphalt paintings at the Spring Gallery. His innovations received widespread discussion in the media, but there was a small faction of conservative painters who accused him of not being respectful of tradition or even of making a spectacle. This heartless criticism caused him to lose confidence, and he almost gave up on this new style of painting.

Zen painting

In 1981 Chiu's wife, who never flagged in her support, sold off all her gold jewelry so that Chiu could afford to go to America to study. He traveled with the sculptor Chu Ming. The two rented a place in New York's Soho, and opened it up to visitors. The theme of his works was "The Many Sides of Humanity." He just wanted to know about what foreigners would think about asphalt painting, and his visitors were enthusiastic. Europeans and Americans were very curious about this method of "semi-three-dimensional" painting. Afterwards, he went all over Canada painting.

With his background as a professional cartoonist, Chiu's works are full of social content and criticism. It is his belief that art serves as a testament of the times. In 1985, black market guns started to appear in Taiwan, and the crime rate soared. Many intellectuals began to lose hope in the social order and threw themselves into religion. Suddenly, Zen meditation classes and Buddhist study camps became all the rage. Upon seeing these phenomena, Chiu began to paint Zhong Kui, the god of ghosts. The bottom edge of his sword was curved, representing its inadequacy against evil. At the same time, he also painted Bodhidharma, in order to show how everyone was turning to religion to find peace of mind instead of working to free the binds from their own minds. That same year Chiu had an exhibit at the Today Gallery on the theme of "Zhong Kui and Bodhidharma."

After the exhibition, he tried his hand at making Buddhist statues and gave one of his statues of Bodhidharma to Master Shengyen of Dharma Drum Mountain. The great monk asked him: "You paint very quickly, probably finishing a painting in less than an hour; but you must think about it for many days." Chiu responded: "You are truly a soulmate. Indeed, when painting I finish with just a few brush strokes, but beforehand I'll think about the conception for a long time."

Void and Substance, a book about the Zen school of painting, described the above-mentioned conversation, and provided the following explanation: "The bottom of this painting is completely blank. Most people would probably take this blank space and cut it off, and just leave behind the head of Bodhidharma, but he left his signature in the bottom corner. This is truly 'taking emptiness as substance, taking substance as emptiness.' This painter seems to understand the meaning of Zen."

Chiu held onto a spirit of "releasing the spirit tied up by the cities and returning to the peaceful, simple life of the country." Putting features of Taiwanese scenery-whether from Lanyu, Penghu, or Chiufen-into his paintings, he came at his topics from a critical angle. Rather than making comparisons about beauty or ugliness, he relied on inner feeling-taking his melancholy and concerns about the transformation of the local landscape and revealing them for everyone to see on his canvases.

Time passes in a mountain city

In 1979 Chiu moved his workshop to the mountains of Chiufen, and in the following years a number of artists began to move in. Moreover, with the assistance of Wu Tsang-fu, who was a Taipei County councilor, plans were laid to make Chiufen into an artists' district. In 1984, there were as many as 50 artists of different disciplines living in the area. And as Chiufen's scenery got exposure in advertisements and the film City of Sadness, its renown grew, leading to the growth of the tourist industry there. The artists' village that had been formed step after step slowly died away, and what came instead was restaurants. They have brought another kind of spirit to Chiufen, but it's not the same old Chiufen.

In his series of paintings The Beauty of Chiufen, Chiu uses the black shininess of asphalt to convey the interplay of roof ridgelines with bricks and tiles to express a sense of life's vicissitudes. The outlines bring great vitality to the objects depicted, showing the original peacefulness and festiveness, luxury and simplicity of the mountain town of Chiufen.

In his painting Never Resting City, Chiu, based on the oral descriptions of old miners and his own speculations and imaginings about the mineshafts and tunnels, conveys the hard work of mining and the stories hidden behind the spade. As far as the miners were concerned, the mines were their second home, and often for the sake of efficiency they wouldn't leave the mines for seven days and seven nights.

"Most people are like ants, busy and industrious in their lives," sighs Chiu. "Are they really any different from miners? Few among them will become rich. And how many will live to old age peacefully? When the old and gray think back upon their struggles to succeed, most are full of regrets."

Eternal grassroots flavor

Having worked in asphalt for more than 20 years, Chiu is getting better and better with his use of it. This year he has been actively making records of disappearing professions, such as the bicycle-riding hawker of baked sweet potatoes, the sweaty noodle stand proprietor on a city street, an open-air temple fair performance of Taiwanese Opera to repay the gods, a beancurd custard maker carrying his stand over his shoulder. These professions that were part of people's childhoods are now gradually disappearing. Chiu hopes to use his paintbrush to stir people's memories.

What about asphalt painting, a style that Chiu developed himself? Will his works survive and the tradition be passed down? "Within the limitations of a human life, there's no need for unfettered speculation," Chiu answers softly. "Naturally, people will preserve good works of art. Creators just need to focus on creating. What's the point of thinking about it so much?'

Looking at distant Chiufen through the rain in a room redolent of asphalt, one can't help but remember one's own excitement and curiosity as a child upon seeing road workers spreading asphalt. These numerous asphalt paintings with their nostalgic subject matter bring one back, led by the smell, falling deep into thoughts about the truths and meaning of life.