I visited Huang Ming-che at his studio in Wuku Township in Taipei County on a hot day in August. Inside his "Three-Dimensional Art Studio," I encountered steel plates weighing several tons, all manner of cutting and welding tools, and a handful of sweat-covered fellow artists hammering away at the plates and making so much noise in the process that I had to shout myself hoarse to make myself understood. Wiping drops of sweat from his forehead, Huang explained, "Artists have to live with modern noise."

A few minutes later, we found ourselves in another recently tidied-up workshop, with walls adorned with Huang's latest paintings. In 1993, this celebrated artist sold his paintings at Sotheby's for prices that stunned the art world, only to put down his paintbrush a few years later. He then began to experiment with stainless steel and founded the Three-Dimensional Art Studio. From there emerged a series of stunning, much-talked-about sculptures erected in northern Taiwan. Following this success, Huang took up painting again and continued to create his unique kingdom of colors. But to trace the origin of Huang Ming-che's passion for art, we have to go back to a young boy on a bridge in Ilan's countryside.

A King in Thought /1988/45.5cm X 38cm/oil painting
Huang Ming-che depicts himself wearing a royal crown: a lonely king poking fun at himself, symbolizing his own bitter experiences with love.

The beginning of a career in art

Huang Ming-che was born in 1948 in Ilan. The beauty and simplicity of his native rural landscape kindled his passion for drawing and painting. From a young age, Ming-che liked to go to temples to look at colorful drawings, to the hills to watch cloud formations, and all around to pick unusual leaves and stones. After his father built a small wooden bridge across a brook in front of their house, Ming-che spent hours leaning on the bridge and watching the changing lights and shadows of the gurgling water. The grain-drying yard in front of their house was his canvas. When he was at Kuanghsing Elementary School in Ilan, his teacher, Chiu Chin-i, discovered his natural gift for drawing and painting. Later, his class tutor, the writer Huang Chun-ming, would often take him outdoors to sketch from nature. Being a country lad, Huang Ming-che was fortunate to have teachers who encouraged and developed his potential.

Although he did not receive a formal artistic education when he was growing up, in 1976 Huang had his first exhibition of oil paintings at the Taiwan Museum in Taipei. This was an affirmation of his Taiwanese localist painting style. That year, Huang got married to a British woman and thus obtained a rare opportunity to leave Taiwan during the period of martial law, to visit his father-in-law in England, and subsequently to audit art lectures at Leeds University.

After a short-lived marriage, Huang traveled around Europe and then, in 1979, moved to the United States, where he became painter-in-residence at the Semions Art Gallery.

Huang Ming-che says that an artist must have his eyes and ears open to the world. During the 1970s, under martial law, however, all information, including art, was restricted. Since it was impossible to see the works of the world's masters, all one could do was to go abroad. Although the marriage to his British wife did not last long, Huang is forever grateful to her for making it possible for him to leave Taiwan and broaden his horizon, a fact which had a deep influence on his subsequent artistic development.

The bitter failure of his marriage in a foreign land turned Huang into even more of a loner than he had been previously. Huang recalls: "Drifting alone gave me a truer appreciation of art and life, and helped me to turn pain into a creative force. I gradually embarked on a spiritual quest and entered a new stage in my artistic development."

The Philosopher's Eye/2003/180cm X 90cm/oil painting
Huang's current style makes much use of black and blue. After a decade spent wandering and gaining a better understanding of life, this represents a fundamental change in his employment of color.

Back to the homeland

While he was in England, Huang got to know the works of Francis Bacon and the French painter Bernard Buffet. After the Second World War, the tragic style characteristic of these two artists, depicting their fear, anxiety, and dejection, caused a sensation in Europe. Bacon had a particularly strong impact on artistic trends in the ensuing years.

In the United States, Huang was drawn to the works of Willem de Kooning, an immigrant from Holland and a leading exponent of Abstract Expressionism.

Although in Europe and America Huang was exposed to a wide range of painting styles, and underwent a cultural baptism of sorts, he continued to paint in the localist style he had adopted before leaving Taiwan. Because his depiction of Taiwan's countryside in all its simplicity and sincerity was well received by foreign critics, and Semions Art Gallery urged him to keep it up, Huang remained loyal to his original style.

In 1980, Huang decided to return to Taiwan. He explains: "Responding to a deep yearning, I left behind my artistic accomplishments in England and America and returned to the place where I was born and bred. A painter can only be truly happy if he creates in the land where he was brought up." Huang therefore gave up the favorable conditions he enjoyed as a painter-in-residence at the Semions Art Gallery, and returned to Taiwan, to the place where he felt most comfortable, most real, most himself: to the homeland where he had spent the first 20 years of his life.

Progeny/1982/180cm X 90cm/oil painting
Because of their individuality and meticulous eye for people's expressions, Huang Ming-che's paintings are in great demand. The photo shows a painting that was sold at Sotheby's in 1993 for more than NT$2 million.

Hope and heritage

After returning to Taiwan, Huang worked with great creative energy. In 1981, Know took the first prize in the 35th Taiwan Provincial Fine Arts Exhibition. In 1982, he again came out on top with The Third Wish. In 1983, he was awarded the right to always have his works included in the exhibition without entering them in the selection contest. Huang Ming-che cut an impressive figure among his generation of young painters, the more so because through his engagement with Western masters close to his own sensibility, he continuously rediscovered where he needed to go. Without turning his back on his unique artistic qualities, Huang had the courage to accept other artists' strong points. He gradually developed his own style and found new techniques to express it. His painting style evolved from Taiwanese localism to sentimentalism. To Huang, traditional ideas, theories, and legacies are the fulcrum of creative work.

Huang's evolving painting style owes as much to his family upbringing as it does to the four years he spent abroad. On returning to Taiwan, he found that while he was single, his close friends were all married with children who represented a promise of carrying on their family line. After his marriage broke up, his parents put increasing pressure on him to start another family. Although Huang hoped to find marital and family happiness, after years of wandering and searching he found that he'd rather express his passion through painting, and therefore resolved to realize his parents' aspirations and make up for what was lacking in his day-to-day existence with his art. The Third Hope is a good example: the painting depicts a pregnant mother lowering her gaze at two young girls, an allusion to the traditional Confucian notion that having no male heir is the gravest of the three cardinal offenses against filial piety, and to the heartache and lack of choices that are the lot of countless women.

Huang's most famous painting during this period was Progeny, which he completed in 1982 and which was sold at Sotheby's for NT$2 million. Depicting the traditional three generations under one roof, the painting portrays with more than a hint of irony the hope of grandparents and parents that their offspring will continue the family line: a mother's indifferent expression is accentuated by her attire and a bright red background.

Despite winning a series of awards after returning to Taiwan, Huang had no steady source of income. To support his art, his parents sold land that had always been in the family. As lifelong farmers, they felt that he had taken a wastrel's path that they could not condone, but neither could they turn their backs on him. Huang likes to joke that his parents' support was a reinvestment.

In the preface to his first album of paintings, published in 1990, Huang Ming-che declared: "I don't owe society an apology. I have always put painting first and followed my artistic conscience. But I have also tried to make up for the ancestral land my parents sold for my art's sake, because in working quietly on my canvasses I am faithful to the farming spirit that has been passed on from generation to generation in our family. To my ancestors I say that although I have not tilled the land with my own hands, their work ethic lives forever in my paintings."

The Eye of the Artist/2003/180cm X 90cm/oil painting
After eight years away from painting, no matter where Huang Ming-che moves his brush, his lines invariably turn into an eye. To him, the eye is a symbol.

My studio is my battlefield

Huang Ming-che had always attached great value to the juxtaposition of bright colors in his paintings. In the 1990s he became captivated by Gustav Klimt's Jugendstil style and his gorgeously exuberant paintings. During his sentimentalist period, Huang's art had portrayed the relationship between mother and child, as well as the trials and tribulations of birth, old age, disease, and death, but now his style came to focus exclusively on love between men and women and on memories and dreams of lonely and lovesick women who knew nothing but dejection. He also depicted himself wearing a royal crown: a lonely king poking fun at himself. By means of allusion and autobiography Huang symbolized his own bitter experiences with love.

A rough translation of one of Huang's poems provides a glimpse into his inner life in those days: "My studio is my battlefield / A kingdom without people or an army / Only color / Brush, a painting knife, and a palette / The canvass is my territory / And my battlefield / For here I quietly plow day in, day out / And do battle with my heart / Attacking and defending / Sometimes suffering defeat / And sometimes victory / Perception and reason / Mingle in a moment's thought."

Professor Wang Che-hsiung of National Taiwan Normal University's Department of Fine Arts has this to say about Huang's style during this period: "Huang Ming-che blends the defining characteristics of the art of Willem de Kooning, Francis Bacon, Gustav Klimt, and Amadeo Modigliani with his own similar models of the human body to create visual poetry. With brushstrokes that wander like spirits against arabesque, multicolored backgrounds and graffiti lines that form reticulated spaces, Huang creates an artistic vocabulary that evokes Eastern mysticism and is instantly recognizable as his own."

Wielding a Sword in the East/1991-1994/180cm X 122cm/oil painting
At the beginning of the 1990s, Huang Ming-che's painting style underwent a radical change. Lines formed in the mind and on a drawing board gave way to succinct, elegant metallic curves. Rough sketches of the male and female forms became bodies with delicately wrought curves.

If you can think of it, you can do it

In 1996, Huang Ming-che began to explore the possibilities of three-dimensional art. Huang explains: "Art is the exploration of possibilities. Accomplishment comes from incessant trial and experimentation." When Huang began to experiment with wood, he found it to be insufficiently pliable. Next he tried stainless steel, a malleable material of infinite possibilities which conformed perfectly with his principle: "If you can think of it, you can do it." Huang then founded the Huang Ming-che Three-Dimensional Art Studio and began to work with stainless steel.

But the process of turning two-dimensional sketches into three-dimensional stainless steel sculptures turned out to be harder than Huang had imagined.

When Huang Ming-che first took his sketches to steel factories, he was told that existing techniques were incapable of producing what he asked for. To realize his dream, Huang leased a factory building, bought the necessary equipment, and personally interviewed and recruited skilled craftsmen willing to spare no effort to overcome the technical difficulties involved. He then formed his own team of collaborators. After talking and experimenting ceaselessly for more than a year, he finally mounted an exhibition of his first three-dimensional artworks at the Taipei World Center in 1997.

Asked what it was like to work with his collaborators, Huang answers with a smile that almost every time he came up with an idea and asked them whether they thought it was feasible, the answer was "No can do!" But Huang had an experimental spirit and always insisted on trying to see if his ideas would work. With welding sparks flying in every direction, he would work more than ten hours a day in a noisy, hot, and muggy workshop. After countless defeats and disappointments, Huang finally succeeded in accomplishing the impossible.

When Huang began to exhibit his three-dimensional works of art, the media referred to them as "public art sculptures," a term he disapproved of. The material Huang uses is high-tensile stainless steel, and his working method is neither carving nor hand molding, but industrial welding and sheet metal working technology. Huang has also borrowed the stove-enameling method from the automotive industry. Moreover, although his style is unique, on the surface his pieces show no trace of work done by human hand or a feeling of individuality. In fact, Huang understands his work as being not unlike the manufacture of high-quality industrial products. In this respect he differs in concept and method from most sculptors, which is why he styles his pieces "three-dimensional metal works of art."

Interaction/2002/height: 3998cm/three-dimensional artwork
Looking up at the point where art and the horizon meet, this large three-dimensional work is as much a testament to a contemporary artist's boldness as to the professionalism of the construction workers who erected it.

Purification by fire

Huang Ming-che's three-dimensional metalwork allows him to turn his passions into solid, cone-like works of art. As his emotions materialize, they take on real depth and physical qualities and occupy solid spaces that can be observed and considered from all sides. Starting out as two-dimensional lines and colors, Huang's complex totem-pole-like models undergo a process of simplification and purification as they are transformed into three-dimensional stainless steel objects. Lines formed in the mind and on a drawing board give way to succinct, elegant metallic curves. Rough sketches of the male and female forms become bodies with delicately wrought curves. Heads are almost done away with or only suggested at by welded eyes and eye sockets. Many of Huang's three-dimensional works appear to be modeled on his earlier paintings.

Huang Ming-che sketches the contours of his steel structures and then employs hammering, filling in, air-injection, and welding techniques to transform pre-cut steel plates into three-dimensional objects. After the structures are completed, he decides what colors to stove-enamel onto them and whether or not to add other elements to create more complex objects. To date, he has made suspended, freestanding, and wall-hanging three-dimensional works of art.

In 1999, the Taipei city government selected a number of public works of art for the Tunhua Art Corridor, a series of artworks displayed on traffic islands. Huang Ming-che won a prize for his seven-meter tall vertical sculpture Flying in the Eastern District, erected at the intersection of Tunhua North Road and Minsheng East Road, which points to the horizon and the world of mortals. This artwork represents memory in simple lines and ideals in dazzling abstractions, both of which form part of the city's historical record and energy, an energy that prompts people to transcend their own selves and to show respect for one another as they wander the streets.

Flying has always been humankind's dream. To travelers, flying shortens distance. To the creative artist, flying is a transcendence of desire, the possibility of attaining a higher angle of view, a different dimension from which to examine desire. Like other public works of art, Huang's artistic depiction of flight is more than an abstract shape: it aims to be a symbol of the spirit. Huang Ming-che's Desire in Flight in Taipei County's Panchiao station is worth stopping for and savoring.

To the creative artist, flying is a kind of transcendence of desire, the possibility of attaining a higher angle of view, a different dimension from which to examine desire. This photo was taken by Huang Ming-che in 2001, at the construction site of his Desire in Flight in Panchiao train station.

Transforming Taipei's character

"Artists must be bold and eager to experiment!" Standing on the corner of Hsinhai Road and Hsinsheng South Road, and squinting to see the point where art and the horizon meet, I begin to realize what Huang Ming-che means. His Interaction, a 39.98 meter-tall three-dimensional work, is a testament to artistic boldness and the professional skills of the construction workers who erected it under the direction of the Executive Yuan's Civil Service Development Institute.

"Every time a three-dimensional work of art is erected, there is a lot of pressure on everyone involved, and the larger the piece the more dangerous it gets," says Huang Ming-che. Huang recalls that after the big earthquake in March of last year and the recent Typhoon Dujuan, he anxiously drove around the city to make sure that his three-dimensional artworks were all right.

Regarding the construction of the urban landscape, Huang Ming-che thinks: "Every city ought to have visual works of art by contemporary artists, and those works must add something to the city. They mustn't become visual obstacles. Futuristic objects with well-executed lines suit Taipei very well."

Ever keen to transform Taipei's character, in 1991 Huang founded the Taipei Art Appreciation Exchange. Walking along Hoping East Road, he noticed a dilapidated old Japanese-style single-story building across from Normal University. Most people would have thought the building unremarkable, but to Huang it was the ideal location for an artistic makeover, so he rented the building, renovated it, and turned it into a place people could go to for tea and conversation.

The Taipei Art Appreciation Exchange became so popular among artists attracted to its cultural and artistic ambience, that there was often standing room only. But it was closed down after three years when the landlord decided to put up a large building on the site. The Art Appreciation Exchange signboard, saved by Huang to this day, hangs above the door of his current studio.

Huang Ming-che plans to open his new studio in Wuku township in Taipei County to fellow art lovers and to exhibit enormous paintings and models of public works of art.

The eyes of the times

In 2003, Huang Ming-che picked up his paintbrush again. Tempered by his experience of working with stainless steel, his style has moved away from the elaborate lines and colors of his earlier paintings to the simple compositions and strokes of his three-dimensional work.

Huang's current style makes much use of black and blue, colors rarely seen in his earlier paintings. He explains that he used to be afraid of these two colors, because he felt he could not bring them under control. But after a decade spent wandering and gaining a better understanding of life, he now feels no restraint in applying black and blue to the canvas.

Before 1996, bright red was practically synonymous with Huang's painting and three-dimensional work, but since then he has employed other colors. Huang offers an intriguing explanation of the meaning behind this transformation: "Painting is the expression of subconscious desires. An artist may employ lively red yet feel loneliness within. Or he may paint freely with mysterious black or melancholy blue yet harbor a growing zest for life in his heart." The interplay of red, blue, and black expresses Huang's inner world in unexpected ways.

When I first visited Huang Ming-che's new studio I had the opportunity to enjoy his latest paintings, and discovered that no matter where he moves his brush, his lines invariably turn into an eye. Walking about his studio, you always feel as though countless eyes of different shapes and colors are staring at you.

The eye is an organ used to express and perceive emotions, which raises some inevitable questions: as a painter, does Huang Ming-che want to see people or be seen by them? Does he hope to understand others through the eyes he paints? Or to allow others to understand him? Are painted pupils like peepholes that allow the artist to hide behind the canvass and spy on the world? Huang smiles at other people's interpretations. He says that the eye is a symbol and what he paints are the eyes of the times.

Be they peepholes or the eyes of the times, Huang Ming-che is right: a work of art requires neither a subject nor a title. The art lover's experience and understanding are the meaning and goal of art. In Huang's studio there are at any one time many enormous paintings that are too large for most galleries. He therefore plans to open the studio to fellow art lovers and to exhibit in it large paintings and models of public works of art. Do you want to see Huang's works, or be seen by them? After eight years away from painting, his new style is definitely worth checking out.

White Days/1983/180cm X 60cm/composite media
Huang Ming-che embraces the "farmer's spirit" and quietly plows away at his paintings to pay his parents back for the family land they sold to support his art.