A Living National Treasure: Door God Painter Liu Chia-cheng

“The first time I saw door gods, I was amazed by the rich hues used to depict these revered figures and instantly fell in love with the idea of painting them,” recalls Liu Chia-cheng.

Liu Chia-cheng’s paintings of deities, laboriously researched in Buddhist sutras and other religious texts, have distinctively bright eyes and beatific expressions. (courtesy of Liu Chia-cheng)

Starting young

The third of five children in a farming family, Liu grew up in ­Xinyi Township, Nan­tou County. He showed promise as a painter from an early age, and would often sit to the side sketching scenes while his boyhood friends played on the banks of a nearby mountain stream.

Liu’s artistic talent was particularly striking in their simple country village. He frequently won local art competitions, and was also very diligent about taking on classroom decorating duties. Noting the boy’s fondness for painting, Liu’s third-grade teacher gave him his first set of watercolors and brushes. “I painted all the time, constantly, to the point that my brushes split apart,” recalls Liu. “But I couldn’t bear to throw them away.”

Though he was largely self-taught as a boy, Liu did receive some early guidance from his uncle by marriage and resolved to become a painter.

His uncle, Ceng Zhu­gen, had studied under Pan Chun­yuan, the father of Pan Li­shui, a master painter from Tai­nan. Ceng was also well acquainted with Chen ­Shouyi and Cai ­Caoru, both of whom were highly regarded painters in a different style. To this day, Liu has yellowing ink-wash paintings hanging in his living room, testifying to his roots in traditional painting.

One of these is a Chen ­Shouyi painting of Nan­tou. The other is a Cai ­Caoru painting of the Liu family home. When Ceng, Chen, or Cai made one of their frequent visits to Nan­tou to paint, Liu would hurry home from school to watch them work. “That was where I got the idea to become a painter,” he recalls.

Liu painted this five-story-tall mural for a temple in Yunlin without so much as a practice sketch. (courtesy of Liu Chia-cheng)

Breaking free of tradition

Liu has earned a number of accolades, including a Tai­pei City Master of Traditional Arts Award in 2011, and was named a Living National Treasure in 2016. ­Huang Yung-­chuan, a former director of the National Museum of History, once said of Liu’s door gods: “They retain a sense of the traditional in spite of their realism and three-­dimensionality, and possess a unique charm.”

Nearly 40 years of diligent and dedicated work have enabled Liu to imbue the tradition with something new. After leaving his home in Nan­tou at the age of 16, he first studied traditional painting with Ceng, then decorative painting with Ding Wang.

While working with these two teachers, Liu learned two essential temple painting skills: composition and applying color. Liu explains that in temple painting vernacular a “painter” composes images and sketches out the shapes of human figures, while a “colorist” uses these sketches as a basis for first priming the surface then adding the colors. The two types of artists have complementary skillsets and rely on one another.

But Liu wasn’t content with learning only these skills. After completing his military service, he went to work on a temple in Tai­pei’s Mu­zha area, which provided him with opportunities to pick up new styles. He put heart and soul into learning all he could about Chinese-style portraiture, landscapes, and bird-and-flower painting, and Western-style oils and watercolors. He also studied anatomy, familiarizing himself with the structure of the human body to better grasp how muscles and skin respond to movement and to better capture poses and expressions.

Liu Ying-ting (right), a graduate of the National Taipei University of the Arts, studies traditional painting with his father, Liu Chia-cheng. (courtesy of Liu Chia-cheng)

A return to glory

Liu’s work appears in temples all over Taiwan. He has repaired pieces at Tai­pei City’s Da­long­dong Bao’an Temple, Wan­hua’s Qing­shan Temple, New Tai­pei City’s Upper Tai­shan Temple, and the National Center for Traditional Arts in Yi­lan, as well as contributing to many temples under construction. However, temple art was largely looked down upon until decorative painting began to undergo its recent positive reevaluation. 

There was a reason for this lack of regard: when the Japanese government banned folk religion during the period in which it controlled Taiwan, it shattered the continuity of temple culture and forced temple painters to find other work. Folk religion experienced a resurgence after Taiwan returned to ethnically Chinese rule, but very few temple painters remained.

Some years ago, temples switched their focus to decorative carvings and de-emphasized painted door gods. “Paint however you like” was the rule of the day, and good work was ignored. The crude paintings produced worsened the general public’s low opinion of temple art.

Unhappy with the decline in door-god art, Liu began painting them in a new format: on the canvases used for Western-style paintings. He also experimented with using Xuan paper, a soft and finely textured Chinese art paper, as another new medium. “When people sneered, I just tried harder to make them see the genuinely high standards of this art.”

Liu is constantly experimenting, trying out new paints to figure out what delivers the best results for his door-god paintings.

Divine charm

Nowadays, Liu’s media include five-story-tall temple walls, and ceilings that he has to crane his neck to paint. He doesn’t do preliminary sketches: every brush stroke is final, each one a test of his skill. “I rehearse each stroke of the outline again and again in my head before drawing it,” he says. Big projects can be tough to visualize because they may include as many as 100 subjects, as well as door gods and du­tou (decorative panels at the sides of other images). “It’s very hard.”

He says that the hardest part of painting door gods is getting the faces right. “If you do it badly, the figures look stiff and lifeless.” Liu relies on his sharp observational skills to get the structure and proportions of the face and the pose right. But it’s the eyes that are the toughest. No matter how much he rehearses in advance, they remain elusive until they actually appear. He focuses his full attention on each and every stroke, following his intuition to capture their divine charm.

Liu’s description of the painting of eyes may veer into the mystical, but his depictions of door gods are the result of hard work rather than divine inspiration.

He researches the background of every temple door figure, du­tou panel or wall painting that he paints. When he illustrates the episodes from The Water Margin and The Romance of the Three Kingdoms frequently seen on temple walls, he has plenty of visual references. Scenes from religious texts that have no illustrations are the hardest to capture. Temples sometimes offer only a few sentences of description, leaving him with no choice but to imagine everything himself.

In recent years, Liu has taken on a new task: producing a visual database of the more than 100 door guards.

Liu says that many people don’t realize that a temple’s door gods are supposed to complement the temple’s principal gods. Unfortunately, over time, institutional memories can be lost and multiple rounds of construction and renovation can lead to incongruities between a temple’s door gods and its principal gods. Liu says he once worked on the renovation of a Guan­yin temple where the door gods should have been the Buddhist figures Wei Tuo and Qian Lan, but were instead the Daoist figures Qin Shu­bao and Yu­chi Gong. In another instance, he worked on a temple dedicated to the dark gods of the underworld where the door gods were figures representing light and positivity. “Wouldn’t that frighten visiting ghosts and force them to use the back door instead?” When Liu discovers these kinds of issues during renovations, he brings them to the attention of temple administrators and fixes them.

In addition to being an art, crafting creative and lively door-god paintings is also an exercise in experimental chemistry. Liu keeps the balcony adjacent to the painting-filled central hall of his home packed with paints and tools for that purpose.

His shelves not only hold traditional paints, but also the expensive environmentally friendly paints, imported Japanese paints, and even aeronautical paints that had to be acquired through special channels, that he needs for the materials he has to work on. Liu explains that the evolution and obsolescence of materials has turned testing and experimenting with a variety of paints into an essential skill.

Passing on his knowledge

His little balcony serves multiple purposes. It is his paint mixing lab, functions as temporary storage for some of his pieces, and sometimes even serves as a classroom where he teaches students, including son Liu Ying-ting (his eldest) and daughter Liu Yin-zhu (his third child).

Both of the kids have backgrounds in the arts—Ying-ting is a graduate of National Taiwan University of the Arts, while Yin-zhu studied in the arts program at Fu-Hsin Trade and Arts School—and picked up traditional painting very quickly. In fact, Yin-zhu began helping her father on temple projects while still in middle school. Since graduating high school, she has gone on to study in the Department of Religious Culture and Organization Management, Aletheia University. Now a university senior, she plans to pursue an advanced degree in religious art.

In the past, many temple painters found the work so exhausting that they switched to other professions and were unwilling to pass on their skills. But Liu has shared his knowledge with his entire family of six. Ying-ting, Yin-zhu, and his youngest child (a daughter) all study with him. His second child, a daughter currently studying in the UK, even occasionally takes pieces overseas to show to people abroad.

It has been more than 40 years since a 16-year-old Liu left his rural Nan­tou home to study painting in Tai­nan. For all that the time has passed quickly, Liu has painted and renovated more than 400 temples in his career. Each time he lifts his brush and focuses his attention, he feels like a young man starting out all over again. Much heralded in recent years, he’s not yet ready to rest on his laurels. He still paints incessantly, sketching the contours of this traditional art’s future, one brushstroke at a time.