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.