Many artists live their whole lives in their own insular little worlds, but that hasn’t been Hung Kun-sheng’s thang. His works reflect not only his internal feelings, but are closely intertwined with developments in society. He is like a monk wandering the profane world, using his brush to record and reconcile his feelings about society.

Born in ­Penghu in 1946, the year after World War II ended, Hung showed avidity for art right from childhood. His two older brothers died very young from diphtheria, and Hung was also illness-prone, leaving him at death’s door several times. As the sole survivor, he was showered with love in his family, and because of his sickly constitution, he did not enter primary school until he was nine years old.

In 2007, Hung switched over to using white as his core color, ­creating delicate, tranquil, and peaceful works like this one.

In those days, when the country was quite poor, few parents were happy to see their children aim for a future in anything as unpredictable as fine art. This was even more the case for Hung, whose father and grandfather were both civil servants and hoped he would follow that same stable career path. But Hung stubbornly continued to favor painting, and even went so far as to show off by hanging his works on the outside wall of the family house. His father, who doted on his beloved son, indulged Ken-shen’s interest, which quite unintentionally encouraged the boy in his passion for creativity.

In the years after the recovery of Taiwan from Japan, there were a lot of military units stationed in ­Penghu. Soldiers were frequent guests at the Hung home, and they all knew that in the household was a boy who loved painting. About the time when Ken-shen was in the fourth grade, a certain staff sergeant named Zhu Heng­yao visited the family and was quite impressed with the pictures he happened to see hanging on the walls. Zhu, who every year was invited to a banquet for heroic soldiers hosted by President ­Chiang Kai-shek, came up with the notion of having Ken-shen paint a portrait of ­Chiang and his wife, which he would then bring to Tai­pei for the year-end fête to present to the president.

Chiang was delighted with this extraordinary gift, and immediately sent Ken-shen a prize of NT$500 (a huge sum at the time), as well as a complete set of oil painting implements and a set of books of fables from around the world. This event made Hung famous overnight, with his name appearing in newspaper headlines, and confirmed him in his determination to carry on with painting.

Hung Ken-shen’s 1974 piece Bridge. Hung created a sensation in the arts community by boldly adding swathes of bright yellow, red, and orange to the 50 shades of gray of traditional ink-wash painting.

Later Hung entered the Department of Fine Arts at National Taiwan Normal University, where he began to reassess traditional ink-wash painting. He wondered whether the traditional landscape themes, expressing the mystery and beauty of remote mountains and rivers, were really suited to the spirit of modern society. With only a limited tool kit of brushes and inks, and confined to a set of established techniques, most painters in the genre found it impossible to take the next step and explore the rich spirit of modern society. Hung, however, saw that the materials were neutral, and that genuinely good art consisted of the transmission of ideas and concepts. Only by using a wide range of media could thoughts, themselves unbounded, be coherently expressed.

Hung therefore set himself to reform ink-wash painting.

Hung’s first works after graduation were called the Shan/Hai (“Mountains/Seas”) series. While mountain and ocean scenery were the central subject matter, Hung employed entirely novel techniques, reinterpreting ink-wash painting in media like lithography, tie-dying, and collage.

Another of his innovations was to leave unpainted spaces that served to balance the colors, but did not necessarily have representational significance. Traditional ink-wash painting places great importance on the idea of liu­bai, which means “the leaving of unpainted space,” with liu­bai space mainly used to express notional clouds, fog, water, or roads. But Hung Ken-shen did not believe that the most important purpose of liu­bai should be merely representational, but that it should be to give a painting “breathing room.”

In addition, Hung integrated colorants (both acrylic and those traditionally used in Chinese painting) into the once exclusively black-and-gray world of ink-wash painting, boldly splashing his canvases with provocative hues like yellow, red, and orange.

In 1974, Hung met the poet Zhu Shen­dong, and together they formed the Xin ­Xiang Painting Society. Later these two got together with a number of modern Taiwan poets and as a group they became very active in the southern Taiwan cultural scene.

The latest works of artist Hung Ken-shen (right, photo by Su Shih-ya) are Buddhist sutras copied out in beautiful calligraphy. For an exhibition, the works were set out like installation art, using angles, light, and shadows to create a dreamlike mood.

Taiwan passed through many traumatic moments in the 1970s, including withdrawal from the UN (1971), the breaking of diplomatic ties with both Japan (1972) and the US (1978), and the “Kao­hsiung Incident” (1979). In society as a whole, but especially in the arts and literary communities, there was a dominant mood of reassessment and a sharp rise in “local consciousness”—identification with and depiction of ethnically Taiwanese rural society. Artists turned in droves toward creative themes based on traditional agricultural society, old buildings, temples, laborers, and the “little people” at the periphery of city life.

Hung also began to express through his works his concern for, and critical position with respect to, the environment and humanity. He returned to his old hometown, which he had left so long before, and he realistically portrayed every corner of his memory in paintings. Fishing villages, temples, old houses, laborers, and statues of deities all came to life on his canvases. In this period Hung also feverishly sketched portraits of ordinary people drawn from daily life, expressing in particular the lonely side of the human experience.

Although it was nothing special in those days for artists to choose “local” Taiwanese rural themes, Hung’s exhibitions drew unusually enthusiastic media coverage. Critics found his sketches of people from life especially compelling.

But after holding only a single formal show of his ink-wash portraits, Hung realized that “local consciousness” had degenerated into a kind of sentimentalism, and he decided he had better not get stuck in that place. He instead turned his attention to social issues and the myriad wonderful (and sometimes bizarre) changes in the fine arts that arose following the lifting of martial law in 1987. New subjects—the violent, the absurd, the pornographic, the anti-Chinese, the anti-localist—created an uproar, and paintings on political themes proved especially popular among the younger generation of artists. Like almost all other sectors of society, the fine arts community passed through a period in which everything was deeply politicized.

During this time, Hung—observing the greed, weakness, and viciousness of human nature—came out with a number of multimedia works with black setting the tone. He wanted to lay bare the deep inner nature of humankind, and offer reassessment and skepticism, steeped in a sense of tragedy, about modern man.

With these works he reached a new peak of importance in painting circles. On the canvases, black overwhelms and submerges the whole composition, and in this tenebrous space you can clearly see the silhouette of solitary individuals, wrapped up like mummies, merging into a dense crowd of other mummified bodies. The mummy motif became so closely identified with Hung that it became his trademark.

You can summarize these works with the expression “absolute freedom and fear.” In an atmosphere of anxiety mixed with desire, Hung’s dark style penetrated the minds and hearts of viewers with a poetic sense of tragedy. Adopting an extremely expressionist method, he used black to symbolize the frenetic activity, anomie, craziness, and insecurity of Taiwanese at that time—a mood of chaos and disorder that was at the same time one of tremendous vitality and energy.

The Jiegou (“Structure”) series of 2014 lends a modern feel to traditional ink-wash painting by laying the colors over a graph-paper-like structure of squares.

In the 1990s, Hung began to focus on concern for the environment, and his perspective consequently broadened, leading to a series entitled Shanxing, Renxing (“Mountain Forms, Human Forms”).

You could say that this series was a kind of summation of Hung’s oeuvre. From the canvases you can feel the artist warning us about the inseparability of the fates of man and Nature.

In contrast to his dark-themed works of the past, with their conflicted and confused imagery, in these new works “white” made a reappearance as the core color. In terms of materials, techniques, and vocabulary, Hung completely departed from the path followed by the modern ink-wash movement since the 1960s, and instead set out on a path that was his alone. Moreover, in 2004 he began to work more with “human” themes, including love and lust, urban moral decay, and political power struggles. He completely transformed his art from the category of “modern Chinese ink wash” to “postmodern Taiwanese ink wash.”

In 1987, Hung (front, second from right) and other young artists from Kao­hsiung formed the Modern Painting Society, which proved to be a new wave force to be reckoned with in the southern Taiwan art scene.

In 2012, the Kao­hsiung Museum of Fine Arts organized a combined exhibition and academic conference on behalf of Hung Ken-shen. Hung himself chose the theme: “Ink Killer.”

In a poem Hung wrote for the event, one line reads “Killing is not destruction; it is the renewal of life.” Hung was saying that life and death are two sides of the same coin, and “ink killer” means that if an artist dares to break with the conventional or with the past, then he or she will find a new opportunity in the very act of parting itself.

There is a Zen feel to this contention. It suggests the sudden illumination, the grasp of paradox, the reconciliation of contradiction, that characterizes the Zen mode of thought. Though this was a belief that Hung began to have from a very young age, it was only when he was approaching 60 that it began to truly guide him toward a thorough qualitative transformation in his art.

For decades now, Hung has looked the same: a head of long hair, and never without a cigarette, alcoholic drink, and/or cup of coffee. His eldest son, on the other hand, is a devout Buddhist. This led to yet another branching out in Hung’s body of work. In 2005, when Hung’s father-in-law passed away, Hung was deeply moved when he saw his son quietly meditating and chanting sutras, and asked him, “Do you have any suggestion for something I could do?”

“You could copy out some Buddhist sutras,” his son replied­.

In his son’s eyes, Hung was a nonconformist, without any particular faith in religion, and would never stoop to doing the painstaking work of copying out sutras. But Hung in fact got to work right away, and has never stopped since! Copying out sutras has become part of Hung’s daily routine, and by the end of 2013 he had completed 108 volumes of sutras totaling over 1 million Chinese characters, done entirely with small, narrow writing brushes requiring extreme attention to detail.

Despite the copybook-like nature of this exercise, it was impossible to hide the elegance of the calligraphy from discerning eyes. In 2013 the Fo ­Guang Yuan Art Gallery held a huge show just for the purpose of putting these works on display. The exhibition format, in which the sutras were set out in the manner of installation art, set an entirely new and creative precedent in Taiwan for the exhibition of classic texts.

Hung has been through many changes in life, but to him they have all occurred naturally, rather than being deliberately shaped, and each stage has ended in the same natural and unpremeditated manner. Hung’s life has been like a cup of Golden Mandheling coffee—with changes in the brewing time and temperature, you get a variety of rich and complex flavors. In Hung’s case, as natural as the changes appear to have been in retrospect, it cannot be denied that they all produced amazing wonders.

Hung Ken-shen is the marquee figure of the so-called Kaohsiung Dark School. His 1991 series Heise Qingjie (“Black Sentiments“) offered reflections on social change in industrial cities. Black dominates the canvases, and each quasi-mummified figure seems very alone.

In the Mi Qing (“Lost in Love”) series, Hung turned his magnifying glass to human passion and lust, portraying people with simple lines.

For more than four decades Hung has worked at his art virtually every day without interruption.