Yang discovered transcendent joy in throwing himself heart and soul into painting. What he found most difficult was when reporters would ask him, "Mr. Yang, to what school of art does your work belong? Will your style of painting change?" "Can it be that only painting that people can't understand is called new?" he would wonder. "That only it is creative?" The creative conceptions of the older artists stood in marked contrast to those held by the newer crop of younger artists who came of age after the war.
New schools, newer schools
New art movements always emerge in step with the changing times. Now those artists of the following generation who took up the banner of modernism and looked askance on Yang's generation are being viewed critically by the "native soil" artists who followed them for being too detached from the living environment. Conversely, the older artists of Yang's generation are once again regarded as important and are attracting great media attention.
In the Yang San-lang Fine Arts Museum, the works that Yang painted abroad from scenes of nature outnumber those of Taiwan, because nature is not subject to national boundaries. When the "native soil" art movement began, Yang continued as before seeking his themes from nature. Though he loved his "native soil," he felt that meant loving his friends and society and didn't mean exclusively painting old farms and the like. Yang had a very tolerant way of looking at the native soil movement.
In the old house, one ascends a flight of steps to enter Yang's studio, which was built 50 years ago with a raised ceiling and a wall of windows to provide the artist with ample light. Every day of the year, light floods every corner of the studio.
In the middle of the room are the painter's easel and oil paints. A rack in one corner holds handicrafts of various countries that Yang brought back from his travels, and a bookshelf on the opposite side of the room holds his notebooks, sketch pads, and address books containing the phone numbers of other artists. A heavy old trunk that is nearly 70 years old lies near a wall. "When he would come back from a trip abroad, my husband would always happily open this trunk, because it was mostly full of his own work," Hsu says, sighing softly as she remembers.
Visiting the home of the impressionist painter Monet, Yang was moved to say, "Wherever there is a blade of grass, a tree, a gust of wind, I am prompted to think of Monet." And today in the Yang San-lang Fine Arts Museum and studio, by the lotuses and old trees in the courtyard, and in the person of his white-haired wife, you can see Yang San-lang, someone who devoted his energy to artistic creation without regret and, as an expression of his faith in art, left many works behind for posterity.
At the end of the day, as the wife lingers in the museum or studio, it almost seems as if the husband has returned to work in his studio, and the paintings in the museum seem to bear marks of overnight revisions. Come on a Saturday or Sunday and have a look at the Yang San-lang Fine Arts Museum. Perhaps it will lead to a chance encounter with the artist himself.
His bright, high-ceilinged studio was where Yang loved most to hang out. The unfinished paintings and the well worn brushes provide testimony to the artist's life.
Through this stack of pastel sketches, Yang San-lang gave praise to nature.