Visualizing Taiwan’s Vitality:

The Japanese colonial era

Some 100 years ago, during the Japanese colonial era (1895‡1945), a type of painting which looked neither like traditional Chinese ink-wash painting nor like Western oil painting started to gain currency among artists in Taiwan. It was characterized by the use of mineral pigments in vibrant hues, with delicate brushwork and exquisite color schemes. Called toyoga (“oriental painting”) at the time, this is what we now know as jiaocaihua (Eastern gouache, literally “glue-color” or “glue-pigment” painting).

Agiluf Chen, an assistant researcher at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) and curator of Too Loud a Solitude: A Century of Pathfinding for Eastern Gouache Painting in Taiwan (TFAM, 2024‡5), tells us about the emergence of toyoga. The Japanese wished to develop a kind of painting that could rival its Western counterparts, so they invented the so-called “new Japanese painting” by bringing together Eastern artistic traditions and Western techniques. The new style came to Taiwan as a result of imperial Japan’s cultural governance.

In 1927 the Taiwan Art Exhibition (Taiten) was inaugurated. There were Japanese painters teaching at schools in Taiwan or serving as judges for official exhibitions here. Their artistic styles and concepts influenced Taiwanese painters of the era, particularly in the practice of working en plein air and observing nature at close quarters. For example, the educator Koto Gobara (1887‡1965) created paintings in vivid colors, evoking the decorative strains of Japanese art. His Indigenous Flowers of Taiwan offers portraits of Taiwanese plants. This kind of creative approach, drawing on local landscapes and people for subject matter, inspired Taiwanese painters to produce meticulous works of realist art focusing on “local color.” Paintings such as Kuo Hsueh-hu’s (1908‡2012) Scenery near Yuanshan and Tsai Yun-yan’s (1908‡1977) Bamboo Grove in Early Summer testify to the artists’ ­painstaking engagement with their subject matter, which is often so exuberant as to fill the entire composition.

Nevertheless, jiaocaihua began to take root in Taiwan only with the emergence of local Taiwanese practitioners. When the “Three Youths of the Taiten”—Chen Chin (1907‡1998), Lin Yu-shan (1907‡2004), and Kuo Hsueh-hu—were selected for the first Taiten, not only did they make their debut in the art world, but their overnight success also heralded the growing preeminence of jiaocaihua at this large-scale annual art show.

The landscapes, human figures, flora, and fauna depicted by Taiwanese painters were distinctively local, and their works attracted praise in Japanese art circles, laying the foundations for the emergence of a characteristic Taiwanese style of jiaocaihua. This trend resonates with the words of artist Huang Tu-shui (1895‡1930) at the time: “We look forward to the arrival of the age of ‘Formosa’ in art.”

Lin Yu-shan’s Lotus Pond was designated a national treasure by the Ministry of Culture ten years ago. The NTMoFA has launched a set of ceramic tableware that reproduces parts of the painting, bringing art into everyday life. (courtesy of NTMoFA) 

Kuo Hsueh-hu, Festival on South Street, 1930 (collection of Taipei Fine Arts Museum)

The postwar period

However, in contrast to its dominance during the Japanese period, jiaocaihua had a rough time after the Republic of China took over Taiwan at the end of World War II. What remained unchanged was the devotion of Taiwanese artists to local subject matter. While painters in Japanese Taiwan gave pride of place to local landscapes and natural objects, in the postwar era they accorded more attention to everyday experiences. Lin Chih-chu’s (1917‡2008) Water Reflection, for example, depicts neighbors washing clothes on a riverbank, and Wen Chang-shun’s (1925‡2005) Reunion Dinner portrays a homely scene of a woman lighting a fire for cooking.

But political changes in postwar Taiwan compelled many artists to adjust their creative strategies. Lin Yu-shan’s Handing Over Horses is a representative case in point. Dating back to the end of the colonial era, this painting portrays a Taiwanese soldier offering up horses to the Japanese military. The two horses originally carried Japanese flags, but following the arrival of the ROC government and its authoritarian rule, Lin was worried about the potential consequences of displaying Japanese symbols. He therefore painted over the sun ensigns, turning them into ROC flags. When Lin set about restoring this painting late in his life, he paid tribute to the past by leaving unchanged the ROC flags in the left half, but he gave the repainted right half, which had been seriously damaged, its original look. The ROC and Japanese flags now coexist in this painting, attesting to Taiwan’s turbulent history in the last century.

The NTMoFA’s Arts as Imprints of the Times showcases artworks from its collection chronologically, from the Ming and Qing Dynasties to the 21st century. The exhibition shows how art has been gathering energy in Taiwan over the centuries. (courtesy of NTMoFA)

Lin Yu-shan, A View of a Pool, 1953 (collection of National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts)

Chen Hui-kun, Wulai Waterfall, 1951 (collection of National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts)

Connecting with the pulse of the land

“Throughout the development of Taiwanese art, no other kind of painting has had as checkered a history as jiaocaihua, and yet so intimately reflects the vitality of the land,” says Lin Chen-ching, a researcher at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (NTMoFA). To reexamine the evolution of jiaocaihua in the last century is part and parcel of Taiwan’s current efforts to reconstruct its own history of art.

Hsueh Yen-ling, head of the NTMoFA’s Research Department, is responsible for the section on early 20th-­century Taiwanese art at the NTMoFA exhibition Art as Imprints of the Times, which will open in April 2025. She hopes that visitors will see how Japanese artists perceived Taiwan’s scenery and folk customs, as well as how Taiwanese painters interpreted their own everyday lives and culture. To this end, she selected Hideo Murakami’s (1900‡1975) The Ghost Festival in Keelung, which presents a detailed view of a major festive occasion in Taiwan. In 1927 the painting won the Special Selection award at the first Taiten, encouraging more people to explore local customs as artistic subjects.

With jiaocaihua being derecognized at official art exhibitions in the 1970s, Lin Chih-chu offered private tuition and sought to rename this art form after the medium in order to free it from political interference. He also carried on perfecting his art. His Recess has a simple composition, featuring neat, fluid lines. His Red Sunset ventures into cubism, showing an avant-garde experimentalist sensibility. (photo by Jimmy Lin)

Lin Chih-chu, Recess, 1939 (collection of Taipei Fine Arts Museum)

Lin Chih-chu, Red Sunset, 1963 (collection of National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts)

The “legitimacy” of jiaocaihua

When the Taiwan Province Fine Arts Exhibition (Taiwan Arts Exhibition) was launched in 1946, works were selected within three categories: Chinese Painting (guohua, literally “national painting”), Western Painting, and Sculpture. Jiaocaihua was subsumed under the category of Chinese Painting. Jiaocaihua painters at the time endeavored to bring Chinese ink-wash techniques into their practice. Both dated 1953, Lin Yu-shan’s A View of a Pool and Chen Chin’s In the Front of a Temple exude the traditional charm of ink washes.

The Japanese associations of jiaocaihua, however, led to controversies over whether it could legitimately be considered “Chinese painting.” Consequently, in 1963 the Taiwan Arts Exhibition divided Chinese Painting into two subcategories, with jiaocaihua being designated “Chinese Painting Category 2,” thus imposing a separate status on it.

Meanwhile, the impact of new trends in Western art encouraged jiaocaihua painters to explore different techniques and styles. Chen Hui-kun (1907‡2011), whose art spanned both Eastern and Western traditions, evokes the spirit of Chinese ink washes in his jiaocaihua painting Wulai Waterfall, though in a different style from traditional ink-wash works, while his Hohuanshan ­incorporates ­elements of ­Fauvism, Cubism, and Impressionism, showing us just how resilient jiaocaihua is as an art form. 

In the 1970s, with Taiwan being at a diplomatic crossroads, intellectuals here committed themselves to a new wave of cultural localism, seeking to define their Taiwanese subjectivity and to give shape to a cultural memory that belonged to these islands. The section entitled “Safeguarding Space: Settling on a Name” at Too Loud a Solitude included numerous jiaocaihua paintings depicting local religious subjects from different faith traditions, such as Chen Chin’s Beigang Chaotian Temple, Chen Shou-yi’s (1934‡2012) The Mighty Spirit, and Chan Fwu-yun’s (1927‡2019) Temple. Explaining her curatorial decisions, Agiluf Chen recounts that firstly at least two works of each painter were selected, which were then grouped into different sections according to their content. Interestingly, when the paintings allotted to the “Safeguarding Space” section were laid out together, it became obvious that they all responded in one way or another to the ethos of cultural localism.

Chen Chin, Beigang Chaotian Temple, 1966 (collection of Shung Ye Museum of Formosan Fine Arts)

Chan Fwu-yun, Temple, 1974 (collection of Taipei Fine Arts Museum)

A resilient art form

In 1973 the Taiwan Arts Exhibition abolished the “Chinese Painting 2” subcategory. In 1977, Lin Chih-chu began advocating for this art form to be named after the medium itself, in order to liberate it from political interference. It was then that the appellation jiaocaihua became established. Despite being caught up in these long-running controversies, jiaocaihua painters in Taiwan continued to create new works. They gave private lessons and formed organizations, preparing themselves for the day when jiaocaihua would regain official recognition. In 1983, the Taiwan Arts Exhibition reinstated jiaocaihua, this time as a separate category.

In 1985 Lin Chih-chu was invited to teach jiaocaihua at Tunghai University. This was the first time a Taiwanese academic institution had embraced jiaocaihua. Since then, jiaocaihua has been studied systematically in formal educational settings, and new talent has been emerging. Modern jiaocaihua painters no longer confine themselves to traditional techniques. Rather, they use the special qualities of the medium to articulate their idiosyncratic visions in experimental and innovative ways. Pan Hsin-hua’s (b. 1966) Landscape, for example, brings together physiognomy, geomancy, and landscape images to conjure up a mysterious atmosphere. Yeh Tsai-wei’s (b. 1988) Boring is inspired by everyday life, expressing the boredom of a girl surrounded by adults enjoying themselves at a banquet.

Introduced during the Japanese colonial era, jiaocaihua continued to undergo localization during the postwar period, while painters today continue to experiment with new techniques. Throughout its checkered history, jiaocaihua has been inextricable from larger sociopolitical changes in Taiwan. Agiluf Chen believes that the evolution of jiaocaihua in Taiwan has always been closely bound up with our “care for our own land, landscape, and culture.”

As Yen Chuan-ying, an adjunct research fellow at the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, says in a book on Taiwanese art in the last two centuries: “What makes Taiwan so precious is its vitality: coming from diverse origins, it is an energy whose innovative force is attendant upon the continual assimilation of genes and cultures.” Jiaocaihua offers a perfect example of this vitality.

Modern jiaocaihua painters no longer confine themselves to traditional techniques. They use the medium to express their idiosyncratic visions in more experimental and innovative ways.