Self-Portraits-Windows on the Soul

The late 19th-century postimpressionist master Van Gogh painted more than 30 self-portraits over the course of his life, most during his last five years. In these paintings his eyes shine with the green light of someone nearly gone mad, and his head is bandaged where he had cut off his ear. The portraits reflect Van Gogh's deep anxieties and the troubled life he led.

Hsu Yu-jen's Self-Portrait Among a Pile of Rocks. 130.5×97cm, 1989 （courtesy of Hanart Gallery）

In the late 20th century, an art gallery in eastern Taipei is holding a show of self-portraits by more than 20 contemporary artists: Lu Tien-yen's head has a furrowed brow and goes right to the edge of the canvas; Wang Wan-chun looks as if he's about to walk out of his self-portrait; Cheng Tzai-tung painted a shadow holding onto a skeleton to show his state of mind; Chiu Tzu-yuan's self-portrait is of a cat in the dark night. . . .

The Taiwanese painter Liu Chin-tang, who threw himself into art education in the mainland, portrayed himself as a monk in his self-portrait Plantain Tree. The choice has mystified those who have come after him. 1928-29 （courtesy of the Chinese Museum ot Art）

Self-portraits have always been a splendid part of Western art history, but you can't find many of them in the Chinese art tradition. Western painting techniques and theory started to make inroads in China in the late 19th century, and via the Japanese imperialists they made their mark on Taiwanese painting too. Painters began to put their own faces on their canvases, and their self-portraits, like those of Van Gogh, served to record and testify about their lives.

The Japanese-era painter Chen Cheng-po most admired the Dutch painter Va n Gogh, and so he used sunflowers, subject of one of Van Gogh's most famous works, as t he background to his self-portrait. 41×32, 1927 （courtesy of Chen Chung-kuang）

Apart from revealing the inner feelings of their painters, ever since the Japanese era self-portraits in Taiwan have to some degree reflected the face of their age.

A stiff body resembles bricks piled into a cross. Like some monument to the dead, it has been left discarded in a bonsai tub that is otherwise only home to yellow sand and pebbles. Dark blue and gray clouds fill up the background. The painter Hsu Yu-jen has painted himself as a bonsai tree.

I am a bonsai

Hsu hails from the countryside of Tainan County, where his father tended more than 100 bonsais. Since he was young, Hsu watched his father bring home young trees he had dug up, manipulate their roots and trim their branches, devoting himself to burning, clipping, carving and cutting, so that the branches would conform to all manner of poses. Their treatment resembled the regimented education Hsu received at school. His parents hoped that he would become a doctor or lawyer.

To Hsu Yu-jen, who could look contentedly at a tree for a whole afternoon when he worked on a surveying team in the Forestry Bureau, bonsais are "very unnatural." As soon they get into a pot, formerly self-sufficient trees will wilt and die if they go for three days without water. In his notebook, Hsu wrote, "This piece of earth has grown concrete roots and steel branches. . . . Even the flowers on the side of the road are full of pain." In the sketches for his self-portrait, Hsu brushed some calligraphy to read, "The roots of the tree constantly extend down, through the sand and rocks, ever downward. Yet their groping is all for naught because there is nothing to absorb." From his preliminary sketches to the completed portrait, it took Hsu three years to complete this Self-Portrait Among a Pile of Rocks. During this period Hsu went to New York to do business and then came back to a Taipei that was changing fast. Born in 1951, Hsu has seen how the earth was severely damaged after society became affluent. To him cities are like huge monuments, with a relic-like air of death to them, and so, as someone living in a city, he painted himself as a monument. The canvas feels crowded, with colors applied layer upon layer with thick brush strokes, bringing to mind a mountain of garbage. At the same time it spurs one to reflect upon so-called progress.

This heaviness and speechlessness, this claustrophobic feeling of lacking space to live, comes from the artist's life experiences, and it strikes a chord for many modern folk who pass their days like prisoners in urban cages. Because painters are people of their times, their own personal memories are part of contemporary society and culture, and so in probing themselves with great sensitivity, they also paint images that capture the spirit of the age.

Mirror, mirror on the wall

"Self-portraits are like those mirrors of Taoist folklore that let you see the true face of a goblin in human form," Hsu Yu-jen says. "In them you can see things that come from deep in the psyche, including depression and terror. Giving birth to a self-portrait is like getting back one's lost shadow."

And so while different painters may create works on vastly different themes, when they hit a creative bottleneck, depression or a period of personal crisis and transformation, they may well turn to self-portraits as a way to find answers or record their feelings.

Take painter Wang Wan-chun. Having come to a creative impasse more than a decade ago, he painted 100 self-portraits in just one year. Some of them were of a youth, others of an old man, and some were merely a lump of lines. Yet after all that painting, Wang says, "I still failed." In that period self-portraits didn't offer a way to creativity or past the obstacles in his life.

Lu Tien-yen, one of the Taipei School painters who stress their social consciousness, has painted only one self-portrait in over two decades. He painted that when he had just finished his military service. It hadn't been many years since the ROC had left the United Nations. In those troubled times teachers prohibited their art students from painting on certain themes or even with certain colors. What's more, with the lack of art galleries and a market for art, artists faced great pressures simply making ends meet.

As a result, Lu Tien-yen put himself into a very small frame, and the painting is cut from the canvas on the top, bottom and left. In the painting his muscles are lean and hard, and his eyes convey helplessness and frustration. His dark red lips look frozen. When he looks back upon the way he was more than two decades ago and that time in which he lived, Lu smiles and says, "There is a certain commemorative value to it"-commemorative because in the many years since he hasn't been moved to paint a self-portrait.

Beyond their individual meanings, these works by Hsu Yu-jen, Wang Wan-chun, and Lu Tien-yen are unusual in the Chinese painting tradition simply because they are self-portraits.

Way back in the Warring States era, Chinese were studying their reflections in bronze mirrors, but then when Chinese scholar-painters directed their efforts toward landscapes, self-portraits became quite rare, and Chinese art took a very different path from Western art.

I think therefore I am

Western Humanism had its rise during the Renaissance, when people turned their gaze to ancient Greece. With stress placed on inner talents and the value of the individual, portraits and self-portraits became part of the artistic mainstream. In his 16th-century mural The School of Athens Raphael depicted such Greek philosophers as Plato and Aristotle with his own face and the faces of other contemporary painters. In Michelangelo's mural Final Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, that figure that God is pulling up to save from falling into hell is Michelangelo himself.

Rembrandt, the 17th-century Dutch master, left more self-portraits than perhaps any other noted painter in history. The over 100 self-portraits that he painted over the course of his life form a sort of diary. Sometimes he would dress up as a noble. At other times he would paint himself as a down-and-out old man. In one work, Portrait of the Artist at his Easel, he holds a brush and palette. The pose would become a standard for self-portraits.

Self-portraits have a resplendent page in the history of art in the West, but they don't count for much in the Chinese artistic tradition. And even just plain old portraits of other people haven't been given much emphasis.

The soul's temporary lodging place

"The differences have been there from the very start." In a seminar, that's how Tunghai University art professor Chiang Hsun explained why self-portraits have fared differently in the West and in China. The ancient Egyptians used stone for statues of people, and especially for statues of pharaohs, because stone doesn't rust. The Greeks made detailed studies of the muscles and bones of the human body, and installed numerous statues of scantily clad youths in their plazas. The pursuit of youth and admiration for the body have long traditions in the West.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, Qin Shihuang had united the six states of China, but unlike the pharaohs of Egypt and emperors of Rome who had statues of themselves installed everywhere, when he marched around on imperial tours he would have words carved on tablets to commemorate his achievements. And the Chinese have worshipped Confucius and even their own ancestors by once again paying reverence to words on tablets and monuments.

In Chinese history the biggest use of visual representations of people has been for those statues of people, mostly slaves and servants, that would accompany the dead in their tombs. With only supporting roles to play, they were not being created in admiration of what they were themselves. "Emperors and sages were always being symbolized by such mythical beasts as dragons and phoenixes, in order to set them apart from normal people," says Chuang Pai-ho, a researcher of Chinese art history. Take for instance a statue at the tomb of the famous Western Han dynasty general Huo Qubing. Meant to show his accomplishments, it doesn't feature a hero spurring a horse forward, but rather depicts a giant horse crushing a Hun. Chiang Hsun feels that this phenomenon is a result of Chinese culture maturing early. The Chinese quickly learned that the body would ultimately turn to dust and was no more than a false image. The story of Chaung Tzu dreaming about the butterfly and then wondering if normally he was a butterfly dreaming he was a man illustrates a way of thinking that shows no attachment to the human body.

The truth is hidden from view

From the Song and Yuan dynasties, Chinese scholars used painting as a tool for self-cultivation, and they embraced landscapes, which became the undisputed mainstream. These scholar-painters aimed to cultivate "inner spirit," and by painting landscapes they hoped to grab hold of some of the qi (literally breath) of heaven and earth. By painting noble pines and bamboo, they were able to convey their own high moral principles. "In a quest for self-knowledge, they naturally didn't stress outer appearance," says Hsiao Chiung-jui, a lecturer in history at National Chengkung University. Hence, very few Chinese would make self-portraits. Instead, everyone would paint Tao Yuan-ming, who wrote "From here, return," in order to show how little they cared for fame and fortune.

With the tradition of landscapes, the cultivated became much more interested in capturing the changes of nature than in focusing on themselves. They developed complicated techniques to portray rocks, but they would use just a few strokes to depict people. Apart from being an expression of their values, you have to wonder if the ancients' aversion to self-portraits later stemmed partly from the lack of adequate technique.

The cultivated looked down upon realistic depictions of people's faces, and painting was supposed to capture spirit not form. Professional portrait painters were not viewed as anything more than artisans, and they had no chance to enjoy the adulation that was bestowed on renowned scholar-painters. Naturally, they wouldn't offer the world images of themselves. Take, for instance, the Song dynasty court painters Fan Kuan and Guo Xi. In their famous paintings Travellers Amid Mountains and Streams and Early Spring, they hid the characters for their names in the mountain trees and rocks. Lin Yu-chun, an assistant researcher in the collections department of the Taipei Municipal Art Museum, calls this practice of hiding one's own names "obscuring images of oneself."

A model of convenience

So far, China's cultural and philosophical differences from the West, its artistic mainstream of landscape painting, and the low status given to portrait painters have been cited to explain the scarcity of self-portraits in China. There is another reason: taboos. When portrait artists made portraits of living people, they called their efforts "writing the truth" or "conveying the spirit," and when they made portraits of the dead, they called their works "chasing shadows" or "lifting the cloth." The latter phrases gave portraiture somewhat inauspicious associations, and even today many paintings of great men or elders won't be made until after they have died.

In the early Republican era, when the inroads Western art was making in China brought an awareness of techniques to paint the human body and face, the same Western influence came through a Japanese filter into occupied Taiwan. This was the beginning of the era when self-portraits were most prevalent in China. At that time those with artistic ambitions went to study at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. There they were trained in how to paint the human body, and a self-portrait was a required part of their final senior project.

But academic requirements weren't the only reason painters started to study their own reflections. In a conservative society during an era of economic difficulties, looking in the mirror for a model provided a convenient means to practice one's art. Take, for instance, the painter Pan Yu-liang, who went to study in France in the late Qing and early Republican era. Unable to find models, she would go to the public baths and secretly paint the women there. Then she started looking in the mirror to paint herself naked. Her husband Pan Tzan-hua, who had previously always been very supportive, found this hard to accept.

Taiwan's Van Gogh

For most painters who lived during Japanese rule, self-portraits provided an avenue to express their emotions or display their technique. But Chen Cheng-po and Liu Chin-tang went a step farther in their use of them, and so illustrate how times were changing.

Born in Chiayi, Chen Cheng-po was raised by his grandmother. From the journal he left behind, you can see that he harbored great ambitions even at a young age. The era of Japanese rule was a time of cultural colonialism, and artists came to be held more highly regarded than ever before. A work being included in an imperial exhibition would make front-page news. Painting became one of the best ways for Taiwanese to make their mark. Chen Cheng-po, therefore, desired to become a major artist, and at the ripe old age of 30, he enrolled at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts.

Heaven helps those who help themselves, and in 1926 Chen Cheng-po became the first Taiwanese artist with a work accepted for the imperial exhibition. Painting is what ignited his high-spirited life. "When you take it as your duty to create art, if you can't live by art, then you'll die by art," he said. "Otherwise how can you call yourself an artist?" The person he most admired was Vincent Van Gogh. At his home he had a biography of Van Gogh and a book of his collected letters, whose pages he covered with his own red underlining and annotations. The painter Hsieh Li-fa, who has studied Chen's paintings and notebooks, points out that Chen's sense of movement and his unstable brush strokes are quite similar to Van Gogh's and quite unusual among those artists who studied with Chen.

Hence, the background of his self- portrait is covered with the sunflowers Van Gogh loved so much. "Chen's self-portrait shows the role artists played in bringing respect to the Taiwanese in a colonial society under authoritarian control and the admiration that the Taiwanese had for the heros of Western art," remarks Hsiao Chiung-jui. It's interesting that in Chen's rendering, Van Gogh's sunflowers look like sliced pineapples from Southern Taiwan.

Monk under a plantain tree

As opposed to Chen's sunflowers, the mainland's West Lake was the background chosen for the self-portrait by the Taiwanese artist Liu Chin-tang, who patriotically moved to the mainland only to fall on hard times, get sick and die. In the background of the work a solitary figure walks across a bridge and an empty boat drifts in the middle of the lake. Dressed in monk's clothes, the painter sits next to a plantain tree, a species that grew in his home town in Taiwan. The top of his head is shaved, monk-like; a beard grows from hollow cheeks; and a slightly smiling expression of transcendence is on his face.

The entire work is painted black around the edges. Placed on a hanging scroll, the work successfully combines oil painting with the Chinese painting tradition. Though the merger is successful, why would Liu, whose life had not been particularly bound up with Buddhism, paint himself as a monk? Does it mean that he was willing to leave the mundane world of men? Or that he had already transcended his age?

When the May Fourth Movement exploded in China, Liu Tiao-tang, who had almost finished his education in Tokyo, felt the great tragedy of the Taiwanese under colonial rule, and with longing for his motherland courageously dropped out to become a follower of Sun Yat-sen in Shanghai. He told his wife and child that the family would not return to Taiwan until the Japanese had left.

With righteous spirit, Liu organized a painters' society in the mainland, and in Beijing served as director of the Jinghua School of Fine Arts. On the face of it, Liu should have been full of pride to be in China, but someone who was jealous of him got The Beijing Morning News to accuse him of fleeing criminal charges in Taiwan. "Liu Tiao-tang, who was full of such passionate vitality, was not someone who would want to put on monk's robes and try to escape from the affairs of the world. He portrayed himself as a monk to show he was above the pettiness of the world and to reaffirm his own high appraisal of himself," says Hsiao Chiung-jui, making an educated guess about Liu's intentions based on an understanding of his life and character.

Naked self-appraisal

In 1987, two months after the repeal of martial law in Taiwan, the painter Chang Chen-yu returned to Taiwan from studies in America, and had an exhibit of his works entitled "True Tremors" at the Taipei City Art Museum. For the paintings in the show several men and women, including the artist himself and his wife, abandoned clothing and social mores to expose themselves warts and all. The portraits are so true to life, they're almost warm blooded. The show caused a big to-do, and some even mocked him for "selling his and his wife's own bodies." Chang admits that many viewers came only because of the commotion and not because of the art.

In fact there are few artists in Taiwan, or anywhere else for that matter, who paint nude self-portraits. In his self-portrait, Chang is coming out of the darkness through a cold iron door, and his eyes are wet with the tears of someone willing to martyr himself for a cause. Chang hadn't intended to shock the world or challenge taboos; he merely wanted to "coolly face the truth head on."

Regarded as an oddball since youth, Chang believes that before the repeal of martial law Taiwan was like a sealed black box. When he went to New York, he discovered that in an open society, every position has some adherents, and everything is open to debate, even the existence of God. With this sort of understanding, he took the first step toward squarely facing himself by making a "naked" self-portrait.

He no longer has those same concerns, and now Chang isn't looking for true representations of people. He has been influenced by Buddhism, and in his new works, he tries to reveal inner truths through shadowy figures in a crowd.

Imminent extinction

Painters use the process of painting self-portraits to probe the self, but this "self" and its emotional state changes with time. The painter Cheng Tzai-tung paints self-portraits as a form of journal. Over the course of 20 years, almost all of his works have included the image of his own head, which meets the viewers' gaze with a bewildered, hopeless and empty expression.

That head goes for soaks in the hot springs of Peitou, takes night trips to Pitan Lake, and guzzles beer with hick friends while playing Taiwanese and Japanese drinking games. These comic scenes all depict real events in the life of 44-year-old Cheng Tzai-tung. He also has painted a series of works about people visiting grave sites in the period before and after his mother died and a painting showing the four characters on his father's grave that mean "Fresh air and moonlight." The theme of death continually reappears in his work.

Whether it's his bohemian outings to a scenic area or the relatives that he comes in contact with day and night, all seem threatened with imminent extinction. The pieced-together fragments reveal a "panic about life slipping away at the slightest loosening, a feeling that you've got to get a grip on things quick." Cheng feels that this indeed is his view of life.

Many art critics think that Cheng's work is, as one put it, "full of the emptiness and loneliness that second-generation mainlanders [the children of those who fled the mainland with the KMT] can't get rid of." Upon hearing the description, Cheng laughs and says, "Perhaps that's it!" But he doesn't like people to use "ideology" to explain him.

What are second-generation mainlanders? What is Cheng Tzai-tung? With its old pines, broken bridge and moon, his painting Tracks through the Northern Suburbs is full of references to traditional Chinese culture. But while that is part of him, so too is the image of him boozing in a Peitou bath house wearing a Japanese bath robe. "It would be too difficult to paint one 'me' in one self-portrait, and so I just sincerely try to experience life, and then in my work I make a record of how I have appeared in my life. It's like the Chinese poets who through their poetry express the relationship between the scenery and themselves." For Cheng, painting self-portraits is a process of recording his appearance and searching for himself, in which there are no predetermined answers.

Beyond the body

The painter Wang Wan-chun had this dream:

Upon viewing Wang's self-portraits, a writer who had come for an interview declared, "You're amazing! How can you paint yourself so exactly?" The painter's surprised response: "Really? I've never seen the way I truly look." To which the interviewer responded, "How is that? Don't we see ourselves every day when we look in the mirror."

But can we truly see ourselves when we look in the mirror? "What we see in the mirror is a false image that has right and left reversed, so can we ever really see our own faces the way we see our own hands?" Wang asked in the dream. "If we can't see ourselves in the flesh, how can we see ourselves in spirit?"

At one stage, when painter Hsieh Li-fa didn't know what he wanted, he painted a few self-portraits. "With a self-portrait," he discovered, "you can always look at it again and change it over and over. It's as if it's never really finished."

"Does it bear likeness; is it true to life? Shadows on paper show a man beyond the flesh. Life and death are dreams, and people just dust between heaven and earth. From the mundane world, turn to yourself." This is a poem that the great Ming literatus Shen Zhou wrote on a self-portrait when he was 80. He was one of the few Chinese painters of history who had a fondness for self-portraits. From the texts he included on several that he painted in his last years, you can see how his views on life were changing.

When he was 70, he felt that a busy life was not as good as going to Heaven and riding the wind; he was very contented. When he was 74, although he had a thorough understanding of everything, it was hard to cover up his sadness about being old. When he was 80, he had already transcended himself and gained a complete understanding about life and death, and he wrote the above poem. A self-portrait, apart from showing a painter's physical appearance, can also reveal his bewilderment or wisdom.

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Windows on the soul, painters' self-portraits may bear likeness in form and may not, but these shown here all refer to matters of the heart and personal history and extend beyond mere physical appearence. From left to right: Li Mei-hui, Wang Wan-chun, Shen Ti, Li An-chen, Li Min-chung, Kuo Wei-kuo, and Lu Tien-yen.

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For down-to-earth Hsu Yu-jen, bonsais are extremely unnatural objects. By putting himself in place of one, he both refers to his own experiences and speaks for many modern people who feel at a loss in the concrete jungle.

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Hsu Yu-jen's Self-Portrait Among a Pile of Rocks. 130.5 x 97 cm, 1989 (courtesy of Hanart Gallery)

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The Taiwanese painter Liu Chin-tang, who threw himself into art education in the mainland, portrayed himself as a monk in his self-portrait Plantain Tree. The choice has mystified those who have come after him. 1928-29 (courtesy of the Chinese Museum of Art)

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The Japanese-era painter Chen Cheng-po most admired the Dutch painter Van Gogh, and so he used sunflowers, subject of one of Van Gogh's most famous works, as the background to his self-portrait. 41 x 32, 1927 (courtesy of Chen Chung-kuang)

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How do you face your true self? The painter Chang Chen-yu took the first step by exposing himself, warts and all, for this nude self-portrait.

180 x 85 cm, 1985

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Cheng Tzai-tung's face appears in most of his paintings. By depicting his own image again and again, he tells stories not only about himself but also about his entire generation.

Cheng Tzai-tung's Pitan Lake. 130 x 93cm, 1991

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"Does it bear likeness? Is it true to life? Shadows on paper show a man beyond the flesh." The Ming dynasty scholar-painter Shen Chou liked to paint self-portraits, on which he often included text. In Chinese art history, self-portraits are few and far between, and Shen represents an exception among Chinese scholars and artists.

How do you face your true self? The painter Chang Chen-yu took the first step by exposing himself, warts and all, for this nude self-portrait. 180×85cm, 1985.

Cheng Tzai-tung's face appears in most of his paintings. By depicting hi s own image again and again, he tells stories not only about himself but also about his en tire generation.

Cheng Tzai-tung's Pitan Lake. 130×93cm, 1991.

"Does it bear likeness? Is it true to life? Shadows on paper show a man beyond the flesh." The Ming dynasty scholar-painter Shen Chou liked to paint self-portraits, on which he often included text. In Chinese art history, self-portraits are few and far between, and Shen represents an exception among Chinese scholars and artists.