A pioneering sculptor
Huang Tu-shui was born in Bangka (in today’s Wanhua District of Taipei City) in 1895, at the beginning of the Japanese colonial era. Despite living to be only 35, he was an important pioneer of modern sculpture in Taiwan. His works were selected for the Imperial Art Exhibition four times, and he is referred to as “a prodigy of Taiwanese art” and “a great sculptor before the dawn of Taiwan’s New Art Movement.”
Huang spent his childhood in Taipei’s Dadaocheng, where religious culture flourished. His uncle made religious sculptures, so he became familiar with wood carving at a tender age. After graduating from what is now Taiping Elementary School, he attended the Japanese-language school set up by the Office of the Governor-General of Taiwan—one of the highest seats of learning for locals (subsequently reincarnated as the University of Taipei and National Taipei University of Education)—and there he first demonstrated a talent for art and craft. After graduation, with the help of Japanese teachers and officials, he won a scholarship to study wood carving at the Tokyo Fine Arts School.
Japanese art education at that time was undergoing modernization and Westernization, and it was this education that stimulated and inspired Huang’s creativity. For example, Huang, who like Michelangelo had an amazingly good visual memory, was keen to try his hand at marble carving, a medium which had a long history in the West but was little known in Taiwan. However, as he had enrolled in a wood-carving course, he wasn’t allowed to learn stone carving. Moreover, Japan followed a strict apprentice system. If he had decided to study under another teacher, the learning process would have taken several years more. As he was not willing to spend so much time, Huang taught himself stone carving by observation, memorization, imitation, and practice.
Huang started to work on Water of Immortality in 1919. “This is a complex work of art,” says Yang Wen-i, a former professor of calligraphy and painting at National Taiwan University of Arts. To express his ideas, Huang opted for a female nude, a noble motif frequently seen in Western art. It is also common practice in Western art to use female forms to personify or visualize abstract concepts.
But Huang did not give Water of Immortality a purely Western expression. “He was very versatile. Although he worked within Western traditions, he was able to draw resources from the East,” Yang says. The title of the sculpture alludes to the “sweet dew” in the vessel held by Guanyin, a bodhisattva associated with mercy and kindness. “Simultaneously using the concept of the female nude and resorting to the Buddhist image of the ‘sweet dew,’ he established connections between the West and the East. This was very ambitious.”
Water of Immortality, a static work that conveys a dynamic sense of beauty, demonstrates Huang Tu-shui’s skill as a sculptor and his hopes for Taiwanese art.
Water of Immortality, a static work that conveys a dynamic sense of beauty, demonstrates Huang Tu-shui’s skill as a sculptor and his hopes for Taiwanese art.