Chiang Han-tung is one of the pioneers of modernistic
painting in Taiwan. Eye disease thirty-four years ago
nearly ended his career as an artist, but will power
restored his ability to create memorable images.
As the morning sunlight streaks into his apartment in northern Taipei's Peitou District, seventy-three-year-old Chiang Han-tung starts each day by painting sharply delineated and brightly colored images. For more than three decades he has struggled with weak eyesight--the result of a bout of glaucoma that left him in despair of ever painting again. The aftereffects of a stroke in 1990 have also slowed his walk to a shuffle. But his mind remains active and his hands steady. "I try to lead a calm and easy life," says the artist, who is determined to stay in mental and physical condition to continue his creative work. "I can move freely, my brain works perfectly, and I can remember clearly what happened in my early childhood." Indeed, that acute memory is essential for a painter who for decades has spent most of his time at home engaged in work and contemplation.
Chiang is one of the major pioneers of modern art in Taiwan. A native of southeastern China's Fujian Province, he was orphaned as a small boy and raised by his grandmother, who encouraged him when he started to show an interest in painting as a primary school student. While in high school, he made his first acquaintance with notions of modern art--and also heard for the first time of the island of Taiwan, directly across the Strait from his home province and then under Japan's colonial rule. "Most of our teachers were upperclassmen at the prestigious Xiamen University, and they were quite up-to-date on developments in the art world and progressive in their thinking," he recalls. "They also introduced us to Taiwan as a place with a high level of education that would be worth a visit." Chiang did eventually pay a visit, only to extend it to a lifelong stay. But first, after graduating from high school with excellent grades in fine arts, he became a teacher at the invitation of the principal of an elementary school in his hometown of Changting.
Chiang finally made the trip to Taiwan in 1948, one year before the communists took over the Chinese mainland, and soon passed the exam to become a primary school teacher. During the next year, he taught at a small school in Wanli in Taipei County and saved enough money to enroll at Taipei Normal College's Department of the Arts. "For the first time, I was attached to an institution of art education," he says. "But to tell the truth, I didn't learn anything there but beginner's stuff."
After graduating in 1952, Chiang arranged an apprenticeship with Lee Chun-shan, one of the most influential avant-garde artists and art theorists in Taiwan. He looks back on that experience as the true source of his learning and inspiration. Following instructions from his master, Chiang discarded everything he had learned at the normal college and started over from scratch. Lee taught painting largely by explaining artistic concepts and emphasizing the need for commitment to art as a rigorous discipline. He never demonstrated how to paint or revised any of his students' works. "He had a knack for getting a student to understand how and why to paint--purely through his words," says Chiang. "There wasn't a single time that I came out of a class without feeling gratified and enlightened."
During the postwar years, Taiwan's art world was dominated by Western Impressionism--filtered through Japanese-trained oil painters--and by traditional Chinese ink painting that had been introduced from the mainland with the arrival of the Nationalist government and soon became the leading genre at officially sponsored art exhibitions and competitions, as well as in school curricula. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, younger artists were being drawn to contemporary Western styles, especially abstract art, and Chiang was no exception. Then painting in a cubist vein, he was aware of resistance to innovative trends from both the authorities and the public. "At that time, the prestigious Taiwan Exhibition refused to accept modernistic works," he recalls. "The progressive notions represented in the style of such expressionists as Chagall were yet to be appreciated or even taken seriously by general audiences."
In 1958, Chiang became one of the founders of the Association of Chinese Modern Prints, which aimed to establish print-making as a proper genre with its own artistic value instead of merely a type of illustration or decoration. Unlike some of the rising modernists who were highly outspoken in their criticism of older traditions, Chiang never disparaged the previous paradigms, deeming them just another way of representing the world. "We live in a world of great variety and countless surprises," he explains.
"Behind deceptively similar appearances, numerous distinctions and singularities may be present, just as any small stone may look strange and imposing under a magnifying glass."
All artists develop their own vision and represent the world accordingly. For Chiang Han-tung, art is different from everyday reality and he has no desire to depict the world as it is. "I want to build a uniqueness in my style and I can say that I've been quite successful in this respect," he says. "I have my own logic and I create my works according to that logic." Chiang's works are characterized by cubistic reduction and fragmentation of natural objects into abstract forms, as well as by the surrealistic expression of fantastic imagery and the flowing juxtaposition of subject matters. The effect is achieved through careful calculation, which Chiang refers to as the "study of geometric structures." "His bold lines, emphatic symmetry, exaggeration, and two-dimensionality suggest features of primitive art, and they impress someone as the composition of a self-taught artist who paints by intuition," says Chang King-hsing, president of the Apollo Art Gallery, who has organized several exhibitions for Chiang, his onetime colleague in teaching in elementary school. "But in fact he is a highly conscious artist with profound knowledge of aesthetic theories."
Chang remembers Chiang being "a kind teacher" who encouraged his students to paint whatever they wished to, in whatever style they preferred. "I always told the students not to worry about whether their paintings are good enough or whether the images under their brush actually resemble their models," Chiang says, "for there is nothing too weird to exist in the world." He admires the simplicity and innocence in children's drawings and has tried to convey that quality on his canvases. "Learn from the children and retrieve what has long been lost in adults," he counsels.
To avoid becoming excessively influenced by Western styles, Chiang has also engaged in intensive study of Hindu art and the centuries-old Buddhist frescoes in the Dunhuang Caves in central China's Gansu Province. But many of the themes in his paintings are drawn from his childhood memories of such folk customs as noisy temple fairs and hilarious parades of stilt-walkers, as well as from the content of folklore that he heard recounted or read about in books. Influenced by his experience with woodcut printing, such works are reminiscent of Chinese folk art but carried to a higher level. "Chiang transformed his life experiences into various forms and symbols that his audience can warmly identify with," comments Liao Jen-i, on leave as professor of aesthetics at Taipei's Soochow University to serve as director of the government's Culture and Information Center in Paris. "His works recapture the elegant beauty that is increasingly absent from modernized society."
Chiang's career as a painter faced an acute crisis in 1968, the year of his marriage. He fainted at his wedding ceremony, overcome by complications due to critically advanced glaucoma. For the painter the disease was catastrophic, as he could see only as though "through the small crack between a door and its frame." He was forced to resign from his teaching job, and declared despondently that he would never pick up his brush again. After the initial confusion and depression, however, he found that a fierce desire to paint was returning, and with his wife's loving support, he strove to resume his life pursuit.
Seeking a convenient way to practice, he asked his wife to buy the octavo books of paper on which tailors draw clothing patterns. He worked at first by drawing with black magic markers, since his weak eyesight prevented him from mixing pigments. Then besides black he also began to use colored makers on the large pieces of soft cotton paper. Through these exercises, he gradually regained his confidence and finally began to try oils. Now, after great effort, he has learned how to control his eyesight. "If he adjusts his focus just right," says his wife, Chen Mei-li, "he can see even more clearly than I do."
Before his problem with vision emerged, Chiang had already won considerable recognition at home and abroad. In 1959, his works were selected for display at Brazil's Sao Paulo International Painting Exhibition, and in the following years were collected extensively by American and Japanese art lovers. After he returned to the easel, he painted with renewed vigor, and his increasingly mature skills enabled him to produce subtler works, some of which have been hung in leading domestic museums. Among the many awards Chiang has received, one that he cherishes the most came earlier this year from a Taipei-based foundation named after his master, Lee Chun-shan. Appreciation has also come from abroad. In 1992 Chiang exhibited his oil paintings and woodblock prints at Vienna's Museum for Ethnology under the sponsorship of the Taiwan government's Council for Cultural Affairs. His unique blend of Eastern themes and Western surrealist style won high acclaim from Austrian audience. "His aesthetic appeal transcends mere exoticism for foreign audiences," notes Liao Jen-i. "His artistic approach and vision have sufficient universality to speak to viewers no matter what their origin."
Chiang believes in the power of imagination--which he calls "the best of human capacities"--so much so that he sums up his creative process as "memory stimulating imagination." Owing to his near-religious zeal in the pursuit of art, his works exhibit a creative intensity and exuberance that take on a poetic aura with spiritual overtones. "Art exists at the very core of his life and has sustained him through hardship," Liao Jen-i observes. This true union of art and life, adds the Apollo Art Gallery's Chang King-hsing, has ensured Chiang an enduring place in the history of Taiwan art and his works a position of permanent value among collectors.