Until recently, the name Kuo Chuan-chiu (郭娟秋) was little known outside of Taiwan’s artistic inner circles. This, perhaps, is not surprising, given her circumstances. She is only thirty-seven years old, and she did not start painting until the late 1980s. Apart from three exclusive exhibitions, her works have received only limited exposure. And finally, she does not devote the whole of her time to painting: photography is both a source of spiritual satisfaction and a means of earning a living. But her relative obscurity should not be allowed to detract from her genuine achievements. The three exhibitions of Kuo’s work were all produced by her agent, the Taipei Hanart Gallery, which also represents such internationally renowned artistic heavyweights as sculptor Yu-yu Yang (楊英風) and Chu Ming (朱銘), and she is slowly coming to be recognized as one of Taiwan’s more promising artists.
Viewers of Kuo’s paintings are frequently charmed by her bold and rich but nevertheless sophisticated use of color, fluid strokes, exotic arrangement of space, and, above all, what one admiring critic called “the meditative, mystic, and child like temperament” that characterizes her style. But Kuo, like many artists, claims not to pay too much attention to audience feedback. She sees painting as being on a par with writing a journal—a very personal, poetic, and free-flowing activity. “You don’t set out to accomplish a goal when you paint,” she says. “You paint because there’s something inside the heart that must come out, must be expressed.”
The progression from casual doodles to serious painting as a way of recording the ebbs and flow of the inner spirit did not happen as easily as Kuo would like to make it sound. Her talent as a painter emerged during childhood, and school teachers often encouraged her to pursue it, despite the fact that she came from a large and not very well off fisherman’s family who lived near Keelung in northern Taiwan. “The kind of life we led in the village, back in the old days, was free and easy,” Kuo recalls. “We weren’t expected to achieve anything extraordinary, so when I took an interest in art, my folks didn’t try to put me off. But they didn’t go out of their way to encourage me, either. Still, at least that meant I was getting some kind of moral support.” In fact, the carefree spirit she cultivated in her backward of a hometown later stood her creative mind in good stead.
After graduating from high school, she went on to study graphic design and printing at the National Institute of the Arts. Her studies did little to prepare her for a career as a painter, but they did eventually help her enter the publishing industry. She worked as an art designer and photographer for various local magazines, and painting—“doodling,” to use her word—became just a pastime.
One day in 1988, while working as a designer for a leading cultural magazine called Echo, Kuo suddenly woke up to the realization that she found life terribly unsatisfactory. “Somehow, I felt tired,” she says. “I didn’t want to do anything, and I couldn’t think of what the next step should be.” So she quit her job and flew to Penghu, a group of offshore islands belonging to Taiwan; and this trip, part self-imposed exile and part vacation, was destined to be a fruitful watershed, one that has influenced the course of her life ever since.
Kuo sits in her old, rented farmhouse on the outskirts of Taipei city and reminisces about that extraordinary time. “At the beginning, I didn’t do anything in particular,” she says. “All day long, I literally drifted from one part of town to the other, not knowing what I was after. But then one day, I walked into a stationery shop and bought a box of ordinary children’s crayons and some drawing paper. I went back to the place where I was staying, sat down at the table, and began to doodle, like I always did when I felt an urgent need to get my feelings down on paper. And a few hours later, I was still doing it. It was then that I realized that I wasn’t just doodling, I was actually doing one drawing after another. It was like I’d woken up from a long dream. And I said to myself: That’s it! This is what I should be doing.”
Kuo stayed in Penghu for about two months. By the time she left she had completed some sixty crayon drawings. Back in Taipei, she showed them to an artist friend, Chou Yu (周瑜), who pronounced them truly original. He introduced Kuo to Chang Tsong-zung (張頌仁), an art critic and the owner of Hanart Gallery in Taipei. Chang took to her work at once, and encouraged her to do more. Two years later, in 1992, Hanart Gallery mounted the first exhibition of Kuo’s artworks.
Chang had no doubt but that he was dealing with someone special. “My first impression of Kuo’s work was that it was very individual and very sincere,” he recalls. “I found it secretive and poetic at the same time; it reminded me of a personal diary. And the sincerity came from her ability to transform mundane daily phenomena into something beautiful.”
Questions of sexism aside, it is convenient to label Kuo Chuan-chiu “a woman painter.” This is not just because female artists are rare in Taiwan—her paintings in fact display characteristics often found in works by women. Wang Chia-chi (王嘉驥), a local art critic, was asked to write an introductory analysis for Kuo’s 1993 exhibition, Mortality and Illumination. He wrote that “Kuo Chuan-chiu’s artworks constantly reflect the kind of meditative, romantic, imaginative, and delicate qualities that uniquely typify the female artist.” When reminded of Wang’s judgment, Kuo turns pensive. “I don’t really know if female traits show up in my works,” she comments eventually. “What’s most important is how I feel at the moment when I’m working. To me, how that feeling comes out in the drawing is secondary.”
The end result may be secondary to her, but it is of great importance to her audience. Wang Chia-chi again, this time writing the foreword to the catalog of Kuo’s most recent show in 1995: Kuo’s work is not about any subject in particular, “but is simply a natural expression of her personal experiences of the universe and nature. Distorted or semi-abstracted natural vistas—grass, flowers, trees, or mysterious dreamscapes—have always been her main themes.” Wang went on to point out that in many of Kuo’s compositions, “human characters have all been reduced to little more than the role of punctuating scenes from nature.”
“This business of cropping is simply a process of discovery, discovering how objects should be arranged two-dimentionally.”
Wang may have a point when he says Kuo does not devote herself to anyone particular subject, but it is undoubtedly true that for her night scenes hold a certain fascination: indeed, the title of her debut exhibition in 1992, was Night Watcher. Kuo appears to be a dedicated observer of the night universe, in life as well as art. “I’ve created various kinds of nightscenes,” she acknowledges, “because over the past few years I’ve only been able to paint at night. I have other things to do during the day.” Also, she reveals, it is easier for her to summon up the special frame of mind required for painting after dark. “When night falls,” she says, “external things such as sounds and colors all seem to quieten down. I begin to feel and see something different. A new image steals into my mind. Then I’m ready to work.”
In the essay he wrote for Mortality and Illumination, Wang Chia-chi also compared Kuo’s works to those of a number of her Taiwan contemporaries in terms of size, concluding that “While many male artists in Taiwan are inclined to produce oversize paintings, larger-than-life paintings, Kuo seems by comparison a non-aggressive artist who is comfortable working with small canvases.” He argued that this characteristic might have something to do with Kuo’s propensity for cropping her artworks—a habit reinforced by years of training as a photographer. In this way, to quote Wang, Kuo is able “to make the composition tighter and more ‘focused,’ thereby increasing the dramatic effect of the image.”
Most of Kuo’s works are about twelve by sixteen inches, and many would certainly have been bigger if she had not cropped them. But she points out that cropping is an essential part of her technique, enabling her to uncover the best possible compositional design. Kuo knows that she operates in a market where the price of a painting often varies directly with its size, but that is the last thing to concern her. “I don’t feel confined to any one paper size,” she says. “But while I’m working I often see something that makes me feel that the spatial arrangement doesn’t seem quite right. I say to myself: this should be thinner, that should be longer. So I cut here and cut there.” She laughs. “Sometimes the painting just goes on shrinking. This business of cropping is simply a process of discovery, discovering how objects should be arranged two-dimentionally.”
Chang Tsong-zung, of Hanart Gallery, also believes that Kuo’s passion for cropping adds to the power of her work. “It inspires a sense of secrecy,” he says. “Often her works are so small and secretive that they seem to be autobiographical presentations.”
The poet is Kuo’s ideal of a real artist. “I’ve always enjoyed poetry,” she explains. “I think it’s a very refined form of literature—something that has been distilled. The best way of delivering a massive image or thought is to use the fewest words possible, and frame them in the simplest but finest structure. That’s what art is all about. And to do it, an artist has to learn how to pare away all but the most essential material.”
Ever since that illuminating trip to Penghu, crayon has remained Kuo’s favorite medium, although nowadays she prefers to use imported French crayon on account of its superior texture. She uses all kinds of pigments, and even combines different media. But crayon still carries special meaning amounting almost to a philosophical concept: she believes it brings her closer to the essence of day-to-day life. “I started with crayon because it’s accessible,” she says. “It’s on a par with with a ballpoint pen—easy to come by, and highly portable. So if I’m out, and I want to draw, I can get down to it right away. That kind of spontaneity reminds me of how so many things happen in our mundane lives.”
Kuo admits that crayon is easier to control from the technical point of view than watercolors and other pigments. “When you use crayon,” she says, “you can control the pace of the painting, and make it follow the pace of your inner spiritual wave. It’s not like watercolors, where you have to learn to control the rate at which the water flows onto the paper.”
Crayon also makes it easier for her to produce the kind of effects she wants. “I can use it to create a texture that’s similar in terms of thickness and weight to what you often find in oil paintings,” she says, “but without all the bother of oil paint, which is far more difficult to handle.” She mostly works on sketch paper imported from Japan, which has been only lightly processed in such a way as to retain its original qualities. “You can still feel the fiber on the paper,” Kuo says. “I like its natural feeling.”
Hanart’s Chang Tsong-zung admits to having reservations about crayon. “The texture is crude, and unless you’re very good at it it’s hard to express precisely what you mean,” he says. “Kuo’s earliest works often lacked a specific form, or image. But she’s improved a lot since her first exhibition. And the good thing about crayon is that because of its heavy texture it can create very strong images, once you’ve mastered it. Kuo is reaching that point. Other artists in Taiwan have their individual styles, but they’re not the same as hers. She’s unique.”
“The best way of delivering a massive image or thought is to use the fewest words possible, and frame them in the simplest but finest structure. That’s what art is all about.”
Although Kuo’s fame is steadily growing, she continues to regard herself as an amateur. The reason, according to her, is that she has not found a way of putting all her time and energy into her art. She does freelance photography, which she has no intention of giving up. “It’s important for me to keep on taking pictures,” she explains. “It gets you out, you visit difference places, and that kind of experience can be very inspirational.” She rather resists the idea of becoming “a professional,” explaining almost apologetically that she wants her life to contain something other than art. “I need to do something else to keep my inner life in balance,” she says. “It would be horrible to devote myself to only one thing.”
As if to prove her point, Kuo says she is not painting much at the moment and has no plans to hold another exhibition in the near future. “After the last one, at the end of 1995, I felt I needed a break,” she declares. “I need to withdraw a little bit, so that my creativity won’t get stuck in a rut.” Does that mean she has stopped thinking about painting altogether? By no means. “My mind is constantly full of images that I can transform into colors and shapes at any given moment,” she says. “It’s just that I don’t want to stand in front of my easel from morning till night, every day.” She smiles. “That’s all.”