On the surface, Lo Ch'ing-che hardly seems like a pensive fellow. You need only express a mild interest in art, and he will pull you aside excitedly, to explain at great length the niceties of modern painting and poetry in the ROC, especially his own. At 35, he is round-faced and still boyish-much better suited, it would seem, to a graduate student library than elite artistic circles; and, indeed, he is currently an associate professor at Fu Jen Catholic University and National Taiwan Normal University.
But there is something decidedly untraditional about this young scholar-painter and poet. While others may still do ink-washes of mist-shrouded moons, he paints UFO's. While the hoary masters paint crooked willow trees, he paints lofty palms. And while many still write poetry using thematic devices traceable to the Sung Dynasty, a number of Lo's metaphors will be most familiar to kung-fu film addicts.
Lo's purpose in using these startling motifs is not to create a "circus of techniques," as he puts it. Rather, he hopes that his artistic endeavors will help lead to a revitalization of Chinese painting and poetry, which are still largely tradition-bound and formalistic.
Many of the older generation of artists in the ROC are wary of breaking with the past, and continue to paint water buffalos and willow trees as prescribed by the great Chinese masters, notes Lo. On the other hand, the younger generation tends to think of Chinese and Western painting as separate genres with little in common and no hope of reconciliation. "Most contemporary Chinese paintings get criticized for not being able to express the modern, scientific world," he explains. "This is the reason why so many young Chinese painters give up traditional painting completely and start Western painting using spraying, acrylic, and so on."
The problem of how to adjust to the demands of the modern world, while retaining a sense of Chinese identity, is as old as China's two-century encounter with the West. According to Lo, the dilemma can be solved neither by ignoring the rich legacy of Chinese art nor by retreating into traditionalism. If the Chinese are to recreate fresh, distinctively Chinese paintings and poetry, he maintains, they must find a modern "grammar" with which to express present experience.
Artist's choice—Mrs. Lo Ch'ing-che
A native of Shantung Province, Lo Ch'ing-che (whose pseudonym is Lo Ch'ing) was born in Ch'ingtao in Shantung Province in 1948. Following the Communist take-over of the mainland, his family fled to Taiwan. At the age of 13, he began studying the "courtly style" of traditional Chinese painting with the brother of the last Manchu Emperor, Pu Hsin-yu, whom he affectionately dubs "the last literatus." Though Lo's apprenticeship was cut to one year by Pu's death, he remained with the master long enough to be introduced to the "green and blue landscape style" of the northern school and the "big-axe" brush-work of the Ma Hsia school. "Later I found the knowledge that I had learned from him was very valuable, because nobody practices these techniques anymore,' Lo recalls.
After Pu died, Lo came to Taipei to look for a good teacher, and found the perfect counterpoint to Pu's strict traditionalism in a Zen monk called Ju-yu, a name which means "entrance into pedanticism." The monk was hardly pedantic, however, for while he favored the ink-splash style of the southern school, he was bold and original in his interpretations.
After two years teaching Lo the basic skills of Chinese painting, Ju-yu asked the student to become his personal disciple. Lo took this as a signal that he would now be introduced to new, sacred techniques, but the monk, initially, refused to teach him anything further about painting. For six months, Ju-yu concentrated on teaching Lo to write poetry and sing Chinese songs. Then, after this period was completed, the monk took him aside and discussed the attributes of a true painter: "The artist must be a complete person first. Only then can he ex press himself in art form. So you must become familiar with other artistic techniques such as poetry, calligraphy, music. That will enable you to do more in your painting."
Though Lo's apprenticeship days are now over, he still has two informal critics: his wife, Chen Pi-hua, and his five-year-old son, nicknamed "Hsiao Niu" or "Calf." Besides being a skillful producer of embroidered broaches, Chen helps her husband mount his paintings, and Lo takes her comments seriously. Hsiao Niu's young and innocent perspective of the world is also an inspiration to his father, who says he tries to see the world through a child's eyes.
Up until recently, Lo was better known in the ROC as a poet than as a painter. He has been prolific over the last ten years, writing books and articles on literature, painting, and the other fine arts. The Ways of Eating Watermelon (1972), Anecdotes of Chinese Knight-Errants (1975), How to Catch a Thief (1977), The Invisible Artist (1978), and most recently Songs of the Rice (1981)—his five books of poetry—have won him considerable domestic acclaim, including the First Crown of Modern Poetry (1974).
Lo feels The Ways of Eating Watermelon is most representative of what he is trying to express. To Lo, the question of how to serve a watermelon parallels the problem of how the poet or painter should present his' work to the public. The watermelon server must be aware of the sensibilities of his guests, he says, and must strive to avoid creating a dish which "goes against the nature of the watermelon. You cannot cook a watermelon with hot peppers. You can do that for yourself, and you can enjoy it. But you can't open a restaurant."
Applying this metaphor to modern art, Lo feels Chinese artists and poets must learn to strike a balance between "art for art's sake" and "art for the masses." The poet who eats watermelon with hot peppers and ignores the needs of the many is not creating great art, he says. He must, instead, think of more palatable ways to present his art, while remaining true to his artistic inspiration.
Lo believes it is possible to create quality art and poetry which offer something to a wide range of people. He compares a masterly piece of art with the levels of an apartment building: "Those who are not trained can find the door to the first floor. But those who are trained can find the way to the second floor. If they want to, they can find many floors." Thus, Lo claims, his art may be enjoyed by sophisticate and layman alike, according to the levels of their understanding.
Perhaps the best example of Lo's writing on such different levels is provided by Anecdotes of Chinese Knight-Errants. According to Lo, the knight-errants of his poetry in more ordinary language might be called kung-fu fighters. They can be seen from two perspectives: on one hand, their magical deeds and courage can be taken at face value-a happy farce so visible in any kung-fu film; on the other hand, the pieces may be seen as allegory. "In Chinese kung-fu movies, old ladies, old men, and little children all have tremendous power, but on the surface are very weak," explains Lo. In the same way, he says, the Chinese people, who have often seemed so helpless over the last few hundred years, have a residue of strength to draw upon in time of need.
While Lo criticizes what he sees as the overly-traditionalistic bent of many of his contemporaries, major changes in Chinese art and poetry have undeniably taken place over the last century. The most important single event was undoubtedly the May Fourth Movement of 1919, when Chinese essay writers started employing pai-hua, or vernacular speech, on a large scale. The implications for Chinese literature were revolutionary: with the eclipse of wen yen wen, the classical literary language, as the medium of written communication, modern Chinese literature could be easily understood by anybody with a mass-educational background.
The May Fourth Movement also had a profound influence on Chinese painters, many of whom went West to study the latest artistic techniques. Some dabbled in abstract styles such as cubism, although their efforts roused only mild interest in conservative Chinese art circles. Later, with Japan's invasion of China, many painters became highly nationalistic, using symbolism to portray their distress. One painting by Chi Pai-shih portrays a cooked crab set against a backdrop of wine and flowers. The expression in Chinese for the movement of a crab, heng hsing, or "side movement," is also used to describe the actions of barbarous or evil people, an interpretation which was lost on the Japanese art lover who added the painting to his collection.
A fascination with art—Also, a fascination with objects
The Chinese love of allegory is reflected in Lo's own paintings. One motif he calls the "tarred road element," he commonly uses to symbolize the pace of modern life. "If a modern painter wants to express modern sensibilities, he's not going to paint a street scene in Taipei," Lo explains. "You must find a symbol like 'speed.' And the symbol of speed is the tarred road." To Lo, the tarred road expresses modernity while remaining faithful to the Chinese experience; he sees the heavy lines of the tarred roads he paints as reminiscent of the bold strokes of Ta Chuan calligraphy.
A somewhat more bizarre motif in Lo's paintings, the UFO's are actually small pieces of gold foil he has pasted to his canvases. To the ordinary art lover, such fancifully named paintings as Earth to Be and Night of the UFO's may seem like little more than starry, nocturnal pictorials done in collage. But Lo holds that his UFO's, purposefully left indistinct to retain their mysterious quality, can be developed philosophically. UFO's symbolize to Lo all that is new, unknown, or controversial. "When the artist is doing something new and brilliant, he makes himself an unknown star among the people," says Lo. "Or people recognize him, but they try to deny him, to eliminate him, saying: 'You don't exist.''' All painters and poets who try to break the old norms are "UFO's" in his terminology. And he is not above applying his metaphor on a cosmic scale. "The earth was the first UFO," he says mischievously.
While Lo sets out to break old patterns of painting and poetry through his work, he does so with a sense of humor. Whereas the traditional Chinese painter places his name-seal on the far side of a canvas, well away from the subject, in Night of the UFO's Lo has smacked his seal right in the middle of a lake, conjuring up images of a submarine surfacing for air. The calligraphic inscription on the same picture says waggishly:
"There's a UFO coming at you from the Han Dynasty." The inscriptions on other paintings often hide themselves behind trees or leaves. In one painting entitled Arhat of Hard-Reading (an Arhat is an enlightened man in Buddhist terminology), he portrays a wrinkled monk peering stoicly at an empty book-an indirect jab at those university students who spend all their waking hours memorizing nonsense.
Such diverse subject matter is difficult to classify, and Lo himself is not quite sure where he fits in, in the world of poetry and painting. "Maybe you can think of a label after I finish explaining," he replied rather testily, when asked how he would categorize his work. With the artist himself stumped, I would hesitate to do so. But whatever he is doing, he is doing it with a creativity and sense of humor rarely found among artists, either here or abroad.