Taiwan Today

Hsu Ming-he is a master of the colorful craft that crowns temples with gods, mythical beasts and flowers.

Every time he drives past the 167-year-old Jieyun Temple in New Taipei City’s Banqiao District, National Taiwan University of Arts (NTUA) assistant professor Pai Shih-yi (白士誼) feels inexorably drawn to the building. In 2014 and 2015 Pai, who was then working as a teaching assistant at the university’s Department of Architecture Art Conservation, spent countless hours working in the temple. He was studying with Hsu Ming-he (徐明河), a veteran artisan and departmental colleague, learning to restore the temple’s decorations. The experience had a seminal influence on Pai’s career as an educator and conservationist. “The aesthetic component of religious architecture is seen in both its basic structure and the decorative elements on the roof, pillars, eaves and so on,” Pai said. “From Hsu, I amassed valuable first-hand experience of ornamental architectural detail.”

  Born into a poor family in Taoyuan City in northern Taiwan in 1942, Hsu started a career in religious decorative art by chance. In the mid-1950s, after finishing elementary school, he moved to New Taipei with the goal of learning a trade. At the age of 16, he saw a small group of people busy restoring decorations on the roof of the Jiyi Temple in Wanhua District in neighboring Taipei City. They were engaged in creating jian nian, a type of mosaic sculpture made from broken pieces of ceramic bowls and vases. This major form of temple embellishment uses pliers and other tools to cut and shape china or glass fragments and piece them together on a mixed clay base to make three dimensional images. What charmed Hsu was the figurines, flowers and animals made of colorful glass shards, a commonly used material from the '50s to the '70s, as there was a shortage of ceramics after the Japanese left the island. The restoration team leader Yao Chih-lai (姚自來) noticed the boy’s interest and recruited him to work with the team for a one-week probationary period.

  Happy Initiation
In the event, Yao did not wait for the week to end before offering an apprenticeship to the youth. “Perhaps he was afraid I would quit, so he offered me a contract straightaway,” Hsu said. It was a serious commitment, requiring Hsu to apprentice for three years and four months, with meals provided. However, if he left early, he would have to pay compensation to his master. “So, of course I didn’t quit. I stayed with Yao right through my term to learn as much of the craft as I could. It was physically tough, like when we would work on a roof in extreme heat or cold for hours, but I loved it because all the elements were so beautiful,” he recalled. After Hsu completed his apprenticeship, Yao took him on a trip touring temples in central Taiwan with an eye to expanding Hsu’s exposure to the art, a privilege not extended to any other of his apprentices. This was an acknowledgement that Hsu had passed or even exceeded Yao’s requirements. “Hsu once told me that you can judge the quality of an artisan by the way they treat their tools after work. If implements are dirty and scattered around, their user is likely to produce sloppy work,” Pai said. “Hsu always cleans his tools carefully and puts them away neatly, and that reflects how serious he is in his attention to detail.”

During his apprenticeship Hsu learned three main crafts: jian nian, koji pottery and cement pillar and wall embellishment. The brightly colored, glazed ceramic statues known as koji pottery, which are prized for use in home altars as much as in large religious venues, are actually the forerunner of jian nian. According to Pai, most temple ornaments were initially this type of low-fire pottery, but they were later replaced to a great extent by jian nian, as its production does not involve firing and thus has a higher success rate than pieces requiring a kiln. 

Jian nian was introduced to Taiwan from southeastern China by artisans including Hung Kun-fu (洪坤福), who came to the island for temple renovation in the 1910s and took on local apprentices. Four of them went on to become well known in the field, including Yao. Hsu is one of the most distinguished third-generation practitioners. Pai explained that more or less the same mythical beasts, legendary characters and natural elements are found on all temple ridges and swallowtail eaves because they bear symbolic meaning. Prevalent figurines are characters from classic Chinese literature that embody values like loyalty, filial piety and benevolence; various deities who stand sentinel on the building’s crown to ward off evil and herald good luck; and fruit and animals such as peaches representing longevity and jumping carps for career advancement. 

Adamant Artist According to Pai, many factories mass-produce the figurine components used in jian nian, or even whole statues, but he feels strongly that restoration work with hand-cut fragments has a completely different quality compared with a piece from a factory mold. Hsu is insistent on working by hand, and for approximately a decade he selectively chose contracts because he refused to change to a more basic and stripped-down style just to win bids for work, precipitating a quiet period in his career. The situation improved in the late 1990s, when he joined in an extensive renovation of Taipei’s Dalongdong Baoan Temple as a result of increased government and social awareness of a unique Taiwan identity inherent in artisan skills.

  Hsu has been involved in over 50 temple restoration projects since he began to work independently in the mid-1960s. The vast majority of his Taoist and Buddhist temple projects were in northern Taiwan, including large-scale religious venues like Yiming Temple in Miaoli County, restored in the early 1970s; Sanyuan Temple in Taoyuan City, done in the early 1980s; and Guandu Temple in Taipei, finished in the mid-2000s. His most recent work, carried out in 2021 and 2022, can be found on Huiji Temple in Taipei’s Shilin District. As well as restoring figures on religious architecture, Hsu is occasionally sought to repair figurines on traditional Minnan dwellings, which often have auspicious jian nian or koji pieces on the roofs and eaves.

Perhaps Hsu’s most famous work, however, is that done on Dalongdong Baoan Temple. It was built in the mid-18th century as a simple wooden structure dedicated to Baosheng, the god of medicine, before undergoing the first of major reconstructions and enlargements in 1805. The latest restoration took place from 1995 through 2002, with work contributed by wood- and stone-carving craftspeople in addition to Hsu and other jian nian artisans. In 2003 the temple gained an honorable mention in UNESCO’s Asia-Pacific Awards for Cultural Heritage Conservation. Established in 2000, the awards recognize achievements in conservation or restoration of structures at least 50 years old throughout the region. The 280-year-old Dalongdong Baoan Temple was designated a national historic site in 2018.

  In recognition of Hsu’s body of work and huge reservoir of cultural knowledge, the Ministry of Culture (MOC) designated the jian nian master a national living treasure last year. The ministry further lauded him for nurturing the next generation of artisans. Following in Yao’s footsteps, Hsu recruited five apprentices in the traditional manner but also shared his abundant skill through formal academic channels at NTUA’s Department of Architecture Art Conservation, where he was a faculty member for nearly 20 years. He additionally taught jian nian at Taichung City’s Artisan Workshop in the MOC-managed Cultural Heritage Park in central Taiwan. The workshop runs training sessions taught by veteran craftspeople to expand the number of workers skilled in historical building restoration. 

Hsu, now in his early 80s, is glad that tangible cultural heritage is receiving due attention. “The beauty of temple art has captivated me since I was very young. Its allure is that it’s crafted by hand, so each piece is unique and varied,” he said. “I’ll continue to restore the loveliness to former artisans’ work while passing on my techniques to the next generation to ensure this enchanting craft endures.”
 

Write to Oscar Chung at mhchung@mofa.gov.tw