Taiwan Today

The reemergence of a sculpture once thought lost triggers new interest in a pioneering sculptor’s work.

  Few events caused a greater commotion in Taiwan’s art scene than the 2021 recovery of a long-lost statue from a factory storeroom in the central city of Taichung. The piece, a nude by Huang Tu-shui (黃土水), was carved in 1919 by the 24-year-old artist during his time as a student in the sculpture department of what is known today as Tokyo University of the Arts. Water of Immortality, as the ­marble work is called in English, is notable not only for being Taiwan’s first modern nude, but also for its warm reception at Japan’s Imperial Art Exhibition, or Teiten, in 1921. Huang had made a stir the year before when his Mountain Child Playing Flute was the first work by an artist from Taiwan to be selected for the same prestigious event, and he even received commissions from the imperial family.

Born to a carpenter in Taipei City in 1895, the year Japan embarked on its colonial project in Taiwan, Huang was a creative child, but he likely never imagined the heights to which he would ascend. Growing up, he attended what is today Taiping Elementary School in the city’s Datong District and began to develop an interest in sculpture through observation of his uncle and other makers of temple statues in the neighborhood. In 1915 he graduated from the teacher training department in the Taiwan Governor-General’s National Language School—now known as National Taipei University of Education—and returned to his childhood school as a teacher, though he soon received a scholarship to study in Japan.

  After he finished his graduate studies in 1922, he married a woman from Taiwan the following year. The newlyweds began to move back and forth between Taipei and a house-cum-studio they bought in Tokyo’s Ikebukuro area as Huang worked on commissions and his own creative pieces. Huang’s life was cut tragically short in 1930 when he died of peritonitis while working on Taiwan Buffaloes for submission to that year’s Teiten. The relief sculpture was the largest work he ever produced, with dimensions of approximately 2 by 5 meters, and the original clay model now at Taipei Zhongshan Hall has been listed as a national treasure by the Ministry of Culture (MOC) since 2009.
 
Considerable Catalog
Huang’s art can be seen at institutions around the country, but he was not widely recognized for his contributions to modern sculpture in Taiwan until quite recently. “He died at just 36 and for a long time was discussed only superficially, with few references,” said Hsueh Yen-ling (薛燕玲), curator and senior researcher at Taichung’s National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (NTMoFA). The rediscovery of Water of Immortality, now housed in that facility, ignited fresh interest in the artist and led the MOC to add the iconic work to its national treasures list last February.

The ministry’s review of the piece lauded its synthesis of Eastern paradigms of beauty and Western classical form, and Yang Wen-i (羊文漪), retired professor of calligraphy and painting at New Taipei City-based National Taiwan University of Arts, pointed out Huang’s evocation of Buddhism and Taiwan’s folk religion through references to the kind and merciful bodhisattva Guanyin. Though the sculpture’s depiction of a woman in a seashell prompts comparison to the famous Renaissance painting “Birth of Venus” by Italian artist Sandro Botticelli, Yang said, “Venus is shown as willowy and bashful. The subject of Water of Immortality, in contrast, has nothing to hide and comes into the world as if declaring that she has a right to do so.”

  The statue was displayed at Huang’s commemorative retrospective in 1931 and from 1945 in the lobby of a building that is now the National 228 Memorial Museum in Taipei. When the building’s occupant, the Taiwan Provincial Council, moved to Taichung in 1958, the statue was moved too, but instead of being displayed in a ­government building, was placed outside near the train station. Here it attracted unwelcome attention and was vandalized. A Taichung physician removed it to his clinic, where it stood until the 1970s, when it was wrapped, crated and placed in a warehouse to lie in obscurity for 47 years. During that period, other works by Huang were still on display. These included the 1920 Bust of a Girl and a Sakyamuni Buddha statue commissioned by Taipei’s Longshan Temple and installed there in 1927.

In addition to exhibiting at Teiten in 1920 and 1921, in 1922 Huang showed Posing Woman and thereafter created two other submissions, both of which expressed a pastoral theme common to his work. The first, 1924’s In the Country, also known as Buffalo and Egret, drew on the artist’s careful study of the ­buffalo as an integral part of farming life. The buffalo piece he was working on when he died led to the creation of small experimental pieces like The Calf. In the years between these two, Huang was ­commissioned by the Taipei prefectural office to create a gift for the emperor on the occasion of his enthronement in 1928, for which he again turned to the buffalo, carving five in the work On the Way Home.

Renewed Appreciation
A year after his death, an exhibition of Huang’s work was held at what is now Taipei Zhongshan Hall. After World War II, when Japan withdrew from Taiwan, Huang and his contemporaries fell into obscurity, resulting in a lack of knowledge among the general public about Taiwan’s pre-war artistic identity. Art historians rejoiced at the rediscovery and restoration of works like Water of Immortality and other pieces that have come to light. “An increasing number of Huang’s works and documents are being unearthed, which provide a foundation for further ­examination of Taiwan’s art history,” Hsueh said.

  Gathering these together was Hsueh’s mission in advance of the NTMoFA-mounted “An Undefeatable Quest for Freedom and Beauty: The Life and Art of Huang Tu-shui.” The exhibition, which began in March and ends in early July, collects 37 pieces by the artist and nearly 100 documents including letters, notebooks and photos. “My team worked like detectives to search out these items,” Hsueh said, describing the preparation for the show. Bust of a Girl, for example, was displayed at Taiping Elementary School, which had received it as a donation directly from the artist. “This endeavor is the mission I’m most proud of in my entire museum career,” Hsueh added, pointing out that the exhibition is the largest of Huang’s work since the 1931 retrospective exhibit in Taipei.

Huang’s death in his prime was a great blow for Taiwan’s budding ­modern art movement, and at the opening of the NTMoFA exhibit, the museum’s ­director Liao Jen-i (廖仁義) expressed the ­historic—and personal—nature of the loss. “It took me a surprisingly long time to even hear about this great artist,” he said, while also sharing his determination to remedy this by acquainting every student he teaches with Huang’s work. More than anything, Liao was excited to witness what he called the rebirth of Huang’s art, encouraging art historians to continue delving into the prolific ­sculptor’s creations and thought. The advice is in line with the philosophy Huang himself espoused in his 1922 essay “Born in Taiwan.” He reminded readers that the only immortality is spiritual and continued with words of encouragement for his fellow artists: “As long as the work made with our sweat and blood is not obliterated, we will not die.”  

Write to Pat Gao at cjkao@mofa.gov.tw