The paintings of Tseng Yu-wen (曾郁文) immediately arrest your attention. The subject matter is innocuous enough: antique Chinese furniture, traditional carved windows, tall wooden doors framed by Chinese characters on strips of red paper, statues of Buddhist and Taoist deities, and other images of traditional Taiwan. But these commonplace items are painted in harsh, contrasting colors applied in thick dabs of oil paint that sometimes threaten to obliterate the image itself. In The Earth God, for example, the likeness of the statue emerges in a mass of bright yellow, red, and green strokes and curd-like smudges. In Temple Lanterns, rows of white paper lanterns are almost swallowed up by an energetic red and blue background. Or in Window, quick smears of light green and pink overflow in the spaces between the window's decorative black frame.
Some viewers are put off by Tseng's intense hues and crude surface textures. Some also find his choice of subject matter provincial and uninspired. But others are enthralled with his vibrant, daring approach and his captivation with locally inspired images. For Tseng himself, these works reflect a long-time search to find the most suitable means for expressing his identity. “My paintings must have a strong Taiwanese flavor,” he says, “so when people see them they can feel Taiwan immediately.
Tseng's fascination with the unique flavor of his culture started with his childhood in the historical city of Tainan, where he was born in 1954. He remembers being captivated by the decorative motifs, historical artifacts, and folk art that he found scattered throughout his hometown. “I thought the designs of our traditional rooftops, doors, windows, beds, chairs, cabinets were really gorgeous,” he says. As he grew up and decided to become an artist, he saw no reason to look beyond his own locale for inspiration. But when he began studying Chinese painting at the National Institute of the Arts in Taipei, he suddenly felt alone in his orientation. He discovered that many of Taiwan's famous artists seemed to draw their subject matter from foreign rather than local influences. “Why did they always paint landscapes in France?” he asks. “Why didn't they paint something about Taiwan? I found that strange.”
Tseng was also frustrated by the teaching methods used by his instructors, even though he performed well and consistently won first prize in the school's annual Chinese painting competition. “There were too many conventions in the education system that limited the students' artistic development,” he says. “We couldn't use the colors we liked. And we had to paint in the styles approved by our teachers. We weren't allowed or encouraged to express ourselves artistically, or to develop our own style.”
To escape his disillusionment with school, from time to time Tseng would skip classes and sneak into the old deserted garden residence next to the school. “I would hide there and forget the rest of the world,” he says. Although today this nineteenth century compound, known as the Lin Family Gardens, has been reconstructed and opened to the public as a major historical site, at the time it was in a state of neglect and disrepair. But even amidst the decay, Tseng reveled in the decorative touches of the Ching-style architecture, especially its ornately carved doors and window frames. “The more I looked at the traditional motifs there, which were so beautiful,” he says, “the stronger my desire to paint folk artifacts became.”
But finding the right style for painting these images was another source of frustration. Tseng felt he was not intellectually or artistically mature enough to find a way to use these motifs successfully in his painting. “The designs of most folk artifacts like window frames or furniture are very complicated,” he says. “I didn't want to just copy them realistically. But the idea of simplifying them to bring out the best qualities also bothered me.” Tseng knew that he wanted to find a way to use these traditional designs in a style that was entirely his own. What he did not know was that it would take him nearly twenty years to find that style.
After graduating in 1976, Tseng quickly turned to his talents as a Chinese landscape painter to make a living. By then, he had already won a number of first prizes in national painting competitions, and his work was sought after by some of Taipei's major hotels. He earned several large-scale commissions with the prestigious Lai Lai Sheraton and Howard Plaza hotels and began turning out hundreds of attractive ink and watercolor paintings to decorate their rooms. “I did one hotel after another,” he says. “I think I did most of the hotels built fifteen years ago in Taipei. I did it like I was working on a mass-production line, more than ten paintings a day, and the money came in.” Most of these paintings Tseng did not even bother to sign. But despite their mass-produced quality, the works did reflect the artist's desire to paint locally inspired images, mainly landscapes.
By the late seventies, when Tseng had saved enough money to support himself, he began to pursue his career as a serious artist, taking the time to explore more intently his interest in local themes. He initially focused on three subjects that were once common in the countryside of southern Taiwan: old-fashioned Chinese-style brick houses, swamps filled with thick growths of mangrove trees, and the white egrets that often nested in such areas. These paintings were characterized by subtle watercolor washes and carefully composed lines or spots of color.
Again, Tseng's talent was quickly recognized. In 1980, the IBM Taiwan Corp. offered him financial support of about US$4,000 a year for three years in return for twenty paintings. And in 1984, he received an award from the Chinese Writers' & Artists' Association, an organization run by some of the most respected artists on the island. It is an honor that Tseng still considers one of his greatest. Several major exhibitions followed. In 1987, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum sponsored an exhibition of his mangrove paintings, and the following year he was invited to present his works of red-brick houses at the opening of the Taiwan Museum of Art in Taichung.
By this time, Tseng had begun to expand his subject matter to include narcissuses, the flower most often used for decorations at local religious festivities. And in the late eighties, he set aside his rustic country life images for depictions of more refined interior scenes that evoked the lifestyles of wealthy Chinese living in Taiwan in an earlier era. His recurrent theme in this period became a traditionally clad woman standing or sitting in a room decorated with old-style furnishings such as straight-backed wooden chairs, mirror and wash basin stands, and porcelain vases. In Lady and Birds, painted during this period, a young woman in a red robe emerges from behind a lattice doorway to enjoy a quiet moment with her pet birds. And in Chinese Flavor, a similarly dressed woman fondly watches a bowl of goldfish sitting atop a carved wooden bench. The images are again simplified watercolor renditions, but painted in a more naive style that gives them a sense of immediacy and simplicity.
During this period, Tseng also began framing his compositions with an image of a window or doorway, creating a kind of entrance into the traditional world he was depicting. This motif has since become one of the signature elements of his work. “I like the feelings that old Chinese windows and doors inspire,” he says. “They suggest grace, modesty, and reserve. I think traditional Chinese culture has these same characteristics.”
But even though Tseng's growing mastery over ink and watercolor helped to boost his reputation, he was not yet satisfied with his work. “I always felt something was missing,” he says. The problem, he realized, was in the medium. It seemed too delicate to express the strong Taiwanese flavor that he hoped to bring to his art.
He gradually became more drawn to oil paints, which he had first worked with much earlier while fulfilling his required military service in 1978. At the time, he had been assigned to create propaganda graphics for the army, and discovered that the new medium was far better for creating layers and a sense of weight. And he knew it would be better suited to his folk art motifs. “The texture of oil paint is thicker and the color looks richer on the canvas,” he says, “This helps intensify the vibrant feelings that Taiwan folk art arouses in people.”
Still, Tseng felt he needed time to become fluent in oils. For ten years, while he continued to show and sell ink and watercolor paintings, he experimented with oils in his studio. The more he painted in oil, the more he felt he had hit upon the right track. “I remember saying to myself, 'This is it! This is the way to do it!''' he says.
By the early 1990s, Tseng was working exclusively in oils—and using them to color his childhood dream. His new works began zeroing in on close-up images of folk motifs, reproduced in simplified forms and painted in raw, contrasting colors: emerald green, indigo blue, bright yellow, and vermilion are now his signature palette. Tseng feels these intense colors reflect the spirit of folk art better than the light, thin colors of Chinese ink painting. “If you look carefully at the things in our folk art,” he says, “you'll notice contrasting colors are used everywhere, even in local religious culture.” This kind of coloring is particularly obvious, he says, in Taiwan's traditional art of painting on glass. This craft, once commonly used to decorate furniture, depicts such themes as folk legends, historical figures, and symbolic flowers and birds. Tseng's works, in fact, could be seen as a modernized resurrection of this old-style craft. “Glass painting,” Tseng says, “is a very important aspect of Taiwan's folk art that has long been neglected.”
Tseng feels his new palette reflects not only the colors of local folk art but also of some ancient Chinese artifacts. For example, he says, the Buddhist cave murals painted in the fourth century in Dunhuang, western China, used a much brighter palette than found in conventional Chinese painting, and they used the same four hues that Tseng emphasizes in his work. “I've studied books about the Dunhuang murals and other old folk cultures of Mainland China, and I've noticed that these four colors appear very often,” he says. “What I do is rearrange the colors and give them a different look on my canvas.”
Tseng's use of space in his oil paintings is also very different from the more linear, light-handed approach of his earlier ink and watercolor works. In the new works, every inch of canvas is covered with his spicy colors, and often the objects are not delineated by black contour lines but by surrounding areas of contrasting hue. This “empty” space is just as colorful and full of texture as the objects themselves. Tseng creates an overall thick, mottled effect by applying much of his paint with a knife instead of a brush. a technique that he feels reflects the rustic quality of his folk art images. “Using a knife gives the effect of agedness,” he says, “and it helps to strengthen the painting's intensity.”
Tseng also finds that his impasto surfaces, bright colors, and minimal use of shading reflect the two-dimensional approach found in most folk art. He points out that folk artists were unschooled in methods of rendering perspective or naturalistic expression. “They had no Western stereoscopic concept like that constantly taught at art school,” he says. “They painted in their own way, which was very ingenuous and spontaneous. They simply didn't care if the figures they painted had realistic physical dimensions. I want to keep that unrefined feeling in my art. That's the spirit of Taiwan's folk art.”
Today, Tseng continues to enjoy a strong reputation for his oil paintings. But whereas his earlier award-winning watercolors had mainly a local following, his new style appeals to a more international audience. Many of his exhibitions in the past five years have been at such venues as the American Club and the Bankers Club, which cater mainly to foreigners living and working in Taipei. One of his biggest advocates has been Patrick Taillandier, the cultural counselor for the French Institute in Taipei, which sponsored an exhibition of Tseng's oil paintings in 1993. When Taillandier was first introduced to Tseng's work the year before, he was drawn to them at once. “I realized immediately that he is not only a Chinese painter,” he says. “More than that, he is a Taiwanese cultural painter. It is not because of what he paints. The very fact that he uses contrasting colors so crudely is Taiwanese to me.”
Taillandier keeps one of the artist's paintings, an image of the Goddess of Mercy, on the wall of his office. He finds Tseng's artistic expression passionate, vibrant, and accessible to people of different cultures. “It is good to communicate in an international language so people outside Taiwan can learn about it through the paintings,” he says. But he also enjoys Tseng's work because it brings a new flavor to the past. “His art is not dead representation of Taiwan folk art,” he says. “He gives it a new meaning. In order to do that one has to feel comfortable with one's tradition. In his paintings, I can feel his passion for Taiwan's folk art, through the colors he uses, the way he arranges the space.”
Taillandier thinks Tseng sets a good example for the many young artists in Taiwan today who have a tendency to go against tradition. He recalls how a similar rebellion took place in France during the sixties and seventies. “The French young people ran to embrace anything American, from jazz to Andy Warhol's pop art,” he says. “That was bad for French culture.” He suggests local artists should depend less on Western influences. “Learn from your own tradition, but don't copy it. Then develop a language of your own,” he says. “That's why Tseng is such a good painter. He is both traditional and modern.”
But Tseng himself is not yet satisfied with his work. “My biggest headache is controlling the oil paint,” he says. “I keep struggling with the best way to use it.” Tseng also aims to make his images gradually less figurative and more abstract, but without losing their essential qualities. “I still want people to feel the flavor of Taiwanese folk art.”
One of the artist's latest subjects is religious deities, including the eight Taoist immortals that often appear on the long pieces of embroidery traditionally hung in homes during festivals. He hopes to capture the images of the gods as well as the nostalgic sense of festivity that these embroidered banners bring to mind. “I've always wanted to show the happy, peace-loving atmosphere of the old Taiwan,” he says. He also continues to experiment with other media. Recently, for example, he began sprinkling shreds of gold foil on top of the paint before it dries, lending a glittering, reflective quality to the surface.
Although Tseng still relies on his art to make a living, he can work at a much less hectic pace than he did fifteen years ago. Rather than several minutes, he now takes several months to finish a painting. In his small apartment in Peitou, a quiet suburban area north of Taipei, paintings of various sizes stand in stacks against the walls, from the entrance through the narrow hallway, into the living room and out into the back yard. Some are finished, but most are still awaiting the artist's final touches. “I don't believe that hard work is what makes a good painter,” he says. Pointing to his head. he adds, “The most important thing is this.” So every day, after getting up at five in the morning and feeding his menagerie of caged birds, he sits down for awhile to listen to them sing, meditating along with the melody. Slowly, an image, perhaps the figures of the eight immortals, settles in his mind and gradually comes alive before his eyes. Then he starts to paint.