Last November saw the opening of the Taipei International Art Fair, one of the most important artistic events in the region during 1996. Much attention was paid to fresh developments, with lectures on such avantgarde topics as Computer Art, Art and Holography, and New Trends in Taiwanese Art. That would have brought a smile to the lips of Taiwan painter Yu Cheng-yao( 余承堯 ), who never owned a television and insisted on painting with only the most basic tools. It is now more than half a century since Yu, one of Chiang Kai-shek's most distinguished generals, retired from the army. Most men would have been satisfied to take things easy and look back on a lifetime of military achievement. Yu decided to become a painter instead--and after forty years of quiet effort the critics hailed him as a genius.
BY ANITA HUANG
Old age hath yet his honor and his toil. Death closes all; but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done....
Alfred, Lord Tennyson's words relate to Ulysses in old age--a retired war hero determined to perform yet more feats before death brings down the final curtain. But the poet might equally well have been thinking of Yu Cheng-yao. Yu, a lieutenant general, fought with the Nationalist army against the Japanese and the Chinese communists. He retired at forty-eight, enduring nearly forty years of seclusion before he struck his own "noble note" as a painter. In the battlefield, he commanded thousands of soldiers, but in art he fought alone, filling the paper with intricate images to the beat of his own highly individual drum. He died in 1993 at the venerable age of ninety-five, just a short while after he became famous. Today, people remember him not as a great general, but as an artist. His story has become a legend.
"I compare him to America's Grandma Moses," says art critic and University of Kansas professor Li Chu-chin( 李鑄晉 ), the man who first recognized Yu's enormous talent. "He was a late bloomer. Long years of cultivation and distillation, all for a short moment of blooming--so dazzling, so rich in color, and yet so enduring."
Yu Cheng-yao's early years were spent soldiering. "What is there to boast about for a general who lost the war?" Yu always said that when asked about his military exploits, but he was being far too modest. Chen Mei-o( 陳美娥 ), Yu's adopted daughter, took care of him until his death and was closer to him than anyone, but it was only years after she first met him that she found out he had been a senior army commander. "He was one of the top decision-makers during the war against the communists," she recalls. "He retired not long before the Nationalist army retreated to Taiwan. He knew too much about the war and he hated it. He said that war is all about killing people, and that was not in his nature. He no longer wanted to talk about it."
Why did Yu retire early? Many people believe he could have risen even higher had he chosen to. He attended the Preparatory Military Academy in Tokyo, as did Chiang Kai-shek himself. Some say that he retired because he fell out with the Generalissimo, but if so, he took that secret with him to the grave.
In later years, he was certainly nobody's idea of a military hero. Ho Huai-shuo(何懷碩 ), a well-known painter and art critic, often visited "Old Mr. Yu." He has intense memories of the painter's shabby hovel: "A few dirty clothes piled up in one corner, an electric rice-cooker and an iron pot covered with black grease, discarded doors serving as desks, and lots and lots of paintings scattered over the floor, unmounted. Some were damp, some had been gnawed by rats and insects, some were stuck under a little webbed camp bed, and yet more just lay around, covered with footprints."
Actually, Yu was typical of many soldiers who came to Taiwan in 1949 with the KMT government. He left his wife and five children in the mainland and lived humbly all alone on the meager pension of a retired soldier. Life was difficult for him, but nobody ever heard him complain. "Old Mr. Yu seldom spoke about himself," Ho says. "Either his face never betrayed his emotions, or his emotions rarely stirred."
On one famous occasion, however, Yu did talk about himself, and at some length. The interview was recorded for a radio program when he was ninety, and his strong, steady voice can still be heard on tape. He recounted that he was born in 1898 in Yungchun county, Fujian province, the youngest of eight children. His mother died when he was two. "I never knew what my mother looked like," he said, during the interview. "I've regretted that my whole life."
One day when Yu was eleven his father, a hard-working farmer, accidentally fell down in a rice paddy and died shortly afterwards. Life was terribly hard. "We ate wild yams," Yu recalled. "Our only clothes were pants made of rags, and we had no shoes. But we didn't feel too bad, because everybody was equally poor." On most days he had to go up into the mountains to cut firewood for sale. A sympathetic child, he shared whatever money he made with a poor old man who lived next door. At thirteen, Yu was apprenticed to a furniture maker, who taught him wood-sculpting and painting.
Yu did not go to school until he was fourteen. He learned classical poetry from the principal, and within a few years his fame as a poet had spread throughout the region. At twenty-two, he got married. "My wife wasn't pretty," he said. "At that time women had to work all day in the sun. They didn't even wear shoes. They were mostly dark and skinny. My wife was illiterate, but she took good care of the family, even though I wasn't home much."
At twenty-seven, Yu went to Taiwan to learn Japanese. (Taiwan was under Japanese rule at that time.) There he witnessed the mistreatment of Taiwan laborers by the Japanese, who were trying to suppress the local culture. A Singaporean merchant who was a great admirer of Yu's poetry offered to pay for him to study at Tokyo's Preparatory Military Academy. At that time, China was in the throes of strife generated by numerous warlords, and good military leaders were urgently needed. Yu accepted the merchant's offer.
"The Japanese did not treat us any differently from the other students," he recalled. "But we could feel the coming invasion in the air, and anti-Chinese sentiment was intensifying. I learned all there was to learn, but secretly I was thinking that one day great China would conquer little Japan."
Yu Cheng-yao returned to mainland China and embarked on his military career. He was first an instructor at the Whampoa Military Academy in Guangzhou, which had been established by Sun Yat-sen and was soon dubbed the cradle of China's officer elite. Then in 1937 the Sino-Japanese war broke out, and Yu was appointed an inspector of troops. In the discharge of his duties he marched the length and breadth of China with his men. He visited the southwestern provinces of Guangxi, Hunan, Jiangxi, and Zhejiang, and the northwestern provinces of Gansu, Shanxi, Shaanxi, and Mongolia. "Whenever I went to a new place, I always studied its history and geography, and the people there," Yu said at one point during his radio interview. "I was very curious about local customs. And I particularly liked mountain climbing."
Yu resembled Tennyson's Ulysses in another respect: he was "always roaming with a hungry heart." Because he was blessed with a good memory, he had lots of interesting stories to tell about his travels. He vividly recalled climbing Mt. Hua, in Shaanxi province. "The mountains in the north of China are magnificent, awe-inspiring," he said. "Imagine--a mountain was originally composed of stone and earth in tight layers. Over tens of billions of years, the earth was washed away by wind and rain, until only the stone remained, piled up in weird shapes. 'The Sword Gate' of Mt. Hua, for example, consists of numerous large sword-shaped pillars. The three of us had to cling on to the rope for dear life. We went up that sheer wall step by step, teeth clenched, afraid to look down, afraid even to think. At about the 2,000-meter mark, we came upon this very narrow bridge, about four hundred steps long, connecting two peaks. There was no other way across except by that bridge. We got down and crawled, our faces to the bottomless void, with a terrible wind whipping at our bodies. How we trembled!"
Yu also discovered many interesting things about the regions through which he passed. "In the Huian area of Fujian province, married women stayed with their husbands during the night, but during the day they had to return to their own homes," he recalled. "Only after they'd had children could they live with their husbands' families. Women there were very traditional and conservative in their thinking. But they wore clothes that exposed their stomachs. People called them 'feudal heads, modern navels.'"
During Yu's days as an inspector, he took extensive notes and even found time to finish studying the 294-volume chronicle of ancient Chinese history, Tzu-chih tung-chien(資治通鑑), or Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government. He also kept up the habit of writing poetry, incorporating many of his experiences as a traveler into his works.
The war against Japan ended in a hard-won victory for the Chinese. The military officers who had done so much to ensure that victory were, almost without exception, rewarded with money and promotion. But in 1946, Yu quietly retired. His pension was not even enough to buy him a passage from Shanghai to Fujian, although he eventually managed to raise the money in a mahjong game.
Once back home, he earned a living as an import-export agent, trading medicinal herbs between Fujian, Singapore, and Taiwan. In 1949, when the communists overran mainland China, Yu happened to be in Taiwan on business. He decided to stay put for a while, anticipating that he would be able to return home shortly. It never occurred to him that he would have to wait forty years.
Yu quickly got tired of doing business in Taiwan. "It's no life, having to worry about money all the time," he said. He often went to the Palace Museum to take his mind off things. The mountains he saw portrayed in the museum's traditional Chinese ink paintings did not quite match the ones in his memory. They were too mild, too flat--not energetic or changeable enough, and lacking the necessary tight structuring and contrast between light and shade. "Why don't I paint some myself?" he thought; and so at the age of fifty-six he took up a brush for the first time.
In later years, Yu composed a short autobiographical note to preface a published collection his paintings, Majestic Mountains: Yu Cheng-yao at Ninety, published by Taipei Hanart Gallery. "Some people laughed at me," he wrote. "They said I had no formal training and no money either. I thought of what Tu Fu [a renowned Tang dynasty poet] had said: 'Ten days to paint a creek and five to paint a lump of stone.' So I decided to take my time, and not care so much about the results." Yu's first painting, just twenty centimeters square, took him three years to complete.
Yu Cheng-yao incorporated a lifetime of experience into his paintings. "Whenever I read the notes I'd written over the years, the past came flooding back to me," he wrote. His poems frequently dealt with the scenes that remained so vivid in his memory. "Great peaks and precipices I have seen/Sheer and rocky; thundering waterfalls./But I love the land of the Southeast more,/With its mild Spring, and vines swinging in the breeze."
He learned how to capture the images in his memory from nature, not from worn-out ancient treatises. "Over and over again, I had observed things in nature, both closely and from afar," he wrote. He sought to present not photographic truth, but truth as it exists in subjective memory. In another poem he wrote: "I hold sincerity to be the essence of art/And true feeling the fire that gives it light./Timeless is the brave and inventive mind--/This I long for, to beat a path of my own./I aim to depict things beyond their familiar shapes,/To seek their spirit within those mounts and streams."
At first, nobody knew Yu had a talent for painting, except perhaps his friend of forty years, Liang Tsai-ping( 梁在平 ), a specialist in traditional Chinese music. "One day, Yu sent me a painting," he recalls. "I was surprised to discover that he could paint and that by then he had been painting for two years. He would squat on the floor for hours at a time, working stroke by stroke, one dot after another, piling one layer of ink on top of another. He would work on one painting for several months at least, until at last the ink had become so thick, the strings so complicated, that there was no blank space at all." Why did Yu use this technique? "He painted in his own unique way, because he never studied painting," Liang says. "He used very simple tools--brushes, an inkstone, and cheap pigments." Yu made no apologies for that. "The simpler the tools, the more distinct the style," was his blunt comment.
Ten years after Yu first took up his brush, Kansas University Professor Li Chu-chin visited Liang's house. He saw the painting on the wall and appreciated it so much that he asked to meet this unknown painter. In 1966, Li took Yu's painting to America for exhibition, along with works by three other contemporary Chinese ink painters. Collectors in America and Europe took note, with the result that Yu became quite widely known outside of his adopted province. But it was another ten years before his works made their debut in Taiwan. Hu Yi-hsun( 胡懿勳 ), an experienced art dealer, was not surprised. "It always used to be like that," he says. "Taiwan blindly followed trends in America and Europe. Many artists weren't recognized in Taiwan, but once they become famous overseas Taiwan went crazy about them. Although in the case of Yu Cheng-yao, Taiwan reacted very slowly."
In 1986, Joan Stanley-Baker wrote an article, "'Old Mr. Yu': Talent and Vision," which was published in the May issue of the Free China Review. That was the first time Yu appeared in Taiwan's media as a painter. Later in the year, his first local exhibition was held at the Hsiung Shih Gallery. Chen Mei-o describes how she had to persuade Yu to have his works put on show: "He refused at first, saying that he didn't paint to make money. I told him that he could use the money to promote nan kuan [the woodwind-based music of southern China], which was his favorite. So at last he consented." The exhibition was an immense success. Yu Cheng-yao had finally arrived.
And arrive he did. Yu's works whipped up a veritable storm in Taiwan's artistic circles. The critics wrangled over whether he should be classified as a traditionalist or a revolutionary, a mainland painter or a Taiwan painter. All kinds of stories were circulated to explain why nobody had taken any notice of him over the past thirty years. Journalists, art critics, and connoisseurs flocked to the artist's little hovel that at one time no one had cared to visit. Yu became so busy dealing with all these guests that he no longer had time to paint, concentrating on calligraphy instead. He was always friendly, always hospitable. He would make tea for guests, talk with them at length, and later send them gifts of his paintings and works of calligraphy. But whenever the visitors left, he had to rest for two or three hours, just to get back his strength. After all, he was ninety years old.
It was perhaps inevitable that the owners of Yu's paintings should start to make a lot of money from them. "People who had turned him down when he offered to give them a painting felt really sorry," Chen Mei-o says. In 1991, one of his paintings was sold in Taipei at an auction conducted by Sotheby's for NT$6,820,000 [US$248,000]. The painting had been commissioned some years before by the distinguished Taiwan art critic, C.C. Wang( 王季遷 ). Yu Cheng-yao had worked on it for three months without a break, and that was unusual for him, because he was accustomed to paint slowly and deliberately. Yu told Liang Tsai-ping that he could hardly eat for a week after he had finished the painting. Wang originally paid US$800 for it and another three paintings. It was not clear how this particular artwork got into Sotheby's auction or who the seller was. Yu Cheng-yao did not profit from the sale, for sure.
"He didn't care a jot about money. He was a saint," says Yu Tzu- ming( 余子鳴 ), a retired soldier who hailed from the same village in mainland China. "People would borrow money from him and not return it. Thieves stole his paintings. He never got angry."
In 1991, Yu finally went back to his hometown in Fujian. When he met his wife, whom he had not seen for forty-odd years, he only said lightly: "How come you've grown so old? I'm old, too." But tragedy marred their reunion: their eldest son had died not long before.
In 1994, the year following Yu's death, Chen Mei-o set up a foundation, the Yu Cheng-yao Memorial Hall, in her father's memory. The foundation recently mounted exhibitions of Yu's works in Paris and New York, where many of the people viewing his works for the first time probably found themselves agreeing with Li Chu-chin. "Yu was completely free from the inhibitions so often imposed by formal academic training, and from the vice of imitation," he says. "He was an ideal traditional Chinese artist in character, yet after thousands of years of ink painting his works come to us as unique."
What would Yu himself say if he could hear such praise and know that his work is becoming internationally renowned? Perhaps he would be content with a shrug and his customary kindly smile. "It's none of my business," as he often used to say.