Lee Ku-mo's friends call him "the country artist." He achieved fame while he was still in his thirties, and his ink paintings have won praise for the humorous, down-to-earth qualities that vividly reflect rural life. But this man had to struggle before he found his ideal occupation: one that would let him both paint and eat.
Chang Ming-chin (張銘清), a Taipei-based businessman, has been collecting objets d'art for a long time now. When asked if he has a favorite artist, he is quick to answer: Lee Ku-mo (李轂摩), a Chinese ink painter whose works make up the major portion of his collection. The connoisseur first met Lee through a mutual friend in 1981, at an art exhibition held at the Taichung County Cultural Center. Chang visited Lee's workshop not long afterwards, and on that occasion he bought a small painting of bamboo complete with meditative inscription. He has been a keen follower of Lee's ever since, often visiting his workshop and sometimes attending his exhibitions. He now has approximately forty of Lee's works, and plans to acquire more.
"Works of art can be excellent investments," Chang notes. "And over the past fifteen years, an established painter like Lee could reasonably expect to see the prices of his paintings increase many times. One fellow collector, a famous gallery owner, complained to me only recently that he'd missed out on Lee. He'd failed to buy at the right time."
But there is more to it than money: Chang genuinely appreciates Lee's work. "He's good at calligraphy as well as painting," he says, "and he's equally good at various types of Chinese paintings--landscapes, flora and fauna--so I think he can properly be described as a full-spectrum painter, which is quite rare in the history of Chinese art. He puts into his drawings what he feels about things, about daily life in our modern society. I can relate to that. I'm no art critic. All I can say is that his paintings really touch my heart."
Lee Ku-mo received only minimal formal artistic training and is largely self-taught. Born to a farmer's family in central Taiwan, he received only nine years of education. After graduating from junior high school, he cast around for work that would give scope to his natural artistic talents. His first job was painting the scenery for a touring puppet troupe. Later he worked at painting glass presentation plaques, which back in the fifties were commonly used to commemorate special occasions and achievements.
Lee's father, eager to foster his son's skills, asked around to see if there were any opportunities for apprenticeships, perhaps painting advertising posters or something of that sort. Lee was eventually given the chance to study with folk artist Yu Ching-tan (余清潭), who specialized in portraits of Kuan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy, and other deities. During the year Lee spent with Yu, he also learned a lot about how to mount Chinese ink paintings.
The experience whetted Lee's appetite for learning. He went on to study with ink painter Hsia Ching-shan (夏荊山), who specialized in an elaborate traditional style. Hsia was a medical officer at a military hospital in Touliu, Yunlin county. He lived in a typical military-family village of bungalows ruled off with neat picket fences. Lee spent three years with the Hsias. In lieu of paying tuition, he did the daily food shopping and a few other chores.
"My life then revolved around painting, only painting," Lee recalls. "I learned the skills and practiced what I'd learned almost every day. Even my leisure activities were related to painting." He would visit the Palace Museum, which in the late fifties was still located near Lee's hometown of Tsaotun, to study the many masterpieces there, or he would visit secondhand book stores to look for used books or old magazines. Whenever he found anything that he thought might be useful for reference later, he would buy it and clip it out.
When Lee set out to study art, he had just one idea in his head: to be able to paint without starving. Whether the results could suitably be described as "art" really did not matter much to him. But those three years spent with the Hsia family exposed this unsophisticated farm boy to a very different kind of lifestyle, the kind that is enjoyed by people who have seen the world. "It sort of opened my eyes and changed my aspirations," he reminisces. "It somehow made me decide to take the harder road of becoming a real painter, and not just settle for being an artisan."
After Lee was done with studying, he had to do his two years' compulsory military service. After that, he could not find any kind of job that both involved painting and paid enough to support him. So in 1965 he opened a small shop, where he mounted paintings and carved the little personal and official seals known as chops. Business came mainly from the provincial government and Nantou county agencies, and the store afforded the family a reasonable standard of living. It also set Lee free to fulfill his initial ambition of being able to paint without starving at the same time. His wife, Yeh Mei-ying (葉梅英), can still remember those days. "He worked hard," she says. "He sat in our little shop and carved chops almost the whole day. At night, he painted, practiced calligraphy, and read till two or three in the morning. He was burning the candle at both ends, all right. Our house was stuffed with works he couldn't sell."
During the years of struggle for recognition, Lee participated in numerous contests and exhibitions. In 1965, when he was still only twenty-four, a painting of his won the Golden Medal Award at the fifth National Fine Art Exhibition. He has subsequently gone on to win many more awards. He was named champion calligrapher at the 27th Provincial Fine Art Exhibition in 1972, and the following year he won the silver medal at Japan's Joint Calligraphy Exhibition.
The first exhibition devoted exclusively to Lee's work was held at the Chinese Armed Forces Literary Activity Center, Taipei, in 1969. There have been several others since then.
All that hard work slowly began to pay off. Sales of his paintings have grown steadily. In 1973 Lee decided that he was earning enough from art to be able to provide for his family, so he closed down h is store and from then on concentrated exclusively on painting. Over the two succeeding decades he has gradually established himself as a major painter, one of the first artists from Nantou to attain islandwide recognition.
What makes Lee stand out is his progressive spirit. He sees no need to dispense with tradition, but he does believe in adding new elements to traditional painting styles. "Wouldn't it be weird if a modern artist only painted people dressed in Ming or Ching dynasty clothes, meditating on a hilltop or sitting around a stone table playing chess and drinking tea?" he laughs. So he has always tried to add something new to the traditional canon; his unique contribution lies in the subject matter he selects and the thoughts and emotions he conveys, both through the paintings themselves and by means of humorous annotations, often expressed in colloquial language.
Lee mostly paints whatever he comes into daily contact with. If he goes for a stroll down a country lane he will surely find something to paint--a dog barking in front of someone's house, a row of sparrows perched on power lines, a leafy banana tree, a pair of glasses, a pack of cigarettes or a box of betel nuts, even fighter jets tearing through the sky above. One of the highlights of his 1996 exhibition was a huge painting of lotus flowers that had caught his eye as he passed by a neighborhood pond. "Art ought to imitate life," he says. "A painter should set out to depict his time, his society, and his own life. This is my ideal: I paint where I live and I live in what I paint."
Perhaps his most frequent choice of subject is the humble fowlroosters, hens, and chicks. They are everywhere in his paintings: clustered around a stack of agricultural tools, rooting in bamboo clumps, or pecking away under loofa plants or in the farmyard. Lee explains that chickens are an integral part of rural life and have many deep cultural connotations. Chinese people regard the chicken highly. It is called "the fowl of five virtues" in Han Poetry, a book of poetics written in the Han dynasty (206B.C.-A.D.221) by Han Ying, a man of letters and imperial adviser. He wrote that chickens' crests give them the look of literati, while their claws represent the soldierly virtues. Which are? Well, when faced with an enemy, roosters fight bravely; their benevolence leads them to share news and food; and by providing wake-up calls on time every morning they demonstrate their trustworthiness.
Lee sees yet another virtue in chickens. "In Taiwanese culture, the chicken has power to ward off evil spirits," he says. "That's why the leaders of the bridal procession always carry chickensto scare away evil spirits and thus pave the way to a happy matrimonial home. It's also customary for a family moving into a new house to bring along some chickens, because in Taiwanese, 'chicken' is pronounced the same as 'home.'"
Like traditional literati painters, Lee believes that a g ood painting should be splendidly conceived. Its function is to convey important perceptions and have a positive influence on those who view it. What sets him apart from his predecessors is contemporary mores. "It would be thought pretty strange nowadays to preach the virtues of staying single for the rest of your life if your husband died, or the importance of unconditional obedience to absolute authority," he says. "Such things aren't part of our society any more. But certain virtues and values have endured and are worth conveying, especially when they have been tested by the artist's personal experience."
His strong sense of mission to show up the positive often drives him to paint "the good life." His fish swim contentedly through soft seaweed. A Lee rooster always strides confidently, often staring boldly out at the viewer, and a Lee hen brims over with maternal love. Birds either sing or chirp with excitement. Mandarin ducks, cranes, and peacocks invariably come in pairs, never singly. His paintings reflect life as eminently peaceful and satisfactory. "Life's simple pleasures are all around us," he points out. "Money can't buy them, and as long as you don't neglect them, you'll enjoy life. The theme of those paintings is one of encouragement. We all know life can be difficult. I want to focus on the bright side. My pleasant images can perhaps help people renew their hopes and pluck up the courage to get on with their lives."
Another major theme running through his work is the giving of advice. Lee incorporates pearls of wisdom derived from Buddhism and from the daily lives of ordinary people into many of his paintings. For example, one of his works depicts the primitive scales often found in rural households, used for weighing crops and poultry. It is an obvious symbol of fairness and justice. Lee reinforces the message in the attendant calligraphic annotation, cautioning that there is an invisible scale that evaluates all human behavior. Thi s is a reference to one of Buddha's principal teachings--that all should strive to do good deeds. Another painting shows a snail slowly climbing a rock, leaving a trail of slime behind it. Lee's inscription is suitably terse and to the point: "Few Words and Much Movement." And on a painting of an early-morning scene, with farmers and buffaloes on their way to the fields, he wrote that morning is the best time to start the day's work.
Famous oil painter Wu Hsuan-san (吳炫三) called Lee Ku-mo an unorthodox genius. In the preface to Selected Works of Lee Ku-mo, published in 1994, he noted that Lee's only artistic training was with folk artists and concluded that his success therefore had to be attributed to raw talent and innate intelligence. In several critiques of Lee's work, Huang Kuang-nan(黃光男), director of the National Museum of History, praises Lee as "an outstanding literati painter with a strong personal style." In other words, Huang believes that Lee has managed to maintain the traditional combination of painting and calligraphy--a style unique to Chinese men of letters--while at the same time using the simple rural lifestyle to make his work distinctive.
Wang Hao (王澔), who teaches Chinese language and art at a junior high school and is a noted art critic, has been observing Lee for the past decade. "He learned how to paint with folk artists and he studied Chinese from community schooling in temples," he says. "Everything, all his artistic nutrition, derives from the grassroots."
Wang observes that a large number of Lee's paintings seem to emphasize well-being and prosperity. A painting of a climbing plant with small red flower that blooms every day is entitled "Every Day Is a Spring Day." A painting of pigs, piglets, geese, ducks, and chickens bears the name, "A Scene of Prosperity," whereas Lee's depiction of a gigantic pumpkin with lots of leaves is called "Proliferation." Many of his chicken paintings have titles that play on the fact that "chicken" and "good luck" are pronounced similarly in Mandarin. "I see Lee as the spokesman of the common man and of rural life," Wang comments.
Wang is especially appreciative of Lee's sense of humor. The painter's comic side can be seen in many of his works: when he represents himself, his wife, and their three sons as a family of frogs, for example, or gives a whimsical twist to the works of famous Chinese painters, or illustrates Taiwanese sayings. For example, in 1985 he painted two ducks listening to a storm. The Taiwanese expression "ducks listening to thunder" means that you can hear something but you don't know what it is. And a 1988 painting of bamboo and bamboo shoots is entitled "Good Shoots Come from Bad Bamboo," another Taiwanese saying to the effect that a not-so-great father can still raise an excellent son.
Some of the humor is obvious--Lee titled a 1995 painting of a tiger on a cliff "Who's Coming to Dinner?"--and some extremely subtle. For example, he once painted a cat attentively watching a painting of three fish. The painting in the painting is a famous work by Chi Pai-shih (齊白石，1862-1957) called "The Three Surpluses," annotated to say that poetry is the surplus of sleep, painting the surplus of work, and carving the surplus of energy. Lee borrowed Chi's work, added a cat of his own, and wrote an annotation saying that in the cat's mind there are surpluses, too. "Surplus" and "fish" are pronounced exactly the same in Mandarin.
But Wang Hao's favorite is Lee's painting of two geese reading a famous stone inscription by Wang Hsi-chih (王羲之). Wang was a great Chinese calligrapher who claimed that his understanding of the art was the product of a flash of inspiration triggered by watching geese swim and move. Lee's painting dramatically reverses the situation, the arrangement subtly suggesting that the geese ought to feel inspired by reading Wang's inscription. "I couldn't stop laughing," Wang chuckles. "It's hilarious, it's ingenious! Who else has painted a good Chinese ink painting that can give you a good laugh?"