Lee Tze-fan fathered Nobel laureate and Academia Sinica President Lee Yuan-tseh, the friend and confidant of the ROC's new president. But it was as a painter and, above all, as an educator, that he hoped to be remembered.
In 1921, the imposing headquarters of the Japanese colonial government was just two years old. It was then the tallest building in Taiwan and as such a symbol of the ruling power--which, indeed, it has been ever since, as it is now the presidential building. Two blocks away stood Taipei Teachers College, the subject of many a student's dreams. Five years studying there virtually guaranteed a respected job and a stable salary, both of which were regarded as vitally important in those difficult times.
On enrollment day in 1921, Lee Tze-fan, a fourteen-year-old boy from Hsinchu, hovered nervously by the college gate, trying to hold back the tears as he waved his father goodbye. His family had persuaded him to study there, much against his own inclinations. He liked physics and chemistry, and had always wanted to become a scientist rather than a teacher. Nevertheless, he under stood that his father could barely manage to support his family on the pittance he made from running a small drugstore, especially since another son was studying in Japan. Tze-fan knew he should consider himself lucky, because not many Taiwanese children were able to continue their education beyond elementary school, let alone attend this distinguished seat of learning.
Only with hindsight did the boy realize that by reluctantly agreeing to attend Taipei Teachers College he had changed the course of his life. The significance of his decision may best be judged by the fact that in 1983, the ROC's Council for Cultural Affairs named Lee Tze-fan as one of the ten most influential senior painters in Taiwan, and invited him to write his memoirs. The resulting book is the best source of information about the painter's life and artistic theories, because in conversation he was a man of few words.
In his autobiography, Lee describes how in his first year in Taipei he threw himself into sports as a way of counteracting homesickness. "I missed my home and my parents day in and day out, until I found I had something in common with a few of my classmates. I started running and doing the long jump or high jump after dinner. I quickly grew larger and taller. I changed seats, moving from the first row to the third and eventually to the last row of the classroom when I graduated." (In Taiwan, it is customary for the shortest students to sit at the front of the class.) But not everything was happy. "I would so much have liked my dear mother to see this, but she passed away at the end of my first year in Taipei--the most traumatic event to occur during my teens."
Lee found another great source of consolation in painting. Here is how he describes the arrival of a new art teacher from Japan against a backdrop of rising racial unrest. "At that time, anti-Japanese sentiment began to pervade the campus. Some of my school mates even dared to attack Japanese policemen, some assaulted the Japanese vendors at our school, and others made speeches insulting our Japanese rulers during morning assembly." The college principal believed that art might have a soothing effect on the students and temper their recklessness, so he invited Ishikawa Kinichiro, a famous Japanese teacher, to join the staff. Kinichiro accepted the offer shortly after his wife died in the 1923 Tokyo earthquake.
Prior to Japanese rule, Taiwan's artistic scene had been dominated by "literati" paintings, which depicted conventional land scapes by scholars and government officials dating from the Ching dynasty. Kinichiro's style of painting was quite different. He knew Japanese, Chinese, and English, and had studied in England and France. His naturalistic renditions of landscapes and his use of transparent watercolors, coupled with an easygoing teaching style, impressed many students.
"The teacher once showed us his painting of the wine and tobacco factory near our school," Lee wrote. "I had never seen anything so beautiful. A stream flowed alongside the factory wall, while a light plume of smoke rose into the air. At that moment, the desire to paint flooded through my heart like an ocean wave." Not long afterward, he joined with other students in forming the Painting Club. Many members of this club went on to become significant figures in Taiwan's art world. They used to refer to their Japanese teacher as the "seed-planter."
Lee Tze-fan became a teacher at the Hsinchu First Public School in 1926. There he soon made a name for himself by breaking the interschool record for the triple jump, recording 12.3 meters. As he recalls the event, "I ran as fast as I could, hopped on the wooden board, my body springing forward, and then took three giant steps. As I landed, the audience burst into applause. They clapped so hard that to me it sounded like a thunderbolt. I almost forgot who I was. After that, I was active in every branch of athletics, including badminton, volleyball, and basketball."
But he had enough energy left over to arrange numerous painting exhibitions for elementary schools in the Hsinchu area. "I did practically everything, from designing the shows, handing out assignments, and overseeing progress," Lee wrote. "I was so good at it that it was ten years before they could find anyone to replace me."
During the two decades he spent at Hsinchu First Public School, Lee experimented with several new teaching methods. One of them was to ask students to read an article and then draw a painting based on what they had gleaned. "My students became very interested in expressing the content of an article through painting," he wrote. "By comparing their paintings with the article, I could judge how well they had understood the latter. Those who did not make the grade were required to read the article again. After they had practiced several times, students found both their reading comprehension and painting techniques had improved. I felt I'd killed two birds with one stone."
In addition to teaching, Lee continued to produce his own paintings. In 1928, his work was chosen to be exhibited in the second Taiwan Fine Arts Exhibition, which was then the most influential official art show in Taiwan. He won several painting contests and in 1930 used the prize money to finance a trip to Japan. He visited the Tokyo Fine Arts Institute, where several of his classmates and fellow former members of the Painting Club were studying. He could not help envying them, for at that time the institute enjoyed a first-class reputation in Taiwan's artistic circles. Studying there virtually guaranteed that a student would become an established artist. Lee was tempted to stay, but he kept recalling his wife at home and his father's weary face. He decided to return to Hsinchu, confident that one day he would discover his own path.
The year 1934 saw the inauguration of the Taiyang Arts Show, which quickly became the second most influential art exhibition in Taiwan. Lee was an active and regular participant. Then in 1945 the Japanese occupation of Taiwan came to an end, and with so many Japanese teachers returning to their own country, a vacancy arose at the Hsinchu Teachers College. Lee got the job, thereby increasing his modest monthly salary nearly threefold.
Not all the news was good, however. The new government clamped down on the import of Japanese books, which made it hard for Lee and his fellow artists to keep abreast of current trends. Another problem concerned language. The Kuomintang frowned on the use of Japanese or the Taiwanese dialect, and the painter had a hard time learning Mandarin. Many different schools of thought were proliferating at that time, debating the merits of abstract as opposed to concrete art, impressionism and expressionism, Chinese and Western techniques. But Lee could not speak Mandarin well enough to contribute to these discussions, so he largely got on with his painting in silence. He branched out into teaching physics and chemistry, renewing his old love of the subjects. He also assumed responsibility for the school orchestra and its athletic team.
Lee remained at the Hsinchu Teachers College for thirty years, trying to fulfill his educational ideals. In his memoirs he wrote "A teacher should always follow his conscience, always try to think what is in the best interests of his students, always try to think in terms of morality rather than money." More specifically, as an art teacher he believed that "Art and life should be integrated. Beauty is the end and conscience the means."
To illustrate how art can be integrated into life, he set up a studio that students could use whenever they felt like it, and hung their paintings on the walls. This was in deliberate emulation of Ishikawa Kinichiro's old studio at the Taipei Teachers College. It improved his students' technique, but the studio also served another purpose. "Students feel much more relaxed in the studio than in the classroom," Lee wrote. "While they're painting, they tell me the things they don't dare say in class. That's good for the develop ment of their personalities."
In 1955, Lee Tze-fan's painting Roses was displayed at the Taiyang Arts Show. Huang Chun-pi, head of the Arts Department at National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei, liked it so much that he invited Lee to teach part-time. For the next twenty years, Lee went to the university every Saturday. Some artists might have resented this as a distraction from creative work, but Lee considered teaching and painting to be mutually enhancing. One of his students, Lai Wu-chiung, now a professor at the National Taiwan College of Arts, has fond memories of that time.
"Our teacher used to come to Taipei by the slow train every week," he recalls. "He jokingly referred to it as 'the tourist express,' and said that he loved to take time out to see the beautiful scenery along the line and the many different faces on the train." He would often find inspiration on his weekly journey and come into class brimming over with enthusiasm, transferring his recollections to paper or canvas as fast as he could.
Lee never made big money out of art, but poverty was not something that bothered him. He used to recycle his old brushes and even used sheets of paper. "I didn't want to waste paper," he recalls, "so when I made a mistake I tried to wash it off with water. To my surprise, this created quite a good effect, and from then on I made frequent use of this technique." Since he was such a perfectionist, it came in very handy.
"If he wasn't satisfied, he'd wash and repaint again and again," says Lee's son, Lee Yuan-peng "When the weather was damp, the paintings took a long time to dry, so father was forced to take a rest. But then he realized he could blow-dry the painting with an electric fan. So when the weather was bad, we'd find him wearing a heavy overcoat, sitting there painting furiously, surrounded by electric fans." Lee sometimes carried his love of perfection to extraordinary lengths. It was not unknown for him to ask a friend to whom he had given a painting to return it so that he could make some revisions.
Another technique that Lee used frequently he called "visual memory." This involved sketching scenery in broad outline and then later building it up into a detailed depiction in the studio. Lee learned this skill from his old teacher, Ishikawa Kinichiro. Here is a striking illustration of the technique, taken from his memoirs.
"I once took my students deep into a mountainous part of Hsinchu. The police asked us to leave behind our cameras and painting materials, because they were banned in reserved mountain areas. As we walked, the scenery became more and more beautiful. I knew I could not afford to lose this opportunity, so I chose a large upright stone as a 'canvas' and used a smaller stone to sketch what I saw. Then I erased what I had done and did the sketch again, only this time I relied on my memory and did not look at the actual scenery. After that, I compared what I had sketched with the scene in front of me, to make sure I had it right. After I got home, I was able to reproduce my observations on canvas.... One of the students who had gone to the mountain with me visited my house and saw the painting. He was amazed, and asked me how I'd managed to go to the same spot, this time with my painting materials."
With the help of this technique, Lee Tze-fan was able to portray a wide range of subjects. These included traditional Chinese gardens, old streets, temples, and sunset industries such as glass manufacture and pottery. He also traveled around the island in search of beautiful landscapes like the ones enshrined in his "Cross-Island Highway" series. He preserved on canvas many historical sites and scenic spots in and around his hometown of Hsinchu, but he was also fond of painting scenes in his wife's hometown of Wuchi, central Taiwan, with its ubiquitous duck pens, rice mills, and seascapes. He acquired the habit of sitting in front of his house at dusk and silently observing passersby, which resulted in numerous portraits of ordinary people, ranging from members of his family to factory workers and indigenous tribespeople.
In 1973, Lee and his wife went to America to visit their children, who were studying there. Inspired by trips to Baltimore, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco, along with several other places, Lee produced various paintings, all of them characterized by an exuberant vitality. He combined Chinese techniques with Western ones, broadening and deepening perspectives, using bold, contrasting colors, and even larding some of the paintings with prominent black lines.
Sadly, Lee suffered a stroke after he retired, which made walking difficult. Nevertheless, he was determined to make a full recovery. He would get his son, Lee Yuan-peng, to take him for a little drive, after which he would walk home. Each day he had his son drive him a little farther than the day before, until after a few months he was well enough to paint again. As he says in his memoirs: "Art is my interest. Art is my life. Since my recovery, I have not been able to lay down my beloved brush. I want to continue to live for the sake of my interest in art." He continued to paint until his death in 1989.
Lee Tze-fan concludes his memoirs with a reference to the model for all great Chinese teachers. "We live less than a hundred meters away from a Confucian temple. It is therefore natural that our whole family should have been influenced by Confucian thinking and also by the schools we attended. We all love reading." Four of his eight children hold doctor's degrees and are university professors in Taiwan or the United States. Thanks to his Confucian ethos, Lee Tze-fan has bequeathed to the world an outstanding legacy comprising his children, numerous gifted students and--last but by no means least--a rich collection of wonderful paintings.
Anita Huang is a freelance writer based in Taipei.
Copyright (c) 2000 by Anita Huang.