Li Chi-mao breaks the boundaries of ink painting with a kinetic energy that keeps the octogenarian busy round the clock.
Surrounded by a gaggle of autograph-seeking students at his Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall exhibition, Li Chi-mao magnanimously scrawls his name across exhibition catalogs and dispenses advice on love and art. With slicked-back white hair, a ready grin and a pair of glasses tilted rakishly across his face, he looks like someone's eccentric grandfather who has led an extraordinary life. At 80, he is still painting, teaching and working his magic on people.
His art is full of its creator's conviviality, and perhaps for this reason is considered to have shifted the boundaries of traditional ink painting. Huang Yung-chuan, deputy director-general of the National Museum of History, thinks Li's ability to capture the motion of an object and his subject selection are his greatest strengths. "Li's paintings are never static," he says. "Even when he does a still life he manages to imply motion in the past and the future."
He thinks that the introduction of Western painting to the East posed the question of how to innovate Chinese painting and that the discussion has since largely centered on subject matter--what should Chinese painting depict? If that is the case, Li responds in three ways--with panoramic vistas, small groups of people and individual portraits.
His vistas are epic and have a cinematic quality. They focus mainly on scenes from everyday communal life, such as market places, restaurants and religious processions, and transport the viewer into the scenes. Li describes the expressions on individual faces and suggests dozens more with such conviction and ease that the viewer might be directing the photography of an epic movie. A lot of the panoramas seem to telescope out from a central image, like a stack of plates in an open-air restaurant, and suggest infinity with simple monochrome strokes taking over when the detailed drawing in black ink recedes.
The smaller group images often take on an occupation or a social setting and emphasize the tools of the trade, such as the gas tanks and woks of a dumpling vendor, and the incidental focus of a gathering. Hawkers, farmers and chess players are represented in midrange shots that show the emotion on faces and inform viewers of what has happened prior to their arrival, and as Huang notes, what is likely to happen next.
Portraits of individuals tend to show their subjects in professional poses, for example, a steamed-bun vendor on a bicycle hawking his wares or the player of an erhu--a traditional two-stringed instrument--bowing away with a cigarette in his mouth. They again look closely at the implements of the trade and seem descriptive of physical gesture rather than individual character.
The great change that Li has wrought in the subject matter of Chinese ink painting stems from his emphasis on the ordinary. Instead of sages in misty scenes or lolling goldfish, people are seen in the real world living their lives. The painter is no longer turned inward to his own class of elite literati, but reflects the world around him. In this light, Huang describes Li's work as folkloric. Li himself simply says, "I paint only what I see, feel and experience." Although parallels between his work and the general direction of Chinese Communist cultural ideology are apparent, Li took the opposite path.
Li was born in 1925 in a remote area of China's Anhui province, where his interest in painting was nurtured by his tutor, Lu Hua-shih, a noted painter in his hometown. Witnessing his tutor showered with praise, gifts and money in exchange for his work, the idea of such a life appealed to Li and set him on his way. Following the Nationalist government to Taiwan in 1949, Li continued his studies in the art department at the College of Political Warfare. The formal schooling further developed his drawing skills, and it was there he met his wife. After he graduated and got married, the college provided him a job teaching art and gave him the time to lay the groundwork for his own career.
During this time, Li visited exhibitions and drew endlessly, turning out more than 200 pictures a day. His prolific output, shown frequently, caused his reputation to grow, and since the 1960s he has lectured, attended conferences and judged art competitions both at home and abroad. The greatest challenge for him throughout his success has been depicting movement. He modestly says that he only finds out after trying whether he is good at it or not.
Huang Tsai-sung, professor in the Department of Painting and Calligraphy Arts at the National Taiwan University of Arts, thinks that Li's depiction of the human figure and animals captures great momentum. He thinks that Li limits his brushstrokes in such a way as to suggest form and meaning beyond the paper. "Li treats the void as larger than or equal to painted space," he says. "This reflects a traditional Chinese approach to aesthetics that is founded in Taoist philosophy about existence and nonexistence, but Li's use of unembellished water and ink juxtaposed with empty space creates an exceptional energy and ethereality." Li puts it down to the good fortune of being endowed with acute observation and a good memory.
The excellence of his drawing skills is evident in every work. A few strokes define the folds of a piece of clothing and reveal a subject's posture, while a line or two on the face express the joy in a smile. He draws with an overriding confidence that does fine detail and smudged suggestion with equal ease, revealing a looseness to his style that is at once eccentric and accurate. However, there is something about his drawing that seems superficial. The characters described by the artist's sure hand are caricatures of real people, cartoons rather than portraits. His treatment of subjects may ride roughshod over the real world, but he has certainly created one of his own.
The high quality of his draftsmanship certainly attracts praise from academics. Shen Yi-zheng, professor of the Graduate School of Fine Arts at National Taiwan Normal University, commends Li for the refinement of his technique. Shen thinks that line embodies the spirit of Chinese painting and illuminates its origin in the pictographic art of calligraphy. "Li captures the essence of his subject with a few swift and simple strokes," he says. "He creates magic."
Never one to rest on his laurels, Li is currently director of Tamkang University's Carrie Chang Fine Arts Center, and busies himself teaching, putting on exhibitions and traveling overseas. The art and culture of other nations is a great source of artistic inspiration for him, and he has a particular affinity to the Middle East where he spends time with the royal family of Bahrain.
In 1977, he set up a scholarship at Dankook University in South Korea to help out handicapped youth with artistic inclinations. In another philanthropic gesture in 2000, he donated some of his work and collected artifacts to Taiwan's Hsing Wu College to establish the Li Chi-mao Museum on campus. In recognition of his contribution to Chinese-American cultural exchange, the City of San Francisco in 1987 designated November 29th as "Li Chi-mao Day." Here at home, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs conferred a "Friend of Foreign Service" medal on Li for his long-term devotions to the promotion of international cultural exchange. He has also received awards for his contributions to the arts by the Ministry of Education and the Council for Cultural Affairs.
Li considers these exchanges essential to the development of himself as an artist and, by extension, the artistic community in Taiwan as a whole. As his personal assistant reminds him of the next appointment, Li hurriedly sums himself up. "My biggest rival is myself," he says. "I turn my work over in my mind all the time. This desire to improve myself keeps me going."