The distinctive tranquility of painter Shi Song's work is a direct expression of his efforts to gain insight into the true nature of life and suffering.
On a hot summer day, a middle-aged man and his wife dropped by Wisteria Tea House in after hearing that paintings by Taiwanese artist Shi Song were on display. The man was drawn by what he said was the feeling of serenity expressed in the painter's still lifes. He pulled up a wooden stool and, oblivious to his surroundings, sat entranced by the art works for more than an hour.
The oil paintings that so engrossed the man were the work of an artist who considers himself a mere artisan, but whose work has touched many with their immense detail and overarching sense of peace. Born in , as an infant Shi was entrusted to a relative's care during the Chinese Civil War. He came to when he was two, but it was not until he was five years old that he was reunited with the rest of his family in . He later came to regard this period of time as the root cause of the sense of insecurity that gripped him as he grew up. "Questions like 'why do I exist?' and 'why am I not somebody else?' circled around my mind when I was a child," Shi recalls. However, he believes that this uncertainty about life also prompted him to seek ways of attaining inner peace and finding freedom from suffering. Painting, it turned out, was the perfect tool for his quest, as it allowed him to follow his passion for art while seeking answers to these larger questions.
Shi has been interested in painting since he was a child. Once reunited with his family in , a liberal education allowed him to pursue his dream of becoming an artist. After he graduated from National Taiwan Institute of Arts (now National Taiwan University of Arts) in 1970 and completed military service in 1972, Shi seized an opportunity to study at Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-arts in for three years. Regarded by many as the art capital of the Western world, the young Shi also saw as setting the global standard for art.
Invisible Man
During his time in , Shi experienced what it is like to be regarded as a foreigner. He describes the resulting sense of inferiority and loneliness as having made him feel "like an invisible man walking in a scenic postcard." To do something to express his Chinese heritage, he once tried to blend some Chinese elements into his Western-style paintings, but the resulting works were criticized as lifeless and the blended elements seen as mere visual effects. The criticism came as a blow, Shi says, but also served as a reminder that any form of art should be a genuine representation and response to real life experience.
He then spent one and a half years working on a series of paintings of two street performers in an underground subway station--a blind accordionist and a crippled flute player. The pair reminded him of an old Chinese story about two men, one blind and one crippled, who worked together to flee a fire, he says. Shi used maps of for canvases and worked in different kinds of paints to complete the series. He has never shown paintings from the series in public.
After three years abroad, Shi returned to . Having observed the lively Parisian aesthetic at work in the fields of painting, children's art, fashion and interior design, the artist says he felt a calling to try to reduce what he saw as "deficiencies" in these areas in . His time in had taught him that the artistic achievements he admired so much in were simply the products of the nation's rich cultural heritage, and he thought that boosting 's resources could have a similar effect in his homeland. "I decided that it would not be so meaningful to bring the most advanced arts and techniques back home, as it was a time when many basic cultural resources were still lacking here," he says.
For artist Shi Song, depicting ordinary objects is simply a way to record his perceptions honestly. (Photo by Chang Su-ching)
Shi came back to in 1975, first working as the editor-in-chief for Lion Art Monthly, and then as the executive editor at Echo Publishing Co. In the following years, Shi helped to create two of the very first and most successful children's publications produced in : the Echo Children's Encyclopedia series and the Chinese Folktales series. The stories and illustrations were so well done that the books became the most popular titles for children in the 1980s and are still appreciated by both adults and children today.
Along with working as an editor, Shi continued to pursue his art, which began to focus conspicuously on local motifs. In the late 1970s, he embraced woodblock printing, a traditional printing method that originated in mainland , because he says it offered a sense of connection to Chinese culture and personal identity. In one of his woodblock prints, A Meinong Farmer Plays the Huqin, he captured a burly farmer's gentle and attentive expression as he played the huqin, a bowed string instrument used in Chinese music, at a local temple. Other characters in the prints included a vendor in the streets of 's Wanhua District, as well as a blind massage master and a fortuneteller at 's .
While some questioned his taking up another art form, Shi says he has come to view art primarily as a way of occupying his hands, thereby keeping his mind active and alert. Like painting, he says, he views making woodblock prints as a tool that can be used to help him find insight into life.
Brush with Buddhism
In the mid-1980s, Shi's mother became ill and was hospitalized frequently. The distress he felt at his mother's illness led him to start a series of ink line drawings of Guanyin, a compassionate bodhisattva in Buddhism. The task demanded total coordination of hand and brush in order to create the fine, smooth lines of the image. Any lapse in concentration could easily result in ink stains on the delicate India paper. "I had to hold my hands still, control my breathing and set aside all the anxiety to reach a state similar to that of meditation [where one is free from rambling thoughts,]" he says.
His mother passed away not long after he started the drawings, yet Shi carried on with the series, hoping to acquire insight into his grief about his mother's death and into the impermanence of life itself. He completed 33 line drawings in the end, each accompanied by an essay on his reflections on life and relationships. The series was published in 1991 by Lion Art Publishing.
Shi's interest in Buddhism continued to grow and he began meditating, reading books about the religion and using his brush to copy scriptures that he found especially meaningful. Out of reverence, at the end of 1995 he set out to retell stories of Buddha's life in oil paintings. After reading scriptures for inspiration, Shi created a series of a dozen paintings of events in Buddha's life. He set the series in an outdoor environment with luxuriant trees, because Buddha was born, enlightened and passed away under trees. Shi also illuminated his subject with sunlight and shadows, deviating from the traditional representation of Buddha as being illuminated from within. He says that this was a deliberate effort to bring Buddha closer to mankind. "Buddha once walked on Earth, just like every one of us does," he says.
Stilling Life
In the early 1990s, his creativity turned to painting still lifes after a ray of sunlight passing through a window in his studio caught his attention. As he wrote in one of his books, "How placid and clear the light was. How quietly the light and its shadow moved. The light had walked for millions of miles before it came into this tiny yard of mine, as if it was telling me of the impermanence of life and how small my existence was in this world. As I followed the light's movement on my mottled wall, it seemed that all the hustle and bustle of this world was thinning out and disappearing."
Flower and Mercy I, Oil on linen canvas, 2007, 130 x 89 cm (Courtesy of Shi Song)
"Let the light tell me what to paint," he remembers saying to himself after seeing it. He settled an old wooden end table against the wall under the window and placed objects on it that fell easily to hand--a small potted plant, a seashell he once picked up, some osmanthus twigs from the yard. Without any attempt to impress anyone or follow a particular painting style, he started a series of still life oil paintings of commonplace objects.
Writer Yu Tien-tsung believes that for Shi, painting a still life is more a form of meditation than a deliberate act of artistic creation. Instead of focusing on his personal sorrow and desires, Shi chooses to be an observer of the world, allowing him to find the beauty in mundane objects and possibly gain more insights and wisdom into the nature of life's impermanence.
Although the works are done meticulously in a photorealistic style, the peaceful ambience of Shi's still lifes makes them appear as though they are not images of this world. "Shi Song's paintings are a natural combination of his experiences in art and Buddhist meditation. Together, these things offer viewers a glimpse into his inner self," says Huang Ming-chang, a recognized oil painting master in the Chinese-speaking world. "You can feel the ease, contentment and serenity of his works, a faithful expression of his character. It's not easy for a painter to reach such a perfect unity of himself and his artistry as Shi has accomplished."
For Shi, depicting ordinary objects is simply a way to record his perceptions honestly. "All I do is to observe and work with my hands," he says, adding that he is not concerned with style. "I don't mind if some people do not consider my paintings as art," he says.
Some of Shi's works depart from the photorealistic style of his still lifes to impart a more profound insight into life. In a three-painting series of camellia flowers, Willing to Be the Spring Soil, he smudged some of the flowers to show life's ever-changing nature. In this series, the desire to portray every detail of the blossoms has been replaced with tolerance and the sheer joy of embracing life's mutability.
Whether in his precise still lifes or less photorealistic paintings, Shi's keen ability to capture natural light imparts a poetic quality to his works, a power that makes viewers feel immediately drawn into the harmony they convey. Huang sees traits of Dutch master Johannes Vermeer in Shi's works. "His [Shi's] mature interplay of light and color conveys a powerful lasting effect, an elevated state of quiescence," Huang says.
Perhaps it was this quality that caused the middle-aged man at the Wisteria Tea House to linger in front of Shi's paintings for so long. The artist tells the story of entering the teahouse and finding the man there, lost in contemplation. It was a chance meeting between strangers, and the man never even ventured his name. As they talked, the man said that while he knew little about the arts, he was moved, almost to the point of tears, by the feeling of inner peace the paintings inspired. Shi relates the story about meeting the man not to boast about his work, but to make a point about the widespread longing for tranquility, for true quiescence, that many people feel in their hectic lives.
Shi paints for the same reason, looking on the art form as an exercise of hand and mind targeted at stilling his rambling thoughts enough to obtain insights into life and suffering. As writer Yu Tien-tsung says, Shi "is not painting; he is simply living life. In his work, you see what's real in this world."
Write to Audrey Wang at tr.audrey@gmail.com