Taiwan Today

After "disappearing" for four decades, Chiang Yi-tze has returned to 's art scene with paintings drawn from the core of Chinese culture.

In November 2007, a solo exhibition entitled The Art of Tao: Chinese Paintings and Sculptures by Chiang Yi-tze was held at the Yat-sen Gallery of 's National Dr. Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall. Sculptures in the exhibition were vivid and the paintings were eye-catching as they demonstrated a spectrum of Chinese painting skills. While many exhibitions are collaborative efforts by several artists who specialize in different subject matter, Chiang painted every stroke and molded every piece of clay himself.

The subject matter of the exhibition, however, was unfamiliar to many viewers who lacked a deep understanding of the elements of Chinese culture, as instead of the usual landscapes, flowers and such, many of the works centered on Confucianism and Buddhism. The name of the artist was also unfamiliar to younger art lovers, as it was Chiang's first exhibition since 1969. Older generations, however, remember Chiang as a very well established artist who won the first prize at the Taiwan Provincial Fine Arts Exhibition for three consecutive years shortly before he "disappeared" from 's art scene for nearly four decades.

Chiang was born in mainland in province. He became interested in Chinese painting while attending school there. "I was fascinated when first seeing how village school teachers could complete a piece with a few strokes of the brush," Chiang says. "They did it so easily and so elegantly that I began to dream of doing it myself someday." However, his dream was soon interrupted by the Chinese Civil War. In 1949, he left the mainland and took up residence in , central , along with his father and an elder brother, who was a career army officer and the sole breadwinner of the family. At the time, a career officer's thin paycheck was hardly enough to cover daily necessities, let alone support a younger brother and pay for painting lessons.

Twist of Fate

But fate had its own arrangements. As the same war that forced Chiang to Taiwan continued to bring other revered artists and scholars to the island, he had a chance to learn from famous painters such as Fu Xin-yu (1896-1963), Peng Chun-shi (1895-1976) and Lu Fo-ting (1911-2005--masters whom Chiang would never have had the chance to learn from had it not been for the war. "In , they believed that their only mission was to preserve their art or knowledge. They would teach all they'd learned to anyone who was interested," Chiang says. "Tuition was the last thing I had to worry about." And he soon discovered that there were other benefits, as the teachers would often invite students over for meals. "They'd find some odd excuses to give you food, like saying the beef was too chewy for their teeth or something," Chiang recalls. "You knew they made them up because they didn't want to hurt your feelings."

As these masters came from different places in the mainland, Chiang had the opportunity to learn the painting skills of different schools. And aside from the master painters, Chiang was also fortunate enough to have the chance to learn from the works of ancient Chinese artists. He explains that the 's collection was stored in Wufeng, before the present museum was completed in 1965. In 1957, a small exhibition room at the Wufeng storage facility was opened to the public and Chiang had the chance to see some of the masterpieces. Before the collection was moved to the site, Chiang spent countless hours among the enormous treasure trove of artifacts of the mainland's dynasties, observing and learning from the cultural heirlooms.

He focused on works from the Tang dynasty (618-907), the Five Dynasties (907-960) and the Song dynasty (960-1279), as he thinks that the works from these periods are more mature and possess higher artistic value. And while he initially focused on doing portraits, Chiang later expanded into other fields, including landscapes and traditional bird-and-flower paintings.

As his painting skills developed, Chiang also served as an apprentice of Li Bing-nan (1890-1986), who was a master of Confucianism and the chief secretary of the Office for the Sacrificial Official to Confucius. The tradition of naming a sacrificial official to Confucius was begun in the mainland during the Western Han dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D. 8). The sacrificial official position has always been filled by direct descendents of Confucius, with the Republic of China government taking over appointments for it since 1935.

Chiang believes that Li was the person who has had the greatest influence on him, both artistically and in his attitude toward life. "A craftsman paints images, but an artist paints images that capture the spirit of his subject matter," Chiang says. "The skill of painting images can be perfected through practice, but the ability to paint the spirit comes from culture." For Chiang, the spirit of Chinese painting is the philosophy based primarily on Confucianism. And since Li was also a master of Buddhism, Chiang also spent a lot of time learning about that religion. "There are actually some strong similarities between Confucianism and Buddhism," he says. "The better you know one, the clearer you see the other."

Spending all his time painting and studying, Chiang did not have a real job, only earning a little money by scavenging recyclables. But just as Confucius said of his disciple Yen Hui, "Living on one single meal a day, with water for his drink and living in the lowest hovels of the city--while others could not have stood such hardships, Hui does not lose his cheerfulness," Chiang also did not mind his threadbare material life much. "Studying in the fields and finding some tin cans or empty bottles that I could trade for food or painting materials on the way home--my life just couldn't have been happier," he says.

Thirst for Fame

But Chiang also had a "weakness." "I wanted to be known," he says. "I attended every art competition there was." Chiang won many of them, including the three consecutive provincial awards. Then, upon Li's birthday, Chiang brought his teacher the three award citations as a gift, since he could not afford anything else. "He was happy to see my achievements," Chiang recalls, "but he told me later that I should give more thought to whether I had chosen a career in art just to win awards and gain fame."

From that day on, Chiang cut off all his connections with the art world, became something of a hermit and took a job at the Office for the Sacrificial Official to Confucius. But although he did not sell his works or hold exhibitions, Chiang did not stop painting for a single day. "I stopped participating in contests, but I've always been competing against myself," he says. "There's no reason to go on if you stop bettering yourself."

Since he started painting, Chiang's subject matter had remained that of traditional Chinese paintings, namely portraits, landscapes and the bird-and-flower theme. This continued until 1986, when Li's health deteriorated rapidly. "His last words to me were that I'd painted too many 'leisure' pieces and that he wanted me do something 'educational,'" Chiang says. "I gave him my word that I'd make it my mission for the rest of my life to spread the philosophy of Confucianism and Buddhism through painting." Writers have long considered the question of whether they write for educational purposes or to express emotion. Chiang does not write, but Li's last words definitely helped him to clarify his thinking about why he paints.

Chiang had a ready source of material to draw from in The Analects of Confucius, which records the master's discussions with his disciples and unveils his concepts concerning society. The problem was that there were no visual records of what Confucius and his disciples looked like. To create an image of Confucius, Chiang went to Qufu--Confucius' birthplace--in mainland 's province in search of clues. He carefully read texts mentioning the features, thoughts and words of Confucius and his disciples in order to help him imagine their personalities and what they would look like.

Each of Chiang's paintings is inspired by a paragraph from the Analects and has a long "caption" that contains the original text, the "translation" in modern Mandarin Chinese and Chiang's interpretations. "Students are forced to memorize The Analects of Confucius but quite frankly, it usually bores them to death trying to memorize anything in ancient Chinese," Chiang says. "With the images and interpretations, I'm hoping to make The Analects of Confucius more 'readable.'"

Chiang's promise to Li also included painting subjects related to Buddhism. In addition to images of bodhisattvas and arhats, or Buddhist saints and enlightened ones, one of his best-known works is a 50-meter scroll of scenery in hell that took Chiang nine months of 16-hour workdays to complete. The scroll portrays different sections of hell where those who have done evil in their lives as human beings suffer in different ways. "The scenes are imaginary, but Chinese people believe in things like heaven, hell and karma," Chiang says. "With the hell scene, I can probably scare a few people off from doing evil."

And there are also heavenly scenes to encourage good deeds. One such work entitled The Pure Land demonstrates Chiang's "outline drawing" skill, which is similar to sketching in Western painting, but is done with Chinese brush pens. Most artists prefer not to create outline drawings since doing so is extremely complicated and time-consuming. The , measuring 2.75 meters in width and 4.2 meters in length, took Chiang 20 months to finish. When it was done, Chiang asked an acquaintance to calculate the number of individual brushstrokes the painting contained. Using a computer to analyze the work, the acquaintance calculated that the entire painting required 7 million to 8 million strokes.

No Room for Mistakes

Chiang says that the most difficult part of outline drawing is that there is no room for making mistakes, for if the smallest thing goes wrong, the whole work ends up in the trashcan as there is no altering the black ink once it goes on the paper. Therefore, he first developed a complete picture in his mind of what the piece would eventually look like before painting the first stroke.

Aside from painting, Chiang has also been trying his hand at sculpture in recent years. It was a little difficult in the beginning as he was not familiar with the medium, but he soon managed to master it. He has created a few dozen statues of Confucius, his disciples and bodhisattvas and arhats.

Merely storing the completed paintings and statues in his workshop, however, did not serve much of an educational purpose. So after nearly four decades, Chiang again wanted to be known--but this time for a different reason. He gave the rights to reprint the hell scene scroll to a temple so that its message could be distributed more widely. And he started to hold exhibitions once more. After the Yat-sen Gallery show, Chiang's works were showcased in the and later at Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in . "I'm 70," Chiang says. "I guess I'm in a little bit of a hurry now."

Viewers certainly seem attracted, even astonished by the skills the artist demonstrates. But the exhibitions, as Chiang sees them, are not about Chinese painting, sculpture or individual artistic achievement. Rather, they are all about Chinese culture, the philosophy of Confucianism and Buddhism, and a promise he made to his mentor, Li Bing-nan.

Write to Jim Hwang at jim@mail.gio.gov.tw