Taiwan Today

The versatile texture and rich colors of gouache are perfect for Chung Shun-wen’s images of rural and family life.
 

No matter where she may be in the world, Chung Shun-wen (鍾舜文) mixes her paints with great care and attention, a quality she describes as essential for a gouache painter. “It’s a long, slow process to prepare the paper and mix the paint properly,” she said. “If you need ten colors, you have to create each on a plate separately, one by one.”
 

Chung’s medium of choice became famous in the late 1970s through the work of Lin Chih-chu (林之助), a master painter. He sought to elevate the status of what had previously been termed “Eastern gouache” in Japanese by renaming it in Chinese to emphasize that it was not solely the province of Japanese artists. Gouache is a type of paint that uses a binding agent, typically gum arabic or yellow dextrin, to carry pigments. Lin named the technique “glue color painting” after the agent, hoping that this would lend it the same status as oil or watercolor.
 

Lin was a staunch defender of gouache, which he maintained was mistakenly attributed wholly to Japanese colonial influence but had in fact been used in China and other Asian countries for centuries. After a hiatus following the withdrawal of colonial power, the technique reemerged in the 1980s, and Lin was invited to teach at Tunghai University’s Department of Fine Arts in central Taiwan’s Taichung City, which led to the establishment of a formal painting course in gouache. This was the very program that solidified the direction of Chung’s career.
 

Born in Meinong District’s Hakka community in the southern city of Kaohsiung in 1978, Chung grew up surrounded by literature. Her father, Chung Tieh-min (鍾鐵民), was a teacher recognized for his novels and essays, and her paternal grandfather, Chung Li-ho (鍾理和), was a novelist active in the colonial and postwar eras. As children, Chung and her sisters studied with Lee Dong-hwa (李登華), a watercolor painter and her father’s colleague at Meinong’s Chi Mei Senior High School. Chung described Lee as a remarkable storyteller. “We’d draw scenes and characters from the tales he told us,” Chung recalled. “Of course it was good practice from a technical perspective, but what I remember most is what fun it was!” Lee’s training prepared Chung for an undergraduate degree in painting from National Changhua University of Education in the central county. She went on to take a Masters in Fine Art with a major in gouache at Tunghai University.
 

Vanishing Smoke

Chung returned to her hometown in 2006, when Meinong was undergoing an economic shift. One of the area’s main crops was tobacco, but after Taiwan became a World Trade Organization member in 2002, sales gradually fell. In line with the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, the government began subsidizing replacement crops. Inspired by the unique, vanishing landscape of tobacco production, Chung documented the tradition by interviewing local farmers, taking photos of them working the land and then painting gouaches. The artist recalled coming home from university and seeing the lush tobacco fields. “That view of green leaves and farmers at work in conical hats and colorful clothing signaled that I was close to home,” she said. Chung posted her work online before publishing a collection of writing, photos and paintings as the 2009 book “That Year in the Tobacco Fields.”
 

The portraits of tobacco farmers that Chung made during that period were exhibited around the country in Kaohsiung, Changhua, Taichung and the northern city of Taoyuan between 2008 and 2010. The monochrome backgrounds are suffused with light that evokes the hot sun of the tropical south. The artist explained that the simple backdrop focuses the viewer’s gaze on the subjects themselves.
 

In reviewing Chung’s art for a recent show in Taipei City entitled “Painting: The Nature of Presence,” critic Chen Yu-jen (陳譽仁‬) praised the delicate expressiveness of the artist’s understated backgrounds. A depiction of bead tree flowers is set against a mottled rocklike backdrop, which Chen says lends the flowers the quality of a fossil rubbing and gives the piece depth. Chen feels Chung’s plant paintings are reminiscent of Japanese floral sketching, in which the artist creates variations through subtle details. “Chung presents wildflowers as petite yet durable characters, using smooth lines and relief-like tints to give leaves and petals a realistic sense of physicality,” Chen wrote.

From the Heart

Chung’s choice of flora and fauna as subjects represents cherished memories of family life near Li Mountain. Her studies of local fruit and vegetables as well as her series of cats, birds and monkeys are all deeply familiar to the painter. “The common elements of daily life that surround me at the foot of Li Mountain combine in my art to build an image of home,” she said. To those who wonder why she does not paint more popular blooms such as peonies and plum blossoms, Chung’s answer is simple. “They’re not what greeted me when I returned home or what I woke up to in the morning,” she said.
 

Her attention to daily experience is not restricted to Meinong, or indeed, to Taiwan. An autumn trip to Baden-Baden in 2015 yielded a series of drawings of acorns and pinecones she had picked up on strolls through the German city’s parks. In 2017 Chung took part in an artist-in-residence program organized by Taipei-based Lovely Taiwan Foundation in which she stayed in a restored historic house in the eastern county of Taitung. There she delved into a new genre by painting landscapes inspired by the serene rural township of Chishang while making portraits of languid local cats. The artist’s observations of beauty in Baden-Baden, Chishang and Meinong converged at a 2018 exhibition at Taipei’s Mind Set Art Center called “Boundless Life.”
 

The show’s curators positioned Chung as the child and grandchild of literary icons who, like Chung Tieh-min and Chung Li-ho before her, is a meticulous observer of daily life. Chung also contributed more directly to the family legacy by illustrating the complete works of her father and grandfather. “It was my father’s idea to distract readers from the text with illustrations that can trigger their imagination,” Chung said.
 

The artist’s family features in a series she began while completing her master’s. Students were required to submit a large work every month in preparation for their graduation exhibition. “Living in Taichung at the time, I missed my family in Meinong and painting was a powerful antidote to homesickness,” she said. “When I drew my grandma’s hair, it was like combing it, but with my paintbrush.”
 

Chung paid tribute to Lin’s commitment to gouache and his influence on her career. “Lin Chih-chu founded Taiwan Gouache Painting Association in the early 1980s, and the group’s painters have played pivotal roles in teaching and promoting the genre in and beyond formal education systems in the country,” she said. Lin’s most famous piece, “Coolness of Morning,” is now in the collection of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung, and with contemporary artists like Chung exhibiting to acclaim, the technique is more popular than ever.

Write to Pat Gao at cjkao@mofa.gov.tw