Taiwan Today

Art took second place to sports in the 1990 Asian Games held in Peking, but it was still very much a part of the competitive environment. Throughout the grounds were massive sculptures by a dozen or so Chinese modern artists, but standing on the most prominent place—directly inside the main entrance to the Games—was a glistening stainless steel sculpture by one of Taiwan's most respected artists.

Yang Ying-feng, better known overseas by his childhood nickname, Yuyu Yang, had won over the Games authorities, convincing them that his Phoenix Rising Up to the Chinese Sky was the best piece for the coveted spot. Although the prime location had been originally reserved for a mainland artist, the aesthetic power of the sculpture and Yang's own persistent persuasion carried the field. "I insisted on that spot," Yang says, "because anyone who walked past the sculpture would see the phoenix as if it were about to fly." Like most of his sculptures, Yang created Phoenix as a piece that interacts with its surroundings, seeming to move as people walk around it.

The sculpture is almost twenty feet high, and it features Yang's stark rendition of the phoenix, sitting on a circular black granite base, its five wings outstretched. The sculptor's vision of the mythical bird, with its aggressive sweeping lines, is far from the colorful and elaborate images presented in Oriental and Western art. But it is just as forceful in symbolism. "The wings stand for the five major groups of people in China: the Han, Manchu, Mongolian, Moslem, and Tibetan," Yang says. "The phoenix represents the ideal Chinese world of peace and harmony, which can only be achieved by the united power of the five peoples of China."

Phoenix Rising Up to the Chinese Sky is the first of Yang's works to be displayed on the mainland. But the sixty four-year-old sculptor, who is also an architect and an environmental designer, has carried his name, ideas, and works to cities thousands of miles away from his hometown in Dan, northeast of Tai­pei. The phoenix is one of the artist's fondest and recurrent themes.

As Yang remembers it, his fascination with the phoenix began in early childhood. His parents, who lived and worked on the mainland, left him under the care of his grandparents in Dan. The phoenixes he saw in picture books reminded him of his mother. Once he wrote a lyrical essay describing how his mother, who returned to Dan for short visits dressed in an elegant black chipao, looked like a beautiful phoenix. The bird continued to be a source of inspiration through the years, and grew to be much more than the representation of a little boy's longing for his mother. For Yang, the phoenix symbolizes, as it does in Chinese literature and tradition, an ideal world where peace, prosperity, and cultural refinement thrive.

Yang's studio in downtown Taipei is cluttered with many models of his phoenix sculptures; he cannot remember how many he has made. But his phoenixes have evolved from elaborate detail to a sparseness of lines, thus becoming more abstract. "Excessive details make one weary," he says.

Back in 1970, Yang created a vibrant red phoenix for the ROC Pavilion at the EXPO World's Fair in Osaka, Japan. The Advent of the Phoenix was a tremendous undertaking that had to be completed within only three months, the time it usually takes to complete a much smaller-scale sculpture. The phoenix, which rose to a height of twenty-three feet and spread to a width of thirty feet, was made of steel plates with an undercoat of five primary colors and a final coat of red with traces of gold. It was an awesome study of a sculpture in harmony with its surroundings, because the phoenix stood powerful and strong, matching the massive strength of the predominantly black Korean Pavilion adjacent to it.

Yang's phoenixes have gone through numerous transformations. In 1976, he traveled to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to build an intricate phoenix that would capture the spirit of Arabic culture. The phoenix at the Asian Games is based on his three-winged Flying Phoenix, done in 1986. And a recent piece called Moon Charm, is a wingless baby phoenix, represented by a curved and twisted stainless steel crescent, with the eye but an aperture in the smooth surface.

In 1934, when Yang was eight years old, he moved to Peking to be with his parents. A desire to study art, specifically sculpture, after high school was quickly dismissed by his father who said, "It will take you nowhere." Yang accepted his father's advice, and went to Japan to study architec­ture at the Tokyo Art Academy. And, indeed, his father's plans took the aspiring artist to his future. At the academy, Yang met a teacher who would eventually become a major influence on Yang's work as a landscape sculptor and environmental designer.

"My teacher, Isoya Yoshira, specialized in wooden buildings," Yang says, "but he also talked about ecology and the climate, approaching the art of building from both an aesthetic and practical viewpoint. It was from him that I learned that the Chinese since early times built their houses for practical and spiritual reasons. This was a result of the Chinese sense of life: that man and nature interact to become an organic whole. In other words, Chinese are concerned about man's relationship with nature and how to become a part of it. A building achieves its ideal beauty when it expresses man's meeting with nature."

It was not until he returned to Peking in 1947 as a sculpture student at Fu-Jen University that Yang began to understand the deeper significance of his teacher's words. He looked at the city as if he had been given a new pair of eyes, and gradually he discovered in Chinese art the interacting harmony of man and nature that Isoya had talked about.

"Art was everywhere in the life of traditional Chinese," says Yang, "from everyday objects to the houses they lived in. They believed that art inspires deep thought, and would lead to a con­templation of man's place in nature and in the universe. For example, in the Tang dynasty [618-907], Chinese gardens included miniature representations of mountains, rivers, trees, and rocks to give the sense of being close to nature. Even a simple clay teapot had more than a practical function. Its shape and design carried symbolic meaning. "

After the mainland fell to the Chinese Communists in 1949, Yang moved to Taiwan and continued his studies at National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei. He quit for lack of money, married soon afterwards, and found himself the sole support of his wife and her family. Yang took a job as an art designer with the magazine, Good Harvest Year. It was at this time that he began his life as a prolific artist. Taiwan was then an agricultural society, and his work at the magazine took him to the countryside, farms, and rural villages. It was only natural that most of his early works, from 1950 to 1961, depict peasant life.

Although Yang continued to sculpt, reliefs and woodblock prints dominate this period. Although his woodblock portrayals of peasant life tended toward the starkly realistic, his bas-reliefs and sculpture showed a reverence for traditional Chinese art. For example, Sage, a sculpture which won a prize at the International Young Artists Exhibition in Paris in 1959, reflects the linear, rectangular forms of Buddhist sculpture done during the Tang dynasty. But the young artist's style was to change dramatically after a three-year stay in Italy.

Yang went to Rome in 1961 on a three-year art scholarship sponsored by the Vatican government. He joined the sculpture department at the Rome College of Arts, acquainted himself with Western sculpture, and traveled extensively throughout Western Europe. "In three years I was able to learn all of Rodin's techniques," he says. "And when I traveled, I carefully observed Western art and the role it plays in people's lives. All the while I was trying to see the differences between contempo­rary Chinese and Western art. It became clear to me that the differences were disappearing, and that the only way to keep them alive was to infuse modern Chinese art with a Chinese spirit. But what is Chinese spirit? It is a special temperament in Chinese art that inspires spiritual thought."

Almost two decades later, Yang is still worried about infusing contemporary Chinese art with a Chinese spirit. "You can hardly see any Asian, not to mention Chinese spirit these days," he says. Although he has taught sculpture at the Taiwan National Institute of the Arts, the Chinese Culture University, and Tamkang University, his students have developed few of the themes he considers so important to his own work. There is one striking exception, howev­er. Yang takes considerable pride in having been the teacher of Ju Ming, one of Taiwan's most prominent sculptors, who is noted for the strong Chinese char­acter expressed in his woodcarvings.

Yang blames Taiwan's educational system for the lack of a distinctly Chinese expression in modern art. "Art education today is an adaptation of Western concepts and Western methods," he says. "Very little Eastern aesthetics is taught. So, of course, it is difficult to build a healthy Chinese artistic character, much less revitalize a tradition."

As soon as Yang finished his studies in Italy, he packed his suitcases and returned to Taiwan, anxious to try his hand at something new and different. He joined the Veterans Marble Factory in Hualien as an artistic ad visor, and worked with retired soldiers for the next six years producing sculptures and handicrafts in marble for the domestic and tourist market. It was in Hualien that Yang's works began to take new directions.

Hualien is one of Taiwan's most beautiful cities, and its only source of marble. Located on the east coast, the city lies between the ocean and soaring mountains cut by the magnificent Taroko Gorge, one of the island's most impressive tourist sites. Marble from the area ranges in color from gray to a deep, forest green. Yang took inspiration from the nearby precipitous mountain peaks, and began using Taroko marble for his sculptures. "By doing so, I was able to create in my sculpture a feeling that came very close to the spirit of my surroundings, " he says.

This ability to instill his sculptures with the spirit of their natural surroundings led to Yang's involvement in envi­ronmental design. In 1970, Yang did the lifescape—a term he prefers over landscape—for the new Hualien airport. One of his sculptures on the grounds, en­titled The Space Voyage, uses green, white, gray, and black marble. Cut into thin layers, the marble slabs were assembled into a mosaic mural, the green at the bottom suggesting the earth; the white, the sky; and the gray and the black, the clouds and the heavenly bodies.

Many lifescape projects followed, as Yang took his energetic and abstract vi­sions of environmental planning to Sin­gapore, Beirut, Riyadh, and New York. He designed the garden of the Shuanglin Temple in Singapore, the Chinese Gate at the International Park in Beirut, and a nationwide system of parks in Saudi Arabia. Central to his environmental plans are his lifescape sculptures, abstract constructions that are meant to be viewed against the perspective of their surroundings. East- West Gate (1973), which fronts a Wall Street building de­signed by the renowned architect I.M. Pei, is perhaps Yang's most frequently mentioned lifescape sculpture.

The stainless steel piece features a moon gate cutout and a three-panel folding screen. Its highly polished surface re­flects the movement on the street, and its form and meaning, according to Yang, have ancient roots in China. "The basic form of the moon gate evolved from the Chinese concept of the universe," he says, "of the yin and the yang, and of the circle and the square existing side by side to complement each other." From earliest times, Chinese believed that the earth was square and the heavens spherical. Therefore, the circle and square were commonly used in both reli­gious and secular art.

A quick overview of Yang's works reveals his own frequent use of this artistic motif. National Flower (1979), a major piece standing next to a condominium in downtown Taipei, is a collage of stainless steel circles and squares. It was designed to complement the strong vertical lines of the building and its curved balconies. In 1980, Yang won the first ROC Golden Tripod Award for excellence in architecture for this work. Even his baby phoenixes repeat the motif. Moon Charm and Sun Glory (1986) both have square edges, hollow circles for eyes, and square bases.

Since East-West Gate, almost all of Yang's sculptures have been done in stainless steel. It has become so much the artist's trademark that he is often described as the "stainless steel sculptor." Yang rejects the criticism that the medium is cold and forbidding. "It has the clearest color," he says. "The mirror effect fascinates passers-by, and stimu­lates their imagination. Look into the sculpture and the reflection of the surroundings appear like a mirage."

Yang adds that his inclination to use pure, monochrome color came from his love for the white and pale green porcelains of the Sung dynasty (960-1279). These delicate porcelains also have a simplicity and fluidity of line that is reflected in Yang's more abstract works, such as his baby phoenixes.

Another motif that appears frequently in Yang's lifescapes is the dragon. He points out that while in the West the mythical beast represents an evil spirit, for the Chinese it is an embodiment of heaven. "The emperors wore robes decorated with dragons and were called the Sons of Heaven," he says. "I use the dragon to indicate the combined power of the earth and the sky, and the primal energy of the cosmos." An energetic dragon materialized in his lifescape design for the Chinese Gate in Beirut (1972). The miniature mountains, pavilions, caves, ponds, and greenery are arranged in a pyramid of circles along the pathways. Seen from above, the paths look like a spiraling dragon.

Seventeen years later, the dragon emerged again, this time in magnificent winding form during the 1990 Lantern Festival at the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall courtyard in Taipei. Flying Dragon was a major creative accomplish­ment, mixing tradition with technology. Rising twenty feet towards the sky, the dragon, constructed from hundreds of stainless steel sheets, was brilliant silver by day and an illuminated, spiraling glow at night. Sixty technicians had drilled thousands of tiny holes in the body of the sculpture, allowing the light from hundreds of small light bulbs installed within to shine through. Yang relishes the evening that he first saw his completed work: "When night came, the lights were turned on. From afar I could see a white creature gleaming like a spirit that had descended from the sky. It was as if the dragon were alive."

Perhaps the origin of this gleaming dragon can be traced back to Yang's interest in lasers as a new, pulsating art medium. He describes as "amazing" his introduction to laser technology in 1977, at a music performance in Kyoto, Japan. "I was transfixed," he says. "The whole image was like the splitting of a living cell. And in that beam of light I saw the origins of the universe."

It was during this time of intellectual stimulation that Yang began to suffer the physical damage of an allergic reac­tion to medication. What was meant as a simple treatment for mumps resulted in a serious skin disorder. It left the sculptor with hands that are swollen and red, and legs that are losing their strength. But the disease did .not sap his energy. Yang threw himself into laser art, impressed by the many possibilities that laser technology offered the artist. As he says "It is like entering another space where the imagination is totally free to create its own associations."

Together with a scientist, an engineer, and his son, who is also a sculptor, Yang established the Chinese Laser In­stitute of Science and the Arts in 1979. Like his sculpture and environmental design, Yang's laser art expresses a definite Chinese spirit, evoking images of a dynamic, throbbing universe. "It is far removed from the geometric patterns of the West," he says. The laser compositions also suggest the modern styles of Chinese splash ink painting that some artists have created to reinterpret traditional landscape art.

Bird of Paradise became Taiwan's first laser sculpture. Done on an acrylic plastic sheet, Yang used a laser to cut the design, which was based on the fiery phoenix he created for Saudi Arabia in 1976. In recognition of the artistic progress in lasography that Yang and his friends had achieved, the Directorate General of Posts issued a set of stamps displaying the group's laser art. The fascination with lasers lasted seven years. In 1984, however, Yang was ready to return to stainless steel sculpture and envi­ronmental design.

As a lifescape sculptor, environmental designer, and a thinker who constantly searches for spiritual meaning in his surroundings, it was only natural for Yang to develop a keen dedication to environmental protection. "It makes me sad to see that the industrialization of Western civilization has led to the pollution of air, water, land, and ocean, alter­ing the climate and the balance of life," he says. "Industrialization would have never happened in China if not for the West, because according to the traditional Chinese sense of life, the purity of nature should not be spoiled."

Yang's vehement objection to the destruction of the environment and stub­born clinging to the Chinese "sense of life" have found expression in his sculp­ture and in the many articles he has writ­ ten. In April 1989, for example, Yang participated in Taiwan's Earth Day activities with Ever Green, a twenty-seven-foot stainless steel sculpture temporarily erected at the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall courtyard. The sculpture was elo­quent in its simplicity: a shining, earth-like sphere orbited by a twisted belt of steel in the form of a Möbius strip, that mind-bending, one-sided geometrical surface. Ever Green, which Yang meant to stand as a reminder of the past unsul­lied beauty of the earth, was the symbolic centerpiece of the many Earth Day programs held at the site.

In style and medium, as well as the mood of the times, it seems light years ago since Yang began his path to sculpture. He remembers the two cement reliefs, Moon Goddess and Sun God, that he did in 1960 for the Teachers Hostel at Sun Moon Lake in central Taiwan. As he originally envisioned it, both images would be naked. "There were complaints that this would be vulgar, so I gave them clothes," he says. "Then other people said that it was not decent to show a man and a woman who seemed so intimate under the Chi­nese characters for 'Moon Goddess.' So a farmer and an ox took the couple's place." Yang smiles, and laughs softly. "You see," he says, "Taiwan was still a closed society at that time."

Over the forty years that he has been a sculptor, Yang has seen many changes in society, in the environment, in art. What would he do differently if the clock were turned back? Aware that his works arouse many negative feelings—"too commercial," "stainless steel is hard and cold," "this Chinese 'sense of life' idea is outdated"—still Yang would not change his past. Nor his future.

"Even my students have given up following my footsteps," Yang says. "My direction is not the trend in the art market here. What is salable is something that is Western. So, you know, I feel lonely all the time as an artist. The road I have chosen to take has never been an easy one."

But the road remains an exciting one, especially because of his latest project. Yang is currently involved in his most adventurous environment design thus far. "At the request of authorities in Peking, I am doing a design proposal for a new community near Peking," he says. "It is supposed to be a showplace for Chinese culture as well as a place for people to develop new industries. I am very much looking forward to the project, because if it works out, the new community will fulfill my concept of an ideal city. It will be a place to live a peaceful, cultured, prosperous, and modern life—and most of all, to live a distinctly Chinese life." Yang's enthusiasm is un­derstandable. In a word, it could be his ultimate lifescape.