Taiwan Today

Amid the continuing tumultuous debate on modernization of Chinese painting, Hung Hsien remains a cool and enigmatic figure, overlooked by contemporary Chinese art managers abroad and virtually unknown in art circles at home. She is very well known and ad­mired, however, in the rarified circle of Chinese art historians in the West.

Twice, her work was circulated in major touring exhibitions organized by Professor Li Chu-tsing of the University of Kansas: She first appeared in a small but important exhibition called New Directions in Chinese Painting which trav­eled across America for five years be­tween 1968 and 1973, and again in a major solo retrospective which toured between 1978 and 1980.

Over the past 25 years she has been shown often in Taiwan and around the world with the Fifth Moon Group, an association of pioneers in art founded by Liu Kuo-sung, her contemporary from the art department of National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei. She has also had solo shows in various museums and university galleries across America, her home since 1958.

Her consequently curious obscurity in commercial galleries stems from two major bases, neither of them related in­trinsically to art or to excellence. One is the uniqueness of her style-this has made it difficult for would-be critics to identify her with any group or school. The other is her self-forgetfulness. Hung's quiet serenity and her total absent-mindedness (except in painting) have exasperated friends and those who would promote her work. She seems to know nothing of the real world. In Taiwan, off and on over the past four years, she has attended countless art exhibitions but has not introduced herself to gallery managers or museum person­nel. She goes to see the art of others and as a rule forgets to promote herself.

Her greatest teacher was Prince Pu Ju (1896-1963), better known as Pu Hsin-yu, brother of the deposed final Emperor of China, Pu Yi. From him, it is clear, she learned not only the Way of the Brush, but also the Way of the Prince. Pu knew nothing of the outside world. He lived in his own sphere of ancient books and paintings. He did not talk a great deal, even to ex­plain or analyze styles and methods to his students. He simply painted. As his family had no other means of support, Madame Pu made sure that they could live on his teaching and painting. But he never concerned himself with the details of physical survival. He knew nothing about money, about shopping, or even his own neighborhood.

One day, walking out into the streets of Taipei, Pu got completely lost. He was carrying no money, as usual. He did not know his address, even less his telephone number. He walked for hours, looking for a familiar landmark. At last he come on a picture mounter's shop; its doors were wide open, inviting maximum sunlight to dry paintings recently mounted on large boards. This was something he could relate to-an establishment which dealt in paintings; and with renewed hope he walked in. The mounter recog­nized him and asked the reason for the royal visit. "Do you know where I live," asked the Prince; "could you take me home?"

Hung Hsien was a highschool girl when she first met the Prince. "I remember going to his house one evening armed with my paintings and sketches, hoping he would take me on as a pupil. We spread out my works and he looked at each carefully. He was on the point of talking when Madame Pu called out from the back that supper was ready. He stood up to go, and beckoned me to stay and wait for him.

After dining, he returned and continued examining my work. Finally, he said he would teach me. And then and there he painted his first copy-model for me to take home. I copied it line for line many times.

"He spoke little on the hows and wherefores. Usually he painted, and I watched, in silence. He was a master of every genre: flowers-court-style with tine outlines and even color till, or the boneless style with its more spontaneous application of pure inkwash or colors; and human figures and animals; and of course landscapes, from the Sung masters down to the Ching.

"He was pleased with the way I copied his models and urged me to devote my life to painting. But when I graduated from highschool and wanted to enter the art department of National Taiwan Normal University where he was teaching, he objected. He wanted me to devote full time to painting-to continue studying with him in private. My parents had a say, of course. So I went to NTNU in the end anyway."

The Prince almost lived in his tiny, six-mat (216 sq. ft.) studio. There he had a desk and a couple of extra chairs. He read, wrote, or painted there, it seemed, the whole day long. Pupils walked in on him at any time, but only the first two could sit down, the others would have to stand. They came as they pleased, to watch him paint, or bringing some work for correction and guidance. Some pupils simply came and watched others being taught, while some worked very hard there, diligently following all his directives. No appointments were made. The teacher-pupil relationship was the old fa­shioned kind-not conceived in terms of hours, but of a lifetime.

The Prince was highly esteemed in the community, even though he lived the life of a virtual recluse, not participat­ing in social activities or exhibitions. But his enormous erudition, his lovable for­getfulness, and his painting endeared him to everyone.

Art in the '50s and '60s was still a cultural luxury; those were still days of economic difficulties. The Republic of China was only beginning to grow as a modern nation. But this artistic master of court and free styles developed a follow­ing which today, thirty years later, has spawned its own branches. His direct stu­dents and others who trained themselves in his style have produced new genera­tions of Pu Hsin-yu style painters. But among them, Hung Hsien is the only one to have graduated to a fully independent, fully contemporary image.

At NTNU, her artistic horizons expanded fast and wide. While continuing under Pu, she also studied Western oil painting under Chu Teh-chun and Liao Chi-chun, Chinese landscapes with Huang Chun-pi, and bird-and-flower painting with Chin Chin-po. All of these men were or have since become distinguished masters in their own right. Under them, Hung was steeped in an atmosphere of professional discipline and diligence.

The combination of traditional and Western training was an ideal base for a would-be modern Chinese artist. She was fortifying skills in observation, draw­ing, rendering, description, coloration. But most importantly, she was acquiring a different perspective on the uses of brushwork-discovering an entirely dif­ferent, if far more limited, expressive potential offered by the Western oil painting brush. Its bristles being short, stiff, and ranged in a row, its "brush strokes" could easily be all uniform; ranged in a group, they offered expressiveness which was purely visual, non-associative. This is in radical contrast to the Chinese fur brush, whose linear traces for six millennia have been per­ceived consciously and unconsciously (more than the contour line of a form) as form itself-as an expression of the conduit of chi(energy).

Chinese painters' brushwork, especially since the 14th Century, has come to be apprehended increasingly the way one views the brushwork in calligraphy. The viewer, himself an adept at calligra­phy, "reads" or "plays back" the entire process for brushwielding, beginning at the top where the brush, freshly charged with ink, first touches down on the paper, and on down then through every line, hook, flop, or dot. During this pro­cess, the viewer mentally replays each attack, each change in speed, in weight, in body balance. Such an experience, more than merely visual, is often highly psycho-physiological.

Under evaluation is the artist's innate endowment of energy, chi-the way he deploys only what is needed, leav­ing reserves of energy-reserves unex­pressed, but to the connoisseur clearly indicated. It is a matter like repeating a martial dance, a sword dance or tai-chi chuan, fast or slow respectively, outward­ly or inwardly manifested.

It is to say that a great deal of Chinese brushwork has long ceased to be primarily visual, but is apprehended as traces of motion in space and time. While it has become rather refined, almost rarified in painting, it has also become increasingly circumscribed, more of a testament of energy-skills than of purely (traditional­ists say merely) visual interests. This preoccupation with the psycho­-physiological aspects of brushwork has often diverted the Chinese artist from contemplating his art in objective pictorial terms, where the primary focus is on arranging forms and colors in space.

Through oils, Hung learned to see forms and colors more or less free of these psycho-physiological concerns­ pure forms, pure lines not saying or implying anything else. Then, just as the abstract potentials of painting were becoming apparent to her, in 1958 she moved to the United States-to Chicago to marry her long-time friend, T.C. Chang, the architect.

She at once enrolled in the art department of Northwestern University, where she studied art history and contin­ued oil painting and other studio arts under Professors Theodore Halkin and George Cohen. She was able also to bring her training in Chinese painting to bear, and both her oils and her litho­graphs of this period reflect the East-West combination in a harmonious way.

Professor Li Chu-tsing, in the beautiful catalog of Hung Hsien's 1978 exhibi­tion, describing one work of the period, writes:

(It) begins in aspects of nature, but goes on to display brushwork in a semi­-abstract manner. Its effect depends not on representation, but on the rhythms and movements created by the formal elements. Despite strong Western influence, she continued to use Chinese paper, ink, and colors, although she also worked on a number of oil paintings. But the sense of Chinese brushwork is always there.

Hung's development with brush on paper has been consistent-and startling. In the mid-50s, in Taiwan, she was still doing the exercises of a traditional pupil, learning Pu's model-painting in line­ for-line copies-as we see in the land­scape in the blue-green style of 1953; her 1955 orchid, done in the "boneless" ex­pressive style (without fine, ink contour lines); and Demon Queller Chung Kuei, 1955, which is inscribed by Prince Pu himself. These are precise and accurate images of Pu Hsin-yu's diverse styles. Hung Hsien's elegant and pliant brush­ work is applied very much in the Mas­ter's manner, and her work of this period can be easily confused with his. Hung Hsien, fortunately, did not stop at being a superb copier of her teacher's model-paintings. Mastering his various techniques, she went on to become an artist in her own right. This phase, the growing awareness of her own individual potentials, unfurls slowly but steadily during the years in Chicago.

From her experience in abstract ex­pressionist oil painting, Hung Hsien was given a double perspective (Chinese his­torical and American contemporary) on her own brush tradition. She can now assess and compare both techniques, both mediums for expression, both lan­guages. Perhaps it was here that she found the common ground: the use of her traditional tool, the 6,000-year-old Chinese brush, applied like an oil painting brush in fine, parallel strokes to form a little cluster resembling the mark of a single oil-brush stroke. Her first truly original works emerged in the early '60s (such as White Clouds, 1960, done in ink and colors on paper) and revealed the mental processes of an artist grappling with Eastern and Western languages.

White Clouds is conceived as a series of brushwork clusters ranged in horizon­tal strata. In its very horizontality, the work suggests Western writing, musical notation, arithmetic ... differing from the vertical formation of Chinese writing or notation. In traditional Chinese painting (as in Prince Pu's), verticality is always stressed in the formal elements whether the format is a vertical hanging scroll, screen, or album leaf, or whether it is a fan or a horizontal handscroll.

In White Clouds, representation, obligatory in traditional Chinese painting, is entirely eschewed. Purely abstract forms are generated by linear motion across the page. But the essential Chineseness of Chinese painting is manifest: in­ stead of still, completed forms, Chinese visual art is often about linear motion in space-now continuous, now interrupted; now loud, now soft; now straight, now curved; now fast, now slow. Like calligraphy, it is very much an imprint of energy moving in linear motion across space, through time, undergoing myriad internal and external transformations in its course.

In White Clouds we can "read" Hung Hsien's painting and retrace her steps, replaying her dance from the top left (as in a letter) to the bottom right (where she signs her name) -and incongruously, still in the traditional Chinese fashion: in vertical alignment with the seal to the left (traditionally meant to be at the outermost edge) to close the painting. Read­ing the work, it is clear she is discovering the potentials of working in the abstract manner. All the potential inherent in traditional Chinese brushwork, both in painting and in calligraphy, is now exploited for all it is worth, without recourse to images of nature for form. In the background are the tiny, pale brush-clusters. (These are done afterward, su­perimposed over the darker, more dyna­mic strokes. On Chinese paper all strokes first laid on paper appear to be on top of those painted later.)

While the dynamics of the strokes­—from soft to loud, from wet to dry, from light to dark, from slow to fast, etc.­—evoke the essence of Chinese brush art, their forms do not recall the Chinese painting of the last millennium —W's and M's, loose and tight spirals and zigzags, and staccato attacks in pure black. They remind one more of contemporary graffiti, random pencil or brush attacks such as those of Mark Tobey and other Western painters intrigued with Oriental art, and less like such traces from the dim past as the formalized meanders and spirals found on ancient bronze vessels.

Light brush-clusters, the fine line, the splayed-brush line called fei-pai (flying sash); large, bold sweeps of curvilinear meander; the dark, unctuous, energetic blobs and splates; grey-toned wet washes which in contrast seem to sweep or sigh; spinning, blushing, sweep­ing ovals which startle one like explosive laughter, contained within gentle, femi­nine enclosures of soft brushstrokes—they are all here. But still as elements, not yet a coherent whole.

After this early period she became more selective and demanding, limiting her ingredients, creating works of in­ creasing coherence. In 1966 she produced a painting which is more fully representa­tional than most others, of her works to date. Waterfall displays two main brush­-work techniques: broad vertical strokes in dry, dark ink, and wet greyish accents. Here the subject, water, is thunderously manifest in the reserved, white sheet. Hung has by now mastered the technique of imbuing strong, positive values via "negative" (unpainted) space. Like White Clouds, the picture is crowded, but the overall rhythms are more unified, the total dynamism more coherent.

Masterful manipulation of blank spaces becomes a hallmark of her mature style. In Emerald Isles, 1970, less than half the paper is touched with ink or colors. This painting eschews the long strokes seen in Waterfall, concentrating on soft, pudgy, wet, rounded blobs in soft hues which, grouped together, form an organic super-pattern of rounded forms in organic interrelationships. Green, grey, and black blobs interact in remarkable harmony with the larger white blobs formed of negative space.

It is an abstract painting, yet in­ formed with the same living, cohesive quality often found in Chinese landscape painting. Hung's skills in modeling and her control of spatial recession have enabled her to create a totally imaginary set of formal relationships which, nevertheless, conform to natural order. This is why viewers easily perceive the "emerald isles" of the title—Yet Hung did not start out with a mental image of islands and water! Such is her grasp of representational depiction (firmly grounded under Fu's tutelage), that no matter how abstract, how devoid of representational images her works, they are ever perceived as an aspect of landscape painting, something about nature in­formed with the essence of nature.

When starting a new painting, Hung Hsien's approach to the blank paper is intuitive and relaxed, never conceptual. It is always, she says, joyful. She has singular courage in abandoning all a priori concepts and notions of what the next painting "should" be. When she takes a piece of paper, she has deter­mined what size and shape she wants the painting to be. She sees some vague image which has been forming in her mind for some days. Often, after she paints for a while, she is startled at what she has done. The result is often quite different from what she had imagined at first. And the sight of such unexpected results usually fills her with amazement and pleasure. That is, her first impression of what the painting will look like changes and takes form when she is actually working at it; the little occurren­ces-the painting so far or the technical process itself-often lead her on, inspire her, suggest the next move. In the end, the sum total emerges as if self-born, surprising its creator.

In works like Ocean Rocks, 1970, the ingredients have increased. But handling of forms and composition is the same as in Emerald Isles. With some additional diagonal straight strokes, there is a sense of rushing energy converging onto the forms, bringing them together by a moving force. Works of the '70s become bold, individualist, daringly sensuous.

In 1971 she created a five-panel screen, Heaven and Earth. The format follows an ancient Chinese conception wherein huge landscapes designed to cover large wall areas are constructed via multiple parallel scrolls, ranging from two to twelve or even twenty hanging panels. The artist creates each such panel as an independent unit which can hang alone, as well as a viable, meaningful part of the whole, in case the owner wishes to display a portion of the land­scape, perhaps in a smaller entrance hall. Hung Hsien is a past master at this sort of planning, and Heaven and Earth astounds both in toto and in individual panels.

With some of the smaller elements now discarded-the dots and small circles- Hung's paintings of the '70s appear to some observers dryer, less atmospher­ic, more abstract. This is directly due to the removal of the more familiar ele­ments associated with landscape painting. In formal relationships, however, Hung Hsien did not depart radically from her course. Mossy Rocks of 1972 reduces the brush techniques to a minimum, con­centrating on fine, long, curving enveloping lines and expertly-placed explosions of dark, wet ink blobs (which form recessive spaces in her works). Form-within-form suggests fetal images, form­ confronting-form, conflict-a departure from more familiar concerns. In 1973 Hung Hsien moves another step in working with an entirely filled space. Con­voluting forms inter-react, inter­ penetrate in soft colors applied in flat layers. With each new work, a slightly different set of technical limitations provides new challenges.

In 1974 she followed her husband to Hornby Island, off Vancouver Island in British Columbia, western Canada, where he designed and supervised the building of a home for her students, Steven and Laura Weiss. Leaving Chica­go and her suburban home in Evanston for the primitive wilderness of the north­west coast was to open up new vistas for Hung. While T.C. Chang and the Weiss's were working on designs and col­lecting beached logs, Hung Hsien quietly slipped away to deserted beaches to marvel at collections of water-marked rocks and sun-bleached tree stumps. She was enchanted by this new world of fantasy images-echoes of the brushwork and motions of her own paintings. It was as if she had at last discovered her alter ego in this solitary wilderness. She moved into a little log cabin and took up the life of a hermit, living and looking on the beach, weeks at a time. She would carry an accordion-folded Chinese painting album, brush, ink, and some mineral colors along with her drinking water, and spend the day at the beach.

Her Hornby albums are full of sketches from nature, half realistic, half self-expressive-an ideal combination to which ancient Chinese literati painters as­pired but few attained. Each objective form revealed an undreamt subjective imagery and an avenue to a particular type of brushwork. Her joy in this discov­ery can hardly be described.

Coming together here were all the artistic ingredients most cherished by her teachers' teachers for centuries past. But the lack of artistic freedom in those olden days had prevented them from ex­ploiting the potentials of such an environ­ment. Some Ming masters like Shen Chou (1427-1509) and Wen Cheng-ming (1470-1559) worked out their brush ideals in paintings of hoary, gnarled junipers. Now, such an opportunity provided her with delicious; blissful indulgence in self-expression. On Hornby Island, Hung Hsien discovered another dimen­sion of perception.

When I sketched from nature as a stu­dent, like my (1955) paintings of orchids and narcissi, I saw them merely as orchids or narcissi, and painted them that way. At that time, my painting was confined to particular styles, particular modes of representation-that is, the fine-outline and color-fill academic mode or the boneless expressive mode. When I painted in the traditional way, I worked the image one stroke at a time, and nothing special came out because I was tied up with my subject. Although I was observant and careful, I saw nothing more than their ostensible, immediate forms. Now (15 years later) I see many things in each form. On Hornby Island, as I sat on the beach for hours and stared at the rocks and woods, I saw differently. I perceived in them various types of brushwork and also various types of other forms: old men's faces, animals, human forms. Then I painted what I saw after hours of looking-the sum total of the various forms a particular thing revealed. What came out was not only a rock or a tree, but a live fusion of the rock's or tree's multiple images, combined with my brushwork.

By 1976, Hung Hsien had gone through another cycle. In her solitary search on the beach, she had learned to see a meta-pattern in things, an organic dynamism to silent rocks and dead trees. Sketching from nature, she had rediscovered, in objective reality, that organic in­terrelationship of formal elements which had been subjectively intuited in the soli­tude of her studio when she first created her series of abstract paintings ten years previously.

Now she was to combine this new perception, subjectively intuited and objectively verified, into bold, new crea­tions which virtually lift off onto another plane. In Loneliness (1976) and another set of Heaven and Earth (1982) in three panels, she creates pure energy forces­—free of corporeality- in dynamic interaction. Leaving much of the space blank, Hung wields a confident and masterful brush charged only with ink. In the '60s Hung had been concerned with organic interrelationships of (solid) forms, in their mutual scale, grouping, spacing, distance, and perspective. In the '70s, the forms grow in size and dynamic momentum and range along the painting surface in a more frontal manner. In the late '70s and early '80s, after the experi­ence with natural forms on the beaches of Hornby Island, Hung Hsien has become absorbed by the dynamic surge of pure energy. In a way, her current painting works out meta-patterns, patterns of patterns, where disembodied forces of energy interact—organically, dynamically, like the invisible forces of the universe.