Painter Wang Lan's watercolors are bursts of dreamlike charm; novelist Wang Lan's pen sets free an exuberance of poetic affection. Where his poetry and graphic dreams interlace, a wonder-fantasy of color is born that is especially remarkable in his depictions of Chinese opera scenes.
Propelled by color impulses formed in waking dreams, his depictions leap from his introspective impressions of the opera stage to embrace the delightfully fantastic. Wherever his brush has traveled, the paper dances with a diffuse brilliance, a buoyant lyricism, and most of all, re-creates the haunting glory of retained childhood. Wang surely conveys, without reservation, the graceful, regal, dazzling atmosphere that the Chinese opera particularly seeks to project.
Wang is the first to portray Chinese opera using a combination of Western aquarelle color and Chinese brushwork. He is driven to depict, in polychrome profundity, the frozen impact of drama as it is released in the stylized movements of Peking opera performers.
In a Wang portrayal—blazing in a dream-drama of retrospections, burdened by no particular time and space minute and complicated details exist no more. Committed to the painting surface are only suggestive shapes, splashes of his beautiful, flowerlike colors-dexterous expressions of both wit and naivete in which the manipulated characteristics of watercolors are fully dedicated to emotional impact.
Wang Lan was born in 1922 in Tien-tsin, a city on the China mainland. His father, Wang Chu-ming, was a prestigious textile tycoon. The family's financial situation was excellent, and they all lived a secure and comfortable life. Thus, Wang had a carefree and happy childhood.
Wang, as a boy, thought of being an enterpreneur like his father, or a pilot, or an opera performer...being a writer and painter was not included in his dreams.
Young Wang did particularly dream of being a Peking opera performer, especially since all the members of his family were opera fans. His father imitated performers of the school of Yu Shu-yien. His brothers followed the school of Tang Fu-ying. His sisters sang Kun melodies and favored heroine roles. Actually, at the age of seven, together with his sister, Wang performed on a stage patronized by his father, the affluent textile tycoon.
Since he was the youngest, the family favorite, Wang was showered with a complete set of stage paraphernalia, including headdresses, panache, usurped beard, pennants, dusters, swords, boots, and beautifully embroidered robes. Almost every day he would appear at the entrance of the neighbor hood lane in a solo dress-rehearsal. Applause from the neighbors enhanced his boyhood dream of becoming an outstanding opera performer.
The children of Peking knew how to appreciate the beauty and charms of Peking opera. To them, it represented all of the wonderful aspirations of childhood, and for Wang Lan, it was not different. His watercolors project not only performers in actions and gestures, but internal feelings of home in terms of remembered childhood delight. Of course, it may also be said that Peking opera most intensely represents China-Chinese costumes, Chinese music, Chinese language and stories, Chinese thought and Chinese traditions. So, to paint the opera is to paint China and Chinese culture. It is also to paint what only China has.
When Wang was graduated from primary school, he asked his parents to send him to a Peking opera school, but was refused in stern tones. He then knelt down in an obeisance to entreat them, thinking they would find the gesture appealing. However, life on stage was looked down on in those days; he shocked his parents and was physically disciplined, shattering his fancy dream and his emotions. Nevertheless, his father quickly recovered and comforted him, saying, "Why think about opera performances as a life-time profession? You can always be a great Peking opera fan; you can be an amateur performer."
Gradually, Wang was to replace his opera love affair with a passion for painting. Eventually, whenever he went to an opera, he would bring along his paints and make brush sketches of the figures on stage. He was particularly determined to capture the charm of each movement-freezing sweeps, nourishes, declamations, whirling, tumbling, stately striding, all at their most auspicious moments. After concentrating on paintings of opera figures for a period of time, Wang shifted to attempts at landscapes. When his sketchbooks were filled, he would paint on walls, doors, even floors.
Wang's father did not play the role of spoiler for his son's newest interest. Instead, he urged him on. He bought paper, brushes, pigments, and crayons in large quantities and encouraged his son to paint to his heart's content. The elder Wang guided his son: "If you really want to be a painter, then, be the best."
Thus Wang, at 12, became a student of Master Lee Chieh-ke of Tientsin, following a solemn ceremony. And until his graduation from middle school, his painting class was never interrupted. He lived a free and leisurely life as a student painter; carrying with him a complete set of painting supplies, he painted almost every corner of Tientsin. During the school holidays, his parents would take him to Peking. The majestic gates of the city wall, the fabulously beautiful decorative archways, the green-roofed, carmine-wailed Peking Palace, the clear as-a-mirror Taiyieh Pond and green-rippled Chungnan Sea, the flowery, willow-tree-shaded Yiho Gardens ... all were devoured by his eyes, and his brush.
Then, in the first battles of the eight-year War of Resistance against Japan, the family's splendid residence was reduced to rubble. All of Wang's treasures, his watercolors and oils, were ashes.
Tientsin was lost. Like waking from a dream, the world had changed completely. The young artist did not suppress his feelings of pain and resentment but joined the Chinese guerrilla band on Taihang Mountain. Time had acted as a giant, if un-parental palm that shocked him out of the "greenhouse." The outside tempest shaped the tender seedling into a strong and vigorous tree.
In Tientsin, Wang was a member of the Luchu Painting Association, though the members no longer dedicated their time to painting. It was not until the end of the war that the citizens of the city discovered that the serene painting association was a cover for an anti-Japanese underground. Wang later entered Hueiwen High School in Peking, where he continued to work for the Chinese war effort, recruiting students for various patriotic activities.
Though young, Wang, risked his life in a sea of danger. The war years entered his experience, matured his personality, and provided seething inspiration for painting and writing. "I learned that painting could be accomplished without a brush—thousands of thousands of Chinese were painting the portrait of their country with their sweat, mental efforts, blood, and lives—it was a great picture, a perspective of an independent, modern China," Wang asserted.
At the age of 18, Wang started to write down what he had experienced, and began producing both novels and short stories. An Eternal Star, his first novel, published two years later, won first place in the National Creative Writing Awards. Encouraged by his immediate success, Wang wrote prolifically, next publishing a long narrative poem as well as several additional novels. Painting was temporarily cast aside.
When the Communists took over the mainland in 1949, Wang left for Taiwan, where he continued his writing career. His 1958 war epic Blue and Black, which made him one of the best known writers in Taiwan, was finished beside his wife's sewing machine. Screen and stage adaptations have since been acclaimed both at home and abroad. Following, Wang published more than ten novels.
In 1959, his long-sleeping passion for paints suddenly erupted; at last he had found the peace he needed to return to this early love. When he picked up his brushes again, it was with great intensity and unrelenting industry. Starting over, he painted every day until late at night.
For the last 20 years, Peking opera characters have been the central theme of his paintings, a reflection of cherished memories. The painter portrays them with impressionistic adeptness, so that the effect of facial expression and posture is one with the stylized (but frozen) movement, the symbolic gesture, dance attitude, and flashing costume amidst a real (if unhearable) cacophony.
Although many of his readers express their disappointment over Wang's abandonment of writing, he responds that writing was merely a pastime—that the career he has been pursuing with life-long devotion is, in fact, painting.
Fortunately, Wang's departure from writing has not meant a discontinuation of his creativity. Actually, "his itch for verbal expression gave way to the desire to interpret the world in terms of visual imagination. He only stepped down from the pedestal of a popular novelist to roam a realm of which he was at first not too certain," comments Prof. Yu Kwang-chung, a leading contemporary poet and art critic.
The walls of Wang's home are now covered with opera portrayals. Whenever visitors discuss Chinese opera with him, his eyes glisten, and opera stories issue forth in an endless flow. Wang not only loves to watch, hear, and talk about Peking opera, but to sing it, for both himself and his friends.
When he was a little boy, he would paint while standing in front of the stage, watching attentively every movement of a subject performer. Now his opera impressions are extracted from his memory, a repository of all the roles in all the performances he ever saw. When we view one of Wang's opera watercolors, we understand that it expresses only one instant of the years of affection for the opera stage. Through our own mental focus on that instant, it is easy to intuitively comprehend the spirit of his work.
Lin Yu-tang, the late, internationally known Chinese scholar and writer, commented: "Throughout Wang Lan's work, the artist reveals two characteristics, which are Chinese in basis, given a modern form. The first is the art of sublimation, which makes important use of 'what is not there.' Empty space, usually misty and colored skillfully, is probably the most striking feature of his paintings. Second, sharp or blurred lines, purposely blunt and spontaneous, sketch easily and naturally certain aspects in the foreground."
Wang's handling of watercolor "whites" can be considered matchless. He relies on suggestion rather than minute detail to convey traditional theatrical forms. His "empty space" is not confined only to sky and water, as in traditional Chinese paintings. It appears ubiquitously.
On this aspect of abstract space, Wang is inspired by traditional Chinese opera technique. On an almost empty stage, abstract space is often multi-level. His watercolor opera performers express this effect. Although they stand on the plane surface of the same stage, his figures often appear to be standing upon different levels. Often, Wang only shows the upper part of a figure, concentrating the imagination.
Wang's art works are among such distinguished portfolios as the David Rockefeller Collection and the permanent collection of the National Historical Museum of the Republic of China.
Recently, he staged an exhibition at the Spring Gallery in Taipei where the vast majority of 30 displayed works dealt with Peking opera characters. Though the opera Jade Bracelet is, perhaps, Wang Lan's favorite source, and though Sun Yu-chiao, heroine of Jade Bracelet, has been often featured in joint exhibitions by Wang with other artists, this time, he did not paint her. He was impelled to bring more opera figures before the public.
Wang, often enough, pays special attention to characters with no important position in a play. Portraying a scene from Tso Kong (Master Yang and the Princess), he makes the maid the center of his picture screen; the princess is seen indistinctly behind the maid. In his Susan and Her Foster Father, he did not include the female lead. Instead, he shows Susan's foster father and a low-ranking official, frothing at the mouth and glaring with rage.
In two broadsheets, Lienhuantao and Pachamiao, there is an aura of a bustling crowd, bespeaking a departure in his painting style.
In his Peng Pei (The Tragedy at the Li Ling Monument), a few simple lines vividly depict the complicated facial expressions of General Yang Chi-yeh and his four old soldiers during their last hours. Besieged at a desolate wayside shrine, they had no provisions for themselves or fodder for the horses: "We are forced to kill our horses for food and to tear up our tents and wrap the cloth around our bodies for protection against the piercing desert winds. Where are the reinforcements?"
His depiction of Chang Fei, a general of the state of Shu during the Three Kingdoms period, almost engenders Chang's earsplitting roar: "Ah! Ya! Ya!"
In the painting Ta Huang Kai, Wang gives special coverage to Huang Kai, depicting Chou Yu as worried and uneasy as he steals a glance at Chuko Liang (181-234 A.D., the wise prime minister of the Kingdom of Shu during the Three Kingdoms period). Chuko, turning his head to the other side and shaking his famed feather fan, shows no feeling or emotion; he knows the trick they are playing. It is true that, in Wang Lan's paintings, stories always exist.
The resounding voices of gong and drum, the articulated shriek of the two-stringed fiddle, the plaintive song of a female lead ... the elements of an opera come stealthily into his mind. He remembers that cavalier, that official, that painted face, their movements, their gestures. He captures an instant and pins it down with "colored water." The stage lingers in memories ever-live from childhood; the curtain never falls....