Taiwan Today

This Friend of Picasso Roams the World To Perfect a Style Combining East, West

It is generally conceded in China that painter Chang Dai-Chien, inspired by the creativeness of the great masters of Tang and Sung, has gone on to create an original, dis­tinctive style of his own. He is one of the world’s great artists of today and probably of all time. Exhibitions in Europe, America and Asia have won him wide critical and popular acclaim in recent years. New works still represent the Oriental style but also nar­row the artistic gulf between East and West. More than any other artist, he has modified the traditions of Chinese painting and brought something new into art.

Chang Dai-Chien owes much of his success to the combination of his talent with in­dustry and worldwide travel. He was a gifted child. He received his early education at home, and could recite a passage from the Chinese classics after reading it only once. He learned quickly and well. When still a child, he was painting flowers and landscapes, taught by his mother, herself a noted painter. Sometimes he composed poems on his pic­tures. In his youth, he copied the works of Shih Tao, a noted creative painter of the Ching dynasty, so perfectly that experts had difficulty distinguishing it from the original.

Once his mind was set on something, he worked patiently and persistently to achieve his goal. In early youth, he was sent by his parents to study drawing and the art of textile dyeing in Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan. He was so fascinated by the Tang frescoes in Kyoto that he could hardly tear himself away. Twenty years later, he spent two and a half years in the caves of Tunhuang, in what is now Kansu province, studying the world-renowned frescoes there.

Dai-Chien has always remembered his teachers’ counsel to travel widely in order to “build a mental storehouse of landscapes.” No other Chinese artist, ancient or modern, has traveled so extensively. Despite the many travel hazards in times of political chaos, he set out to visit all the famous mountains of China. He went twice to the Hua Shan in Shensi and three times to the Huang Shan in Anhwei, where his favorite painter, Shih Tao, had lived. He saw the Tai Shan in Shantung, the Heng Shan in Hunan, and the Tientai Shan in southern Chekiang. In recent years, he has roamed the world. After six months on his farm in Sao Paulo, Brazil, he spends the next half year in travel. He knows most of the magnificent mountains and rivers of South America, Western Europe, and Southeast Asia. He also loves flowers. Last June he spent a week in Taipei, then went on to Tokyo and Paris to view the flora before returning to Sao Paulo for the cherry blossoms. He calls this his “flower route.”

Master of Styles

His career has had three stages. During the period from his youth to the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, his paintings were mostly inspired by Shih Tao and the great masters of Tang and Sung. Shih Tao was a descendant of Ming royalty. When the house of Ming collapsed, he refused to serve under an alien regime and devoted himself to art. At the time, one school of painting adhered to the conventions, while another was in revolt, seeking new forms. Shih Tao was an innovator, a great creative genius with a distinctive style.

When young Dai-Chien went to Shanghai for the “new education” in the early 1910s, he frequented galleries where he could study both ancient and contemporary paintings. He became enthusiastic about the paintings of the “Eight Eccentric Masters of Yang­-chow” and especially those of Shih Tao. A few years later, he was copying Shih Tao’s works so well that Pu Ju, a celebrated Chinese painter who died in 1963, said Dai-Chien's paintings excelled those of the earlier master.

But Dai-Chien did not stop at mastering Shih Tao’s style. He imitated all the great painters of Tang, Sung, Yuan, and Ming. He absorbed the simplicity and seren­ity of the Tang masters, the style and form of the Sung painters, and the techniques and imagination of the Yuan and Ming artists. He used his talent to nourish and enrich unbroken tradition of more than 1,000 years of Chinese art. His works from this period include landscapes, human figures, flowers, birds, and animals, many of them acknow­ledged masterpieces:

Study of Caves

In his second period, he devoted himself to the study of the frescoes in the caves of Tunhuang. In medieval China, Tunhuang was the last stopping place in Central Asia on the way to China, or the last outpost of China on the caravan route to India and Persia. The nearly 500 Caves of the Thousand Buddhas honeycomb a cliffside in irregular tiers. Really cave-monasteries, they contain a fantastic treasure of Buddhist art in the form of murals, sculptures, pictures on silk and linen and paper, blocks and woodcuts. The time represented is nearly a thousand years, the first cave-monastery having been built in 366 A.D. during the reign of Emperor Tai Ho of the Eastern Tsin dynasty. The dry desert air has perfectly preserved the entire collection.

After the death of Dai-Chien’s elder brother, Shan-tze, a celebrated painter of animals, in the summer of 1941, he decided to visit the caves. In his two and a half years of study, he made more than 200 scaled, color copies of the frescoes.

Dai-Chien was the first artist to study and reproduce these medieval masterpieces, which represent religious painting in China at the height of Buddhism. His work at Tunhuang already is ranked among the truly great achievements of Chinese art.

The Tunhuang paintings were shown in the Szechwan capital of Chengtu and in New Delhi, Tokyo, and Paris, introducing the frescoes and culture of the Tang period to tens of thousands of art lovers. Dai-Chien’s detailed study of these religious paintings has given him unique authority as art historian and critic, and has also enriched his own style. His paintings during this period were strongly influenced by the frescoes. His style become more lofty and powerful.

In 1950, the Indian Arts and Crafts Society asked him to make a comparative study of the frescoes of Tunhuang and those of Ajanta. His impartial, scholarly report won him new friends and admirers.

After the end of World War II, he extended his travels to the Americas and Eu­rope. Contacts with Western artists brought another change in his style. In his recent work, he has explored new subjects and techniques. His paintings seem more personal.

European Influence

During this latest period, he has used the splashed-ink method with outstanding success. Splashed-ink technique goes back to Sung artists, but Dai-Chien’s approach is freer and more powerful. His ink-monochrome lotus, his puissant landscapes, and his dram­atic treatments of man in nature are fresh in conception and brilliant in execution. These works have no real parallels in Western painting and few in Chinese. Nevertheless, they satisfy both Chinese aesthetic criteria, in which the painting reflects the nature of the man who created it, and Western, in which the work of art must be meaningful in itself. Thus he is building a bridge between the art of East and West.

His meeting with Pablo Picasso in southern France in the summer of 1956 was a significant event in the annals of art. These two have much in common. Both conceal a deep seriousness of purpose beneath an outward waywardness. Both display a virtuoso command of a dazzling range of styles as they try to sum up all that preceded them. Both are original and creative, yet preserve, more than many of their contemporaries, the full variety and richness of Chinese and European traditions. It is not surprising that they respect each other as men and artists.

Probably Dai-Chien has seen and owned more great Chinese paintings than any of his contemporaries. He started early to collect his favorites and his collection includes many periods. He has often sold his own work in order to enlarge his collection. The following anecdote may illustrate his love for these paintings. Shortly after World War II, he decided to buy a house in Peiping. But on the eve of the transaction, an art dealer show­ed him Tung Yuan’s “Twilight on the Bank of the Lake.” He bought the painting instead of the house. “I have been looking for this picture for 20 years,” he said.

Dai-Chien was born to a distinguished family at Neikiang in Szechwan province in 1899. His parents named him Yuan. Dai­-Chien is his pen-name. Despite his many years overseas, his way of life remains Chinese. He wears a Chinese robe and a long gray beard. His voice is clear and commanding. He has repeatedly turned down Communist invitations to visit the mainland because there is no freedom of art there.

In recent years, he has held a number of one-man exhibitions in Europe, the Ameri­cas, and Asia. In 1958, he was awarded a gold medal by the International Council of Fine Arts in New York. As painter and as a cultural catalyst of Orient and Occident, he is a nonpareil of his time.