Taiwan Today

The industrial revolution wrought many changes in the textile sector. One was the growing use of synthetic dyes, as they could be produced economically in large quantities to meet the needs of commercial textile production. For most people, that meant the use of natural dyes made from common, locally available plants was no longer relevant and their role in daily life faded away. Chen Ching-lin (陳景林) and his wife Ma Yu-hsiu (馬毓秀), however, are determined to bring back the traditional craft. “Synthetic dyes lack the vibrancy of the colors nature has to offer,” Chen says. “Using natural dyes is a miraculous way of bringing the colors of nature into everyday life.”

Chen was born to a working-class family in 1956, became interested in art when he was a little boy and made up his mind to become an artist when he was a junior high school student. In the beginning, that ambition was not encouraged by his parents, who believed that being an artist was not a profession that could put food on the table. After repeated discussions with his father, however, Chen was finally allowed to give the career a try. He majored in Western painting at National Taiwan Normal University’s (NTNU) Department of Fine Arts, where many of the country’s art teachers have earned their degrees. “Becoming an art teacher was probably a safe career choice,” Chen says. “But in my heart, I was certain that I wanted to be an artist instead of an art teacher.”

During his last two university years, Chen had his first “encounter” with fiber art via several foreign art magazines when he was moonlighting as an art editor for a local publishing house. He was fascinated by the dyeing techniques and the colors provided by nature, but it was not until he graduated and succumbed to being an art teacher at Fu-Hsin Trade and Arts School in New Taipei City that he had his first hands-on experience with fiber arts. Chen recalls that at Fu-Hsin, the competition between teachers was strong. “I was teaching what every other art teacher was teaching,” he says. “So I started thinking of teaching something different to make it more interesting for my students.” Fiber art, which had been neglected in Taiwan, came to Chen’s mind and he took a course in it offered by the National Taiwan Craft Research and Development Institute in Nantou County, central Taiwan. The three-week course focused mostly on basic weaving techniques, but it was fascinating enough to attract Chen and his new wife Ma, who also majored in Western painting at NTNU, to dig deeper into the art. In 1985, that desire led them to become students of master fiber artist Lo Jing-wei (婁經緯). Not long after, Chen quit his job at Fu-Hsin and with Lo’s help, became the head of the Department of Arts and Crafts at Nanshan High School, which is also located in New Taipei City.

During his three years at Nanshan, Chen helped establish a systematic program for students to learn weaving and dyeing techniques. But the longer he taught, the more he found that there was still so much about fiber that he did not know. “Many of the weaving techniques and knowledge of natural pigments were lost,” he says. “As a teacher, I began to realize that there was still a lot of basic research to do if I were to go any further in fiber art.” He quit the teaching job and in the early 1990s set up the Fiber Art Workshop, which was renamed Tennii Taiwan Natural-Dyeing Studio in 2003, to experiment with weaving and dyeing techniques as well as do field studies on the suitability of Taiwan’s plants for pigment production.

Initially, Chen had planned to research the weaving and dyeing techniques of Taiwan’s indigenous peoples. He explains that historically, the Chinese people faced great restrictions on the colors of clothes they could wear. In imperial China, ordinary people wore mostly blue, black and white, or red for special occasions, while certain colors such as yellow and purple could only be worn by members of the royal family. But indigenous peoples had not been subject to such restrictions, as they lived mostly in remote areas that were out of the government’s reach. Chen was disappointed, however, when he realized that most of the traditions of natural dyeing had disappeared among Taiwan’s indigenous tribes.

Having little luck at home, Chen decided to refocus his research on ethnic minorities in mainland China’s southwestern provinces. At first, he was doing all the field work by himself. He soon found that it was too much for one person to handle, so Ma resigned from her job and joined her husband. Each year from 1989 to 1999, the couple spent several months documenting the weaving and dyeing techniques as well as traditional costumes of minority groups there. “It was physically exhausting, but we could easily ignore that since we were doing something we really liked,” Ma says. “Compared with indigenous peoples in Taiwan, people from these minorities [in southwestern mainland China] have been living in a much more isolated environment,” Chen says. “Maybe that’s why they’ve managed to preserve most of their fabric-related heritage.”

Chop, Boil, Color

Although the couple spent most of the 1990s doing field studies, Chen managed to create several woven pieces that won prizes at major awards including the Folk Crafts Awards, which became the National Crafts Awards in 2000. With his reputation established, Chen received commissions to start more fiber art-related research projects, including one by the Taichung County Cultural Center on Taiwan’s native plants and their use as dyes. In the three years following 1998, the couple tested hundreds, if not thousands, of plants for the project. Ma admits that the research process was tough and time consuming, as the couple had to collect the plants in the wild, chop them, boil them, sometimes for hours, observe how the colors developed, dye fabric samples and record the results. Moreover, the various plant parts hold different tinctorial properties, and there are even more possibilities if a piece of fabric is dyed several times in different colors.

Before the project ended, the couple managed to develop dyeing “recipes” using more than 120 species of commonly seen local plants. The results of their research were published as The Essence of Nature—An Encyclopedia on Natural Dyeing in Taiwan in 2003 and a sequel was released the following year. The books detail the habitats of plants used for dyeing, their properties and use, means of collection and dyeing methods. Chen notes that he and Ma actually collected and tested a lot more plant species, but only included the most commonly available ones in the books. “Plant dyeing used to be a common household craft and that’s what we want it to be in the future,” he says. “There’s no point including some sort of plant that can only be found on the top of Jade Mountain, no matter how beautiful a color it dyes.” But Chen also warns that even with the books, dyeing is still an “unpredictable” craft that needs a lot of hands-on experience to master, as plant material can vary depending on factors such as growing conditions and whether it is used fresh or dried.

After gaining knowledge and experience, Chen and Ma moved on to the next stage—promoting the craft. Chen explains that basic dyeing techniques are not complicated, involving twisting or tying the cloth, or covering parts of it with wax so that the fabric resists or absorbs different amounts of color. The formula for the pigments and how various fibers respond to the pigments, which are the difficult parts of dyeing, have already been worked out by Chen and Ma. “We spent a long time doing the basic research so that others don’t have to go through all that,” Chen says. “We wanted to make it easy for everyone to start and see some results so that there is a better chance that people will grow to like it.”

The couple began to hold workshops regularly at their studio and visited schools and civic organizations to offer courses, lectures and demonstrations in which step-by-step explanations of all the techniques were offered to guide trainees through the various stages of each process. In the meantime, Tennii also started to develop products such as clothing, notebook covers, lampshades and other accessories that were colored with plant dyes. A series of government-initiated community empowerment projects also reminded residents in a number of villages of their area’s old craft of dyeing fabric, and such local groups sought out the couple in order to relearn the techniques.

Return of the Old Ways

Sanxia Township in New Taipei City was one of these communities. Indigo dyeing was once a prosperous industry in Sanxia, thanks to the area’s plentiful Goldfussia formosanus—one of the plants commonly used for indigo dyeing in Taiwan. The natural dye had been replaced by synthetic dyes for about seven decades, but a local history and culture workshop under Chen’s guidance started the recovery of the craft in 1999. Members of the Sanxia workshop, after picking up the techniques from Chen, began to promote the craft in local grade schools and among townspeople. In the summer of 2002, Chen and Ma helped organize the first Sanxia Indigo Dyeing Festival. Featuring a series of activities including an introduction to some of the plants used for dyes, dyeing fabric along a creek in the town, guided tours, fashion shows of naturally dyed clothing and other demonstrations, the festival is now an event that helps boost tourism to the region every summer.

In fact, the promotion of natural dyeing methods has turned out to be much smoother than Chen and Ma expected. Chen explains that in addition to benefitting from the government’s various community development projects, demand for products that use natural dyes has grown as health and environmental issues have risen to prominence in the past decade. Teaching, researching and promoting the use of natural dyes left little time for Chen to realize his dream of becoming an artist, however. It was not until about five years ago, when the plant-dye project was mostly on track, that he started to spend more time on creating artworks.

Chen focuses his subject matter on local scenery. Although trained in Western painting, Chen has produced many works that remind viewers of the “multi-angle” technique, in which the subject is seen from different angles, that is commonly used in Chinese ink painting. Up to now, Chen has used only indigo dye for his artworks, explaining that it is one of the most colorfast of the natural pigments. In the future, he also plans to use a brown pigment extracted from persimmon and a dark-red pigment from shulang yam, which was a common plant-derived dye among the island’s indigenous peoples. “For me, these are the colors that really represent Taiwan because they are all from common, locally available plants,” he says.

In 2008, however, Chen’s artistic career was interrupted by another project. He moved Tennii from Taipei to Nantou County and is in the process of building a fiber art visitor park there. The park will have showrooms for the couple’s works, a studio for production and demonstration of the craft, a space where visitors can try out weaving or dyeing and a garden full of plants that can be used to produce natural dyes.

Chen estimates that it will take another five years to complete the park. That means he will have to wait for a while longer to become a full-time artist. Or perhaps it does not matter so much now, as he has already lived much of his life in the presence of the beautiful colors nature has to offer.

Write to Jim Hwang at cyhuang03@mofa.gov.tw