Taiwan Today

“On the crowded streets of this bustling emporium of [Sichuan] one sees many things made of bamboo. Indeed, in this Province a man can sit in a bamboo house under a bamboo roof, on a bamboo chair at a bamboo table, with his feet resting on a bamboo footstool, with a bamboo hat on his head and bamboo sandals on his feet. He can at the same time hold in one hand a bamboo bowl, in the other bamboo chopsticks and eat bamboo sprouts. ... He might then take a walk over a bamboo suspension bridge, drink water out of a bamboo ladle, and scrape himself with a bamboo sweat scraper,” observes American missionary and explorer William Edgar Geil (1865–1925) in “The Ubiquitous Bamboo,” a section of Chapter VII from his 1904 book A Yankee on the Yangtze. Despite its practical applications in almost every facet of daily life, however, bamboo is not a material that is widely used by artists. “It’s such a common material that people don’t seem to associate it with art,” says Yeh Chi-hsiang (葉基祥), one of the few individuals involved in the little-practiced art of bamboo carving.

Yeh was born in 1968 in the Nantou County township of Zhushan, which means “bamboo mountain” in Chinese. The small urban township in central Taiwan is so-named because of the large swath of bamboo forest in the region, which gave rise to a huge bamboo industry in the mid-1930s. By the time Yeh was born, people there had been growing and processing bamboo, as well as making bamboo products that were mostly exported to Japan, for a long time. Yeh’s grandfather ran a bamboo processing factory, and Yeh as well as other members of the family had to pitch in whenever there was time. “The Zhushan area was a self-sufficient industrial cluster replete with bamboo farmers and trading companies, as well as every other aspect of the bamboo business,” Yeh says. “We manufactured everything bamboo, from furniture to chopsticks.”

Taiwan’s bamboo industry reached its peak in the 1960s and 1970s, but was in decline by the mid-1980s due to the popularity of cheaper plastics. Yeh was a vocational high school student majoring in art and design when the family business closed in 1986, but he was not about to give up on bamboo. “I wasn’t really thinking about running a business or making money with bamboo,” he says. “But growing up surrounded by the bamboo that fed the family, I really wanted to work with the material in some way.”

Yeh’s interest in bamboo, however, grew more from a school bamboo carving project than from working at the family factory. “I had no apparent artistic talent, but I knew the material and was able to create works of art that were better than those of my classmates,” he says. “That encouraged me to keep going.” Yeh consequently decided that he would try bamboo carving as a career. After the bamboo carving project at school, Yeh visited Chen Ming-tang (陳明堂), one of the few bamboo carving artists at the time, and asked Chen to take him on as a “holiday apprentice.” Thereafter, he practiced at Chen’s workshop in Taichung City, central Taiwan on weekends and during summer and winter vacations for the next two years.

The apprenticeship lasted until Yeh had to perform his compulsory military service. He completed his duty and returned home in 1990, thinking of picking up where he had left off with the craft, only to learn that his grandfather had other plans for him. “For my grandfather, it was all right for a high school student to try a little of this or a little of that, but my military service meant that I was a grown-up and should find a steady job,” Yeh says. “Bamboo carving was far from a steady job—or even a job at all.” His grandfather pulled some strings and managed to get Yeh a desk job at the local farmers’ association. After three days, however, the younger Yeh quit the job and picked up his carving knives once again.

It was not long before Yeh was planning his first exhibition, which was held at the Bamboo Art Museum in Nantou City. He explains that the museum was undergoing renovation at the time and had invited him to display his works for the reopening. In addition to an exhibition on the history and products of the local bamboo industry, the museum wanted to showcase bamboo arts and crafts, so Yeh was given six months to carve a sufficient number of bamboo pieces. “I guess I was invited mostly because there were not too many bamboo-carving artists around,” he says. Whatever the reason for his invitation, Yeh did not pass up the opportunity. After the exhibition, he went on to establish a reputation as an emerging bamboo carving artist through his participation in various local and national art contests and shows. By the mid-1990s, he was already recognized for his craftsmanship by collectors. During the subsequent years, his renown as a bamboo carving artist only increased, until in 2007 the workshop he was running was selected as a Taiwan Crafts Workshop under a program organized by the Ministry of Culture’s National Taiwan Craft Research and Development Institute (NTCRI), which recognizes workshops for the excellence of their artists.

Yeh finds his subject matter mostly in the rural environment, carving items such as plants and small animals. Moso is a bamboo species he likes to use, as the larger diameter, thicker wall of the trunk and its solidity make it an excellent carving material. He also favors the solid texture of thorny bamboo roots. Although Taiwan has plenty of bamboo, securing a steady supply of the material can become problematic. Yeh explains that this is because bamboo trunks and roots are valued far less than edible bamboo shoots. The shoots of older bamboo taste bitter, so farmers tend to cut down bamboo after a year or two—before the plants grow big enough for carving—and grow new bamboo for the shoots. In fact, even bamboo roots are hard to come by. Suppliers normally do not bother digging them out because of their relatively low economic value. Fortunately for Yeh, old business connections from the days of the family bamboo business help him secure the material he prizes for his art.

Intricate Textures

Freshly cut bamboo must first be cured and sterilized in boiling water, then allowed to dry for at least a year, before being used for carving. Once the bamboo has dried, it can be tricky for the craftsman to avoid cracking the parallel grain structure if it is cut into at the wrong angle or from the wrong direction. What makes it even trickier is that there are three layers of textures, each with a different hardness and thickness. Controlling the carving knife when working on bamboo is much more crucial than it is for wood, which usually has a more consistent hardness.

The ultimate challenge in the art comes from limitations inherent in the shape of the bamboo. With this in mind, in order to depict depth, distance and layers, Yeh will typically carve a myriad of images across the inside of a section of bamboo trunk that is about 30 centimeters in diameter and 15 millimeters thick. The material’s limitations can often be circumvented by featuring lotus, melons and other plants to form depths and layers. A frog or a snail on a plant can be added to yield yet another dimension. The actual carving of such a detailed spatial arrangement can be quite challenging. An imperfection in the material revealed halfway through, for example, will result in a lot of time spent adjusting one’s plan to fix the problem.

Overcoming the constraints of shape is the key to working on sections of bamboo trunk, but a different challenge is presented when working with roots, which come in an unpredictable variety of shapes. “Every root is different and you can’t carve it into just anything,” Yeh says. “Any particular root should only be carved into one ideal design, and an artist has to study the root carefully to figure out what that one design is.”

Yeh started teaching bamboo carving in 1997, mostly at classes organized by the NTCRI in Nantou. “These classes don’t run long enough to train craftspeople, but they can help the students learn how to work with the material,” Yeh says. “It’s always a good thing when more people become interested in this craft.” In fact, some students grow so interested in bamboo carving that they continue learning from Yeh after their classes finish, with some even going on to win awards and others showcasing their works in Yeh’s workshop.

These classes have also proven helpful to the teacher, as Yeh explains that his familiarity with bamboo may stifle his creativity at times. Students who are ordinarily new to the medium, however, often approach carving from a design perspective rather than worrying about what can and cannot be done with bamboo, and may inadvertently have a fresh take on the craft. Yeh allows his students to go with the moment, and although that approach may not always work out, once in a while someone successfully creates something new and unique. “A student might come up with some new applications or shape an angle that I hadn’t thought possible,” Yeh says. “To teach is to learn, as people often put it.” In fact, working with students gave Yeh the notion of carving functional art, although this idea was eventually not fully realized. “There are only a few manufacturers in Taiwan, and my designs are either too difficult for them or the orders too small for them to bother with,” he says. “In short, I have crafted the prototypes but can’t find a company to execute them.”

Cups with No Coffee

Just when Yeh was about to drop the idea, he was offered another opportunity to give it a try after being recruited as a craftsman for Yii, a Taiwanese design brand jointly created by the nonprofit, government-funded Taiwan Design Center in Taipei and the NTCRI. By bringing domestic and international designers together with local craftspeople, Yii aims to reposition traditional Taiwanese crafts using various design motifs within a contemporary context. One of its first projects was a series of cups designed by Taiwanese designer Idee Liu (劉一德). The series was called World Cups and included a variety of decorations on standard Starbucks-style coffee cups, and Yeh was responsible for carving a bamboo cup with a frog on it. “It wasn’t really difficult technically and it wasn’t meant to actually hold coffee, but the idea of combining the East and the West was inspirational,” Yeh says.

While Yeh was working with Yii, one of his biggest challenges was to craft a chair from a design by Brazilian designers Fernando and Humberto Campana. The chair, named Wave, was designed to be made entirely by shaping and bending a number of bamboo trunks. “It wasn’t bamboo carving and there’s no way you can bend bamboo to those angles,” says Yeh, recalling the first time he saw the draft. “But I took the job anyway because I wanted to show off some Taiwanese craftsmanship.” The first challenge was selecting the right materials. Yeh explains that diameters vary at the ends of a bamboo trunk, so joining the trunks together to form a flat surface could result in a malformed chair. The ends of the various trunks had to be as close in size as possible in order to minimize this problem. Yeh contacted several wholesalers before managing to secure about 200 usable trunks from among more than 10,000. Once two trunks had been joined together to reach the necessary length, they were heated and bent to the desired shape. Despite a 50 percent failure rate in the bending process, Yeh eventually managed to deliver the chair. This collaboration between international designers and the Taiwanese craftsman won high praise at Milan Design Week 2011 when the chair was first showcased, as it did at several other exhibitions in London, mainland China and Tokyo.

Through the effort of government agencies and the private sector, bamboo crafts have been gaining popularity in recent years. Yeh, however, chose not to renew his contract with Yii after 2011. In fact, he has not attempted to develop functional art for a while now and stopped giving official classes last year. These days, his only students are those that he has been teaching for many years. Such side jobs, Yeh feels, have taken up too much of his time and kept him from focusing on the intricacies of layered texture and varied density involved in the art of bamboo carving.

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