Taiwan Today

From January to May this year, the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in the central city of Taichung is staging a special exhibition to explore the works and celebrate the life of one of the most influential artists in the country’s history. Over the course of his more than half-century career, Lin Chih-chu (林之助, 1917-2008) earned widespread acclaim for his mastery of glue-color painting, or Eastern gouache painting. A passionate educator, Lin dedicated much of his life to teaching and promoting the medium, even coining the term now used to describe the genre in Taiwan. In 2005, he received the National Cultural Award, one of the nation’s highest honors for lifetime achievement, for both the exceptional quality of his artworks and his efforts to ensure the continuation of the traditional technique.

Though now primarily associated with Japan, glue-color painting originated in China. Artist Tseng Teh-biao (曾得標), who studied under Lin, points out that the medium traces its origins back thousands of years in the mainland. In the past, glues made by boiling animal skins and bones were used to fix colors to materials such as pottery, silk and stone. Tseng cites the Dunhuang Cave murals, which date back more than 1,500 years, in northern mainland China as early examples of glue-color painting.

Lin, who completed much of his education in Japan, began studying the medium in his teens. Born during the period of Japanese colonial rule of Taiwan (1895-1945), he grew up in an affluent family in today’s Daya District of Taichung City. In 1928, while still an elementary school student, he was sent to Japan to complete his education. In 1934, Lin enrolled in a Tokyo art college, today’s Musashino Art University, where he studied contemporary Japanese painting. Within a decade, he would gain significant recognition in art circles in both Japan and Taiwan.

Running until May 15, the Lin Chih-chu Centennial Memorial Exhibition at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts features more than 100 of the artist’s paintings, sketches and drawings, with the earliest works dating to the time of his college studies in Japan. The centennial show is being held this year as in local culture a person’s age begins at one rather than zero. The event takes its name, “The Wind Will Still Blow Tomorrow,” from an expression that Lin depicted in Chinese and Japanese calligraphy works in 1976 and 1987, respectively.

The exhibition was curated by Tseng and Pai Shih-ming (白適銘), a professor in the Department of Fine Arts at National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei. In his written introduction to the event, Pai highlighted Lin’s contributions to sustaining the genre of glue-color painting and shaping it to be the medium “that best represents local identity and native culture in the recent history of fine arts in Taiwan.”

Pai notes that Lin was a prominent figure, along with painters such as Chen Cheng-po (陳澄波, 1895-1947) and Lin Yu-shan (林玉山, 1907-2004), in the first generation of Taiwanese who received formal training in modern art. Works by these artists often won top prizes at the Taiwan Fine Arts Exhibition, an islandwide competitive event established in 1927. Reorganized in 1938 as the Taiwan Governor’s Office Fine Arts Exhibition, the competition carried on in the postcolonial era as the Taiwan Provincial Fine Arts Exhibition before being discontinued in 2006. Lin Chih-chu won first prizes at the Taiwan Governor’s Office Fine Arts Exhibition in 1942 and 1943.

Most of the winning pieces in the competition from 1927 to 2006 are now in the collection of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts. In May 2015, from among these works, the Ministry of Culture labeled the glue-color painting A Lotus Pond (1929) by Lin Yu-shan as a national treasure, the highest designation for antiquities as outlined in the Cultural Heritage Preservation Act. Meanwhile, two oil paintings by Chen Cheng-po, Tamsui Scenery (1935) and Chiayi Park (1937), as well as the glue-color piece Bathing in the Morning (1940) by Lin Chih-chu were assigned the status of significant antiquity, the second-highest designation.

Lin’s work Bathing in the Morning was included in a prestigious 1940 exhibition in Tokyo held to celebrate the 2,600th anniversary of the year when, according to legend, Jimmu became Japan’s first emperor. The artwork features Lin’s fiancee in a kimono looking down at a white goat that is gazing back at her, with the animal said to symbolize the wistful painter. Tseng, a celebrated glue-color painter whose works have won numerous awards at the Taiwan Provincial Fine Arts Exhibition and other competitions, says that due to the Japanese cultural elements in the work, official recognition came slowly and reluctantly to this masterpiece in Lin’s home country.

Tseng began studying under Lin in 1958 when he enrolled in the predecessor to today’s National Taichung University of Education. Lin had returned to Taiwan in 1941 and took up a teaching position at the college in 1946. The Japanese-style house that served as the artist’s dormitory and studio when he taught at the school is now the Lin Chih-chu Memorial art museum and was designated a historic building by the Taichung City Government in 2007.

A former head of the Taiwan Glue-Color Painting Association, which Lin founded in 1981, Tseng notes that he and the master’s other glue-color painting pupils studied as private apprentices since the medium did not appear on fine arts programs in Taiwan at that time. This did not change until 1985, when Lin was invited to teach an official course on the genre in the Department of Fine Arts at Tunghai University in Taichung. “Back then, education authorities didn’t allow schools to develop specialized subjects,” Tseng recalls, “so mediums like glue-color painting were essentially forbidden in Taiwan.”

Prior to the 1980s, which saw the gradual liberalization of Taiwanese society, the dominant genre of fine arts was traditional Chinese ink painting. Owing to what Pai refers to in his introduction to the centennial exhibition as the Nationalist government’s “de-Japanization” and “re-Sinification” of Taiwan, glue-color painting was dismissed in local art circles as a Japanese medium. Indeed, until the late 1970s or early 1980s, the art form was known as Japanese painting or Eastern painting.

Nevertheless, works in the genre were commonly included in the National Painting section of the Taiwan Provincial Fine Arts Exhibition. This angered many ink painters, and as a result separate categories were created under the National Painting section for glue-color and ink entries beginning in 1963. The two styles continued to be judged separately until the glue-color category was eliminated in 1973, one year after Japan severed formal diplomatic ties with the Republic of China.

Lin, who had served as a member of the judging committee for the National Painting section, was dismayed by the dispute between ink and glue-color painters. In 1977, in an effort to resolve the disagreement, he penned an article in a local art magazine suggesting the use of “glue-color painting” rather than Japanese or Eastern painting to describe the medium. This term, he noted, follows the naming convention used for other styles of painting such as oil and watercolor by identifying the substance mixed with pigments to create the type of paint used in the genre.

In the same year, Lin organized the first art exhibition devoted exclusively to the medium in Taiwan and used the new term he had created in the title of the event. Glue-color painting was readmitted as a subcategory of the National Painting section of the Taiwan Provincial Fine Arts Exhibition in 1979. Later, in 1982, competition organizers created an entirely new section for the genre and used the term Lin had proposed in 1977 as the title of the new category.

Tseng stresses that the decades of antagonism between ink and glue-color painters in Taiwan was absurd since both mediums find their origins in ancient Chinese art traditions. Prior to the Song dynasty (960-1279), a style of painting called “gold and green landscapes,” categorized by the use of heavy glue-based colors and meticulous depictions of natural scenes, was popular in China. Over time, ink painting came to be viewed as a higher form of art and became the mainstream genre of classical Chinese painting, though the glue-color medium continued to be practiced in Japan until it became primarily associated with that nation.

For Pai, Lin’s commitment to preserving and advancing the genre amid a hostile artistic environment sealed his legacy in Taiwan’s art history. In his introduction to the centennial exhibition, Pai drew attention to the painter’s signature theme of birds and flowers during the latter half of his life. According to the professor, the artist’s depictions of peaceful natural scenes served as a silent protest against Taiwan’s then-authoritarian society and the vexing debates surrounding the definition of its national painting culture.

In summarizing Lin’s perspectives on art, Pai highlighted a statement that the painter once made in a recorded interview with his student Tseng. “An artwork’s value consists in its thought, spirit and creativity,” Lin remarked, “regardless of whether it was painted using oil colors, watercolors, glue colors or ink.”

Write to Pat Gao at cjkao@mofa.gov.tw