Thus 84-year-old anthropologist Chen Chi-lu looked back at his younger self June 7, back to the time he began his field research among the Amis aborigines in Hualien County at the age of 28. Chen recalled the difficulties involved in finding firsthand sources about aborigines--how he sometimes climbed four to five hours into mountainous areas to visit hill-dwelling tribes and how his relatives would send him supplies if he stayed away too long.
In his efforts to record the material evidence of tribal life, Chen made drawings of everything he found, such as pottery, clothing, personal decorative items, weapons, woodcarvings and wickerware. Fifty-three of these original illustrations form the exhibition "Fieldwork, Artifacts, Illustration: The Multi-facet World of Dr. Chen Chi-lu's Ethnological Drawings" on display at the National Taiwan Museum from May 18 to Oct. 14. This site, the nation's oldest museum, is a fitting location: Not only was it built by the Japanese colonial administration, which can claim to have originated ethnological study of Taiwan's aborigines during their rule of the island (1895-1945), but Chen was later in charge of exhibitions at the NTM when it was still called the Taiwan Provincial Museum.
In asking Chen to present some of his drawings as acknowledgement of his contribution to the development of anthropology in Taiwan, the NTM was particularly interested in his early work. These were the preparatory sketches of drawings that later appeared in his academic work alongside descriptions of individual material artifacts possessed by aboriginal groups.
"Sometimes illustrations explain things better than photographs," Chen said, giving as an example the way he demonstrated each step of aboriginal wickerwork techniques through a series of drawings. He then used dotted and solid lines to distinguish the routes taken by the interwoven wicker strips. Examples in the exhibition show Chen's drawings of different wickerwork methods used by the Bunun people of southeastern Taiwan, reflecting the significance of women's weaving skills in tribal society. The drawings have been used as background material for further research into their customs.
Chen emphasized the difference between his specimen drawings and drawing used as a creative art: "Artistic paintings are the unique creation of the artist, while specimen sketches should be as similar to the authentic objects as possible." He also pointed out that the importance of duplication in ethnological drawing might not be so welcomed or encouraged by modern artists. "Depiction of an object required accuracy and conciseness," he said. "The illustrator could not add any personal emotion to exaggerate the presentation." Chen gave the example of watercolor or oil painting, which often emphasized qualities a painter wished to convey, whereas illustrations should not show modifications or alterations, he said.
Since his illustrations would appear in print, the illustrator had to take into account their quality and effect once printed, not those in his sketchpad. Fine lines, for example, needed to be clearly visible.
Illustrating material objects could be time-consuming, therefore, and required great patience, Chen said, admitting that repetitive processes were the most troublesome part of a drawing. Having selected the object he wished to sketch, he first made a rough outline using a pencil before applying ink onto a piece of semi-transparent tracing paper. Use of tracing paper made it easier for Chen to reproduce the image on a clean sheet afterward. Next, he measured the object's dimensions to ensure his sketches were correctly proportional to the real artifact. A scale was displayed beside the illustration so that viewers could calculate the original size and envision the object more accurately. Finally, Chen arranged, on a single sheet, various sketches of the same object made from different angles. "Each piece of paper had drawings from at least three angles, including the front, side and back," Chen said.
Although accurate depiction of an artifact required skilled drawing techniques, Chen's studies had not included any special art training. Rather, his expertise was based on unique experiences in his early life. "I had enjoyed drawing since elementary school," he said.
Chen was born in Tainan in 1923, but his parents moved to Shantou in China's Guangdong Province soon afterward, where the young boy enrolled in primary school. Following outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Chen's family took refuge in Hong Kong, and the next year he went to Xiamen to study in the Ying Wa English Secondary School, where he continued his junior-high-school education. There, he made friends with other students who were fond of painting, and they met frequently to share their interest. Chen particularly recalled buying tubes of oil paint to practice painting in modern or Western styles with his friends. Some of these, like Chen Yudao and Zhong Sibin went on to study at the Shanghai College of Fine Arts and had successful artistic careers after graduating.
Leaving Ying Wa in 1942, Chen went to study at the Tokyo First High School, perhaps because both his parents were teachers of Japanese. Chen remembered his school uniform catching the attention of a man fishing at a river as he passed by on his way home. The man turned out to be the renowned artist Kado Hiroshi, who invited Chen to join his weekend painting classes. The five sessions he attended were the nearest he came to formal artistic training, Chen said.
He did not let his lack of training interfere with his passion for drawing, however, nor with the practice of his art during his study of politics and economics at St. John's University in Shanghai, and his drawing skills were useful later. After graduation in 1948, he returned to Taiwan and worked as an editor at the Chinese-language Taiwan Public Opinion Journal, where he drew illustrations for a column on "Taiwan's cultural and social customs." These included aboriginal artifacts, which required him to familiarize himself with numerous research papers and other documents about tribal life. The reporting and editing experience in aboriginal studies enabled him to apply for a position of assistant professor in anthropology later.
He felt these secondhand resources were inadequate, so he started to carry out his own field research into Taiwan's various indigenous peoples. As he published several research papers on Taiwan's historical remains and comparative tribal studies, he was promoted to professor of anthropology at the prestigious National Taiwan University. The department's specimen collections and exhibition hall offered him the chance to view indigenous material culture at close range. The more he saw, the better he could portray the objects' shapes and compositions. Speaking about an item of black Bunun pottery, for example, which was round and broken at the neck, Chen compared his drawing with others', saying, "I use shadow and space more to create a three-dimensional effect, while other researchers insist on being true to details, which may make the work look a bit monotonous."
Chen's ethnological drawings are perhaps best described as being both authentic and artistic. Many foreigners working in this field are familiar with Chen's drawings through his 1968 publication "Material Culture of the Formosan Aborigines," which is still considered the "Bible" of Taiwanese anthropological studies. Moreover, his technique was like a visual notebook that recorded trivial details precisely, which could not be achieved by photographic technology of that time, he claimed. In addition, old cameras were heavy and inconvenient for anthropologists to carry into mountainous areas. While some of his contemporaries took photos and brought them back for professional draftsmen to make illustrations, Chen encouraged researchers to accustom themselves to doing on-the-spot drawings.
To this day, Chen still champions the use of drawings and hopes his successors will carry on the practice. Nothing else is as loyal to the original as hand-executed drawings, he said.
Write to Sandra Shih at sandrashih@mail.gio.gov.tw