Taiwan Today

Hakka artists are working to document and revitalize their communities and traditions.

Hakka oil and watercolor painter Tseng Wen-chung (曾文忠‬) has visited more than 50 countries, but his sleepy hometown of Meinong in southern Taiwan’s Kaohsiung City remains his muse. The rural district is one of the nation’s foremost centers of Hakka culture, with over 90 percent of its some 40,000 inhabitants hailing from the ethnic group. From the earliest days of his decadeslong career, the 84-year-old has found abundant inspiration in its traditional farmhouses, babbling brooks and time-honored religious practices.

Tseng’s determination to document Meinong was reinforced in the early 1990s, when the government sought to build a reservoir on an upstream section of the district’s eponymous river. Fearing the environmental and social impacts of the project, the artist helped lead successful local protests against it. That incident strengthened solidarity among residents, but also brought into sharp relief the transience of life and his village, he said. “This is where I grew up and I never feel I’m doing enough to paint it.”

This deep emotional connection to ancestral lands and culture is a prominent feature of Hakka art, according to Hsiao Chong-ray (蕭瓊瑞), an art history professor at National Cheng Kung University in southern Taiwan’s Tainan City. “Hakka talents in many mediums exhibit this strong devotion to capturing the towns and culture that nurtured them.”

For ink painters Liao Mei-ling (廖美玲) and her husband Chiu Ping-liang (邱炳亮) from the northern city of Hsinchu, this commitment is most clearly apparent in their frequent depictions of tung blossoms, perhaps the most recognizable symbol of Hakka culture in Taiwan. First brought to the country as a cash crop during Japanese colonial rule (1895-1945), tung trees were primarily grown in hilly regions with majority Hakka populations. The trees are still an important source of revenue, with their white flowers drawing large numbers of tourists every spring.

Liao’s “Tung Blossom Village at Night” is representative of her vibrant artistic style and favored subject matter. Used by the Cabinet-level Hakka Affairs Council (HAC) on a postcard promoting the annual Hakka Tung Blossom Festival in 2007, the piece shows villagers gathering outside a temple as tung trees dotted with glistening flowers jut into the scene from all sides. “I’m so accustomed to seeing the blossoms that it just feels natural to spotlight them in my paintings,” she said.

Artistic Identity

According to the council, Hakka people account for 19.3 percent of Taiwan’s population of 23.5 million. In recent decades, the government has enacted various measures to promote their language and heritage with the aim of reversing the impact of assimilation policies from the 38-year martial law period ending in 1987. Hakka artists’ frequent renderings of lands and traditions are in line with this wider movement to highlight the ethnic group’s distinct cultural and linguistic identity.

For award-winning ceramist Liou Chen-chou (劉鎮洲), inspiration primarily derives from his childhood spent in the Hakka community of Beipu Township in the northern county of Hsinchu during the 1950s and 1960s. “My representations of mountains, rivers and clouds are informed by the simple everyday sights you see growing up in a rural Hakka village in Taiwan,” he said.

In his quest to more vividly portray these scenes, the 68-year-old has adopted outside-the-box approaches like using a wood-fired kiln rather the more common electric varieties. “Ash produced in the firing process falls randomly on the surface of the ceramics, intensifying the naturalistic feeling,” he said. In 2017, these efforts saw Liou win the lifetime achievement prize at the Taiwan Ceramics Awards, biennial honors presented by New Taipei City Yingge Ceramics Museum, the leading facility of its kind in the nation.

While nostalgia is a standout theme in Hakka art, the field is hardly lacking in innovation. Wistful scenic pieces aside, Liou is noted for modernist creations depicting spaces such as doors and stairways. “People are absent from these works, but you can feel their presence, as if they are hidden somewhere just out of sight,” the artist said. “I want viewers to reflect on their relationship to interior spaces.”

Spotlighting the full gamut of the ethnic group’s artistic endeavors is the objective of ART Hakka, a triennial exhibition organized by the HAC. The latest edition, set to take place from May to July at venues across Taiwan, will showcase pieces by Liou, Tseng and more than 100 other talents. “The works don’t necessarily convey a Hakka cultural flavor,” said Hsiao, the show’s curator. “Rather the exhibition aims to highlight the breadth of Hakka people’s contributions to Taiwan’s fine arts landscape.”

Featured works this year include a silk screen print titled “Flying” by abstract expressionist Yang Chi-hung (楊識宏). The 71-year-old is renowned for eye-catching creations characterized by vibrant streaks of color. Also on show is an intricate sculpture made from stainless steel and Lucite, a kind of acrylic plastic, by Huang Hsin-chien (黃心健‬). The multidisciplinary artist is best known for co-creating “The Sandroom,” a 15-minute virtual reality (VR) movie that claimed the inaugural Best VR Experience Award at the Venice International Film Festival in 2017. Also produced by American Laurie Anderson, it explores the volatility of memory through a series of dreamlike sequences.

According to Hsiao, while many of the participants have garnered acclaim in their respective fields, their Hakka heritage is not widely recognized. “By highlighting their achievements, we hope to inspire the next generation of Hakka talents to embrace and sustain their cultural traditions.”

New Voices

Few organizations have done more to rejuvenate Hakka arts than Rom Shing Hakka Opera Troupe. Founded in 1988 in northern Taiwan’s Miaoli County by academic and composer Cheng Rom-shing (鄭榮興‬), the company is a successor to a former troupe established by his grandmother Cheng Mei-mei (鄭美妹), a noted Hakka opera performer. Her company toured Taiwan from the late 1950s until being disbanded in 1967.

When Cheng launched Rom Shing three decades ago, “Hakka opera was completely ignored and some even refused to recognize it as a separate genre,” he said. “So, I felt driven to breathe new life into the discipline.”

Rom Shing comprises 40 actors and musicians, including players of a genre called bayin, a core component of Hakka opera. Traditionally, shows featured the same three characters: a young tea seller, his wife and his sister, with onstage improvisation central to the art form. The troupe has broken the genre out of this mold, producing two or three new plays annually with fixed scripts and larger casts. Its most recent work is inspired by the Shakespearean comedy “As You Like It.” Transcribed in the Hakka language and accompanied by bayin music, it is scheduled to premiere in October at the National Theater in Taipei City.

The troupe’s blend of tradition and innovation has proved a hit with audiences at home and abroad. In addition to staging annual shows at the National Theater, the company has performed in 10 countries such as Austria, Brazil and the U.S. It has also been nominated in the best troupe category at the Golden Melody Awards for Traditional Arts and Music, Taiwan’s top honors in the field, for four of the past five years.

Cheng is not simply focused on reviving the genre but ensuring its long-term future. As former president of Taipei-based National Taiwan College of Performing Arts (TCPA), he has placed considerable emphasis on training a new generation of talents in the field. He founded the Miaoli-based Hakka Opera School in 1996 and pushed for the establishment of the Department of Hakka Opera at TCPA, launched in 2001. “Performers tend to have relatively short careers of just a few decades,” he said. “To avoid a talent cliff, we need to maintain a real sense of urgency on this issue and proactively seek out new actors and musicians.”

This sentiment resonates with painter Tseng. In 2010, he began funding an arts competition for Meinong youngsters, hoping to inspire them to continue his mission of documenting the area. The annual illustration contest awards a certificate and prize money to winners in its kindergarten, elementary and high school categories. Participants are required to submit works on a specified aspect of Meinong, such as old residences or traditional festivals. More than 400 youths have received the accolades to date.

According to Tseng, the competition is helping boost local children’s interest in fine arts and deepen their bond with Meinong. “This will promote the preservation of our precious cultural assets,” he said. “As a minority group, Hakka people must use art as a platform to raise our visibility.”

Write to Oscar Chung at mhchung@mofa.gov.tw