Taiwan Today

In the fall of 2010, two painters found themselves discussing a problem that has long bedeviled the art world: The only time most people see art is when they visit galleries and museums, and those visits can be few and far between. One of the commiserating painters was 46-year-old Lee Jiun-yang (李俊陽), who earlier that day had opened a solo exhibition at Kao Yuan University (KYU) in Kaohsiung City, southern Taiwan. The other painter was 56-year-old Lee Jiun-shyan (李俊賢), who serves as director of the art center at KYU. The director had invited the younger painter out for dinner and drinks, as it was the elder Lee’s routine to celebrate with artists on the day their exhibitions opened at KYU.

The two men, who are not related, soon discovered that they shared more than similar names and a passion for art. “As we were drinking and chatting, we found we had a lot in common in terms of our feelings toward the general visual environment [in Taiwan],” the director says. “We both observed that the majority of the images in our surroundings were produced by digital technology or printed by machines. They lacked the human touch because they weren’t drawn by hand.” The problem with such an environment, the elder Lee says, is that it places art outside the realm of experience for most people. “As artists, we both felt that we should do something to [improve the situation]. We needed to find a way to pack up our brushes and do our painting out in the community,” he says. The two artists eventually came up with the idea of painting murals on the walls of buildings in local communities.

A few days after the two artists’ night out in 2010, the elder Lee pitched that idea to two good friends, Chiang Yao-hsien (蔣耀賢) and Shang Yu-fang (商毓芳), who for years have jointly operated By Wood, an artists’ village at the Taiwan Sugar Museum in Kaohsiung. Chiang and Shang took an immediate interest in the community mural idea and the four of them began planning to form a team of local artists under the name The Formosa Wall Painting Group.

Uphill Battle

Chiang foresaw, however, that convincing communities to accept the murals could be an uphill battle. “We thought it might be difficult to express the core value of our activities, to show the difference between what we wanted to do and street graffiti,” he says. Lee Jiun-shyan concurs, saying that it is necessary to educate neighborhood residents about the differences in style and motivation between painting outdoor murals and street graffiti. While the former is focused on a connection with a specific location, the latter is often seen as a medium used by socially marginalized groups to express emotion, he says. Formosa has no interest in graffiti, he adds, as that done by street artists in Taiwan is greatly influenced by the style used in New York City, and thus is not a true reflection of Taiwanese identity.

The elder Lee also realized that community residents might be reluctant to allow a group of outsiders to paint semi-permanent murals on the exterior walls of houses and public spaces. To head off such concerns, Shang, a former architect, came up with the idea of creating a “white house,” a low-cost structure built specifically to provide space for murals. Ideally, the structure would be easy to dismantle, move and reassemble in any location without affecting the nearby surroundings. In the end, she developed a design for a building that resembles a bungalow, the structure of which is covered with 64 wooden boards that each measure 120 centimeters wide by 240 centimeters long. Chiang, the Lees and Shang officially launched Formosa by inviting artists to help build and paint the first white house in front of By Wood around the end of 2010.

According to the elder Lee, the announcement elicited a strong positive response from the art community, eventually attracting roughly 60 artists from all over Taiwan for the two-week get-together. The white house was built within days and participating painters were given a little more than a week to finish their works. Most of the artists completed a painting on at least one of the 64 boards, while a few chose to work together. The white house and its murals were then displayed to the public for a month and the individual boards were made available for purchase after the showing. Since that first event, Formosa has organized five more white house projects across Taiwan, while membership in the organization has risen to more than 150. Chiang and Shang now plan the projects while staffers at By Wood are responsible for conveying Formosa’s ideas about art to neighborhood residents in order to gain their approval.

Along with building and painting the white houses, Formosa has begun to make progress toward its original goal of creating art on the walls of public facilities and private residences. The first such project took place in 2011 at Baishu Community, which is a 10-minute drive from By Wood. Since then, Formosa has painted murals in Hualien County, eastern Taiwan and Pingtung County and Tainan City in the nation’s south, just to name a few locations.

One of the group’s goals is incorporating attributes and features of local communities in their painting. According to the elder Lee, Formosa’s painters are basically free to follow their own muse, but are provided with information on the community and its background to serve as a reference and source of inspiration. “Speaking for myself, I always put the historical and cultural elements [of the community] into my painting, because that allows my art to gain recognition from the locals,” Lee Jiun-shyan says. “On the other hand, it’s also a great learning experience for an artist because you get to paint things you’re not familiar with.” For example, he says he painted a mural with wax apples, bananas and seafood in a community in Jiadong Township, Pingtung County, as all were local specialties. “In the ‘production process’ for outdoor murals, artists naturally begin a conversation with the community,” Chiang explains, adding that painters need to keep the characteristics of the locality in mind to create works that are acceptable to residents.

The elder Lee says most communities Formosa has painted in have given very positive feedback about the murals. “People have been consistently curious [about our work],” he says. “Many of the residents come to watch us painting almost every day. … They ask us questions and discuss the painting with us. I think it’s great to be able to have such direct interaction with the locals.”

There have been a few cases, however, in which tensions arose between the painters and residents. For example, Lee Jiun-shyan says some elderly residents of Dagangko Community in Hualien County took exception to works created by several young artists who painted images resembling characters in traditional glove puppet shows. Residents were offended because Dagangko is a conservative Catholic community and the characters and imagery in glove puppet shows are sometimes associated with Taoism, he explains. Compounding the problem, the images were painted on a permanent structure, not a white house. The issue has yet to be resolved, as some members of the community expressed reservations about Formosa’s second visit to Dagangko six months later. Such incidents, Lee Jiun-shyan says, serve as a reminder to Formosa members to pay close attention to the feelings of locals.

Another misunderstanding took place in Jiadong Township, where a Formosa artist included a turtle in a mural to symbolize his wish for long life for the residents. An elderly woman living across the street complained about the work, however, because a Holo, or Taiwanese, phrase containing the word for turtle carries the meaning of losing at gambling. That struck a nerve with the woman, who was an enthusiastic lottery player. The story had a happy ending, however, as the artist replaced the turtle with a pineapple, the word for which has a Holo homophone that means prosperity and good fortune. The group later learned that the woman had won a lottery prize one week after the change, the elder Lee says.

In 2012, Formosa extended its efforts overseas, with members creating murals in Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, northeastern Japan and Marghera, Italy, a borough of Venice. The group’s trip to Ishinomaki, which was heavily damaged by the tsunami that hit Japan in March 2011, offered a particularly vivid reminder of art’s power to transcend national differences. Eiji Tarumi, a Japanese expert in disaster prevention and recovery and former government official, invited Formosa to create murals on the walls of selected buildings in the city to lift the community’s spirits after the disaster. On one wall, the artists painted a huge banana boat, as Taiwan’s bananas are a staple in produce stores in Japan. On another wall, Formosa members painted a rainbow suspended above the sea, symbolizing a hopeful and promising future. The artists also drew a mural on the surface of a parking lot in the city and invited local high school students to participate in the project.

According to Tarumi, the wall paintings give comfort and joy to Ishinomaki residents, many of whom are still recovering from the disaster. Art is uniquely suited to playing such a role, he says, as it does not require any words, and thus no translation, to get its meaning across.

Tarumi, who facilitated Formosa’s work in Ishinomaki, says its importance lies not just in brightening up a community after a major disaster, or in bringing art to the public, but in building connections between people in the two countries. “I hope there’ll be more exchanges between us, and that the results of those interactions will be reflected in [future] artworks,” he says. “We don’t want to make this just a one-time event, but something that will continue for a long time.” Chiang says Formosa was invited to paint murals in Ishinomaki again this year, although this time the members will paint their murals on the walls of a purpose-built white house. The group was scheduled to leave for the Japanese city in April.

Formosa also helps artists discover the joys of introducing more people to art. For example, artist Lu Chung-chen (盧崇真) says the most interesting part of participating in the projects is how building and painting a white house creates relationships not only among artists, but also between art and the public. “Art used to be created only in a closed box called the studio, not out in the real world,” she says. “Then, after the artist was done, the work went to another closed box called the gallery or museum. Other than the artist, nobody ever knew what happened during the process of creating the work,” Lu notes, adding that the manner in which Formosa “exposes” the artist’s creative process has increased her enjoyment of painting.

Hospitality and Warmth

Lee Jiun-shyan says he continues to be touched by the hospitality and warmth of the communities in which Formosa has painted murals. The director lives near Baishu Community, the site of Formosa’s first mural. Some residents still recognize him to this day, he says, and ask him when the group will do more paintings there.

Chiang notes that art is the perfect medium for reconnecting people to their environment. “Images and colors are the most direct way to highlight features of a community,” he says. “Creating a sustainable community is not difficult, but it has to begin with local people paying more attention to the history and background of the place they live in.”

Residents of Jiadong Township, for example, began paying more attention to a historic old house in the neighborhood after it appeared in one of Formosa’s murals. No one lived in the house, which was being held by a bank after the owner defaulted on a loan. As the bank had no interest in maintaining or repairing the house, the mural boosted awareness of the need for its preservation. By the end of 2011, locals had raised about NT$300,000 (US$10,000) and purchased the house from the bank. The house was then handed over to Jiadong’s culture and history association for restoration and preservation.

The elder Lee believes that Formosa’s projects, although still few in number, have begun to help bridge the gulf between art and the public in Taiwan. In fact, he hopes that working out in the community will help members develop new styles. Along similar lines, the younger Lee says he hopes the group’s works will inspire emerging artists to pay more attention to their surroundings and their own creative vision.

One of Shang’s experiences may offer the best example of the impact community-based art projects can have. While Formosa was painting a mural in Huwei Township in Yunlin County, southern Taiwan, an elderly woman visited the site every day and attempted to sell her produce to the painters, Shang says. Although none of the artists purchased vegetables from her, the woman always stayed all day to watch them paint. On the day the group was ready to leave town, the vendor showed up again, but instead of trying to sell her produce, she offered all of it to the artists as a gift. “Although the vendor didn’t explain her act,” Shang says, “I think it was her way of giving feedback [about our effort]. In the end, I believe she finally found herself making friends with a thing called art.”

Write to Audrey Wang at ycwang06@mofa.gov.tw