Taiwan Today

In February 2012, while writing the preface to her book published later that year, Li Su-chu (李淑珠) recalled her decision to focus on Taiwan’s fine arts during Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945) as the subject of her graduate study at Japan’s Kyoto University, which she entered in 1999. The book, Depicting Something of the Time, which is based on Li’s doctoral thesis, explores the artistic achievements of Chen Cheng-po (陳澄波, 1895–1947), one of Taiwan’s first Western-style painters. “I’d been worried about the scarcity of research results and documentation in [local art history], so I was not very confident about that topic,” wrote Li, who is now an assistant professor in the Department of Visual Communication Design at Ming Chi University of Technology in New Taipei City. But after learning more about the works of local painters like Chen, she was quite surprised to discover significant cultural traditions that she says Taiwanese can be proud of.

Art critic Hsieh Li-fa (謝里法) published his seminal work The History of Fine Art Movements in Japan-ruled Taiwan in book form in 1978, with the work becoming an inspiration for many subsequent local art researchers, including Li. In many ways, however, Li says Taiwanese art history is still an “emerging discipline” as there is a general lack of awareness by Taiwanese of their own historical and cultural heritage. Li, for example, studied the work of French painter Henri Matisse (1869–1954) during her undergraduate education. Meanwhile, Taiwan has been recognized internationally for decades for its research in the art history of mainland China, largely due to its unique collection of works now housed in Taipei.

In 1965, the National Palace Museum (NPM) was founded in the capital city with a spectacular collection of more than 600,000 artifacts and documents. Most of the works were moved to Taiwan in the late 1940s from Beijing’s Palace Museum when the Nationalist government relocated to the island after losing the Chinese civil war. The Beijing museum was established in 1925 as the repository of the vast collections of the emperors of the Qing court (1644–1911). A number of the NPM’s items also came from the Central Museum (now known as the Nanjing Museum) in Nanjing, the former capital city of mainland China during Nationalist rule. The Central Museum’s preparatory office was formed in 1933 in close cooperation with the Institute of History and Philology at Academia Sinica, which also relocated to Taipei and is now Taiwan’s foremost research institution.

Unrivaled for Research

For Academia Sinica researcher Shih Shou-chien (石守謙), the establishment of the NPM marked the beginning of solid art history research in Taiwan. Compared with the development of art history in other places in the world, the 1965 starting date seems somewhat belated. Nonetheless, the development of local expertise in the field has attracted global attention due to the unparalleled research base at the NPM, which is especially acclaimed for its collections of calligraphy, painting and ceramics.

Since the museum’s founding, the discipline of art history has been expanding, as scholars like Hsieh and Li seek a deeper exploration of local traditions. At the same time, Shih has been internationally acclaimed for his achievements in building an East Asian perspective incorporating Chinese, Japanese and Korean art traditions. Notably, this marks a departure from past scholarship that posited the central significance of Han Chinese culture in Asia.

Shih served as the NPM’s deputy director from 2000 to 2004 and then headed the museum for the following two years. In July 2012, the members of Academia Sinica elected Shih as a lifetime, honorary academician. Among the voters was Fong Wen (方聞), professor emeritus in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University and Shih’s teacher at the US university. Fong was elected to the same rank at Academia Sinica in 1992 and became its first and only academician in the field of art history until Shih’s election. While the almost unanimous recognition of Shih by the academy no doubt reflects the art historian’s personal achievements, the honor also points to the more “active” role that art history can play in the field of humanities, as Shih put it in the press conference following the release of election results.

Setting Up School

In 1949, the present National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) in Taipei formed the nation’s first tertiary-level art department of the postwar era. While Taiwan saw the emergence of a number of art-related departments at universities as well as specialized schools following the founding of the NTNU department, most students learned art history or art theory just as part of their training in art creation.

A turning point for art history in Taiwan was the establishment of the Graduate Institute of Art History at National Taiwan University (NTU) in Taipei, which Shih helped found in 1989 as the country’s first dedicated art history institute. Tainan National University of the Arts in southern Taiwan established the first such unit at the undergraduate level when it set up its Department of Art History in 2003.

The NTU institute has its origins in a collaborative project that began in 1971 between the NPM and NTU’s Department of History to offer Chinese art history as part of the department’s master’s program. For the NPM, the project was an opportunity to build up a base of talented researchers, with the museum offering instructors and financial resources to the NTU master’s program and giving its students, including Shih, access to the museum’s invaluable collection. “Our senior specialists taught there,” says Lee Yu-min (李玉珉), a Buddhist art expert who currently heads the NPM’s Department of Calligraphy and Painting and also teaches at NTU’s Graduate Institute of Art History. “The museum has become an indispensable source of research material for scholars at home and abroad,” she adds.

Lee points out that at the time the collaboration project began in the early 1970s, mainland China was a closed society, and the NPM therefore played a crucial role in traditional Chinese art studies by offering a research environment found nowhere else in the world. Among the scholars who came to Taiwan from the United States to study the NPM’s collection were Fong and James Cahill, the well-known professor emeritus of art history at the University of California, Berkeley. In fact, in a survey published by the Center for Chinese Studies at the National Central Library in Taipei in 2012, Shih found that Taiwan’s close connection to Western academic circles in the field of Chinese painting history has continued largely unchanged since the 1960s.

Shih also draws attention to works collected by the Institute of History and Philology at Academia Sinica. Ancient bronze vessels dating from the Shang dynasty (roughly the 17th to 10th century BC) at the institute provided the basis for the famous stylistic analysis published in the 1950s by celebrated art historian Max Loehr (1903–1988). Loehr was a former professor of oriental art at Harvard University in the United States.

The 1970s saw an international forum on classical Chinese painting organized by the NPM, which took place in Taipei, as well as two significant exhibitions of classical Chinese paintings at the museum that covered the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) and a 90-year span of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). “[The exhibitions] were in line with contemporary Chinese painting research at US universities,” Shih notes. “Based on the outstanding NPM collection of literati paintings [from those periods], the exhibitions made an important academic contribution.”

The literati tradition, one of Shih’s major subjects of expertise, emerged during the Song dynasty (960–1279), a period noted for its economic and artistic strength, and in following dynasties developed into a mainstream style that tended to present a more abstract, detached view of the world in contrast to detailed, realistic depictions. Idealized landscapes in the literati style were usually considered high art. For Shih, the genre represents a series of “avant-garde revolts” against the contemporary art fashions espoused by major political or social forces at the time, and formed a crucial, driving force behind the development of Chinese painting.

Shih says the access to the NPM’s collection afforded to scholars of traditional Chinese painting starting from the 1960s resulted in a new understanding of Chinese cultural traditions, which until then had been perceived largely from a Japanese point of view. This advantage, he adds, is still maintained by Taiwan even though since the 1990s other collections have become available in mainland China at places such as the Palace Museum and Shanghai Museum. “Their artifacts’ quality and accessibility to researchers still fall behind Taipei’s NPM,” he says, adding that Taiwanese scholars of traditional Chinese art history have made a wise choice by continuing to actively tap the NPM’s collection.

Like the development of many other fields of study in Taiwan, local art history has its roots in two main traditions, with one reaching back to the emergence of mainland China’s modern intellectual tradition in the late 19th century and the other a consequence of Japanese colonial rule. Shih points out that while the former legacy had little to do with local matters in Taiwan, the Japanese era did lay a quite solid foundation for further studies on local subjects through the accumulation of art-related fieldwork, especially of aboriginal art and architectural history.

Tracing Local Roots

Such pioneering surveys supported by the colonial government traced the periods of rule by various powers in Taiwan from Japan, mainland China, the Netherlands and Spain all the way back to prehistoric times. “These are not just a pile of records and data,” Shih notes. “The studies also did the fundamental job of developing methodologies and concepts.” Local art history continued in a similar vein with fieldwork conducted throughout the 1950s and 1960s, albeit with a much lower profile, as “the mainstream culture [of that time] deliberately ignored the cultural legacies of Japanese rule.”

For the past three decades, however, the general support in Taiwan for greater localization has seen those Japanese legacies of scholarship rediscovered, organized, published and interpreted. The availability of relevant material and artifacts has far surpassed what it was when Hsieh wrote his history of art movements in Taiwan, Shih notes. In addition to specialized institutes and departments at universities, other organizations have emerged that focus on Taiwanese art. The National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung City, central Taiwan, for example, opened its doors in 1988 as the Taiwan Provincial Museum of Fine Arts, changing to its present name in 1999. The museum’s major collected items include the prize-winning works from the Taiwan Provincial Fine Arts Exhibitions held from 1946 to 2006. That competition succeeded official art shows that began in the late 1920s during the Japanese era. Such a unique collection of local works forms the basis for Taiwanese art studies and promotion, the chief missions of the Taichung museum.

The emergence of Taiwanese art as a discipline in its own right came as part of broader social calls for a more distinct local identity. “Chinese art history can’t cover all issues related to Taiwan’s art development,” the NPM’s Lee says. “Each place has its own historical background and cultural elements and Taiwan is no exception.” To recognize different local values, in recent years the NPM has worked to move beyond an exclusively Chinese cultural focus to incorporate cultures of other countries. Notably, the NPM branch museum currently under construction in Chiayi County, southern Taiwan, is designed as a center for Asian arts. “In the past, Taiwanese people have had little interest in the rest of Asia outside Japan,” Lee says. “Now, along with increasing international connections through such means as tourism and the Internet, people are able to get to know more and more about Asia.” When the branch museum opens at the end of 2015, the first exhibits will include Buddhist art, textiles and tea culture from across Asia, Islamic jade items, and Japanese and Korean ceramics.

By the same token, Shih points to an emerging approach among Taiwanese scholars to look at local arts through a comparative lens that includes the arts of Japan, Korea and mainland China. “By transcending local limits, approaches with an East Asian perspective are likely to open up a brand new scope for Taiwanese art history research,” he says, explaining that such study would contribute to a better understanding of Taiwanese culture and that of Asia.

Referring to the “sudden” appearance of the NPM’s unparalleled collection of Chinese art in Taiwan, Shih says the establishment of the museum was something totally unforeseeable during the Japanese era. While that accident of history meant that a Chinese view of art dominated local art scholarship for several decades following the late 1940s, a wider, more ambitious perspective has been developing in recent years, one that explores local roots on the one hand and embraces Asia on the other.

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