Through his oil painting and woodcut printmaking, Lin Chih-hsin has been exploring the phenomena of Taiwan and creating imaginative historical tapestries of gigantic proportion.
One day in the early 1970s, a 38-year-old elementary school teacher from southern Taiwan visited an art museum in Japan where works by such distinguished painters as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso were on exhibit. Overwhelmed by his first encounter with such masterpieces, he placed a long-distance call to his wife that night and urged her to sell all their cattle and turtles, animals they had been raising for a sideline business. "She was very confused," says Lin Chih-hsin, "and thought I was being impetuous."
In the four decades since, the accomplished artist has proven that his midnight decision was not a passing fancy. Each day after he finishes his early morning workout, Lin works in his studio until well into night and only takes breaks for meals and naps. Today, Lin is working on an ambitious project of panoramic oil paintings that portray Taiwan's 1950s landscape on 50 canvases, which together will make up a single work more than 110 meters long. In order to hone his skills, he has made regular trips to Japan since 1998 and has submitted works to an annual art exhibition in Tokyo where his oil paintings quickly secured permanent judge-free status in 1999. Also since 1999, his oil pieces have been selected for the annual exhibition of the Salon des Artistes Français (French Salon of Artists).
Before Lin tried his hand at oil painting in 1991, he was well known for another--and some think quite disparate--genre. Born into a farmer's family in 1936 in the southern county of Tainan, he entered the Tainan Teachers' College as an art student to study sketching, watercolor, and ink painting. However, he was first drawn to woodcut printing, and though it was not included in the school curriculum, he picked it up from his sketching instructor. He attempted his first woodcut pieces when he was eight years old. The young Lin took swellings off a silk-cotton tree trunk and cut them into patterns resembling a folk-religion talisman. He had already watched craftsmen at local temples produce rubbings from carved woodblocks. "The resultant prints were very popular among my classmates," Lin says. "And that gave me a sense of achievement."
During the 1950s, Lin's early pieces, small monochrome woodcuts, appeared in magazines and newspapers as illustrations. At the time, printmaking was becoming popular in Taiwan's art circles. In 1970, the Graphic Art Society of the Republic of China was established in Taipei to promote printmaking and to hold a nationwide biennial print exhibition. After neglecting his art after he graduated from the college in 1955, Lin began creating larger colored prints almost 15 years later. Since 1971, his woodcut prints have been selected in print exhibitions held in Austria, Britain, China, Germany, Italy, Korea, Norway, Singapore, Switzerland, and the United States.
Lin's international renown partly stemmed from his rural themes and local flavor. Water buffalo, sheep, chickens, paddy fields, hard-working farmers, children having fun, nursing mothers, and boisterous festivities, all these subjects symbolize an idyll of simple pleasure and countryside beauty. The artist's detailed depiction of the villagers' everyday life also helped document a changing society. "Taiwan is my artistic inspiration, and I've tried to create lively and fresh images of the island," Lin says. "I am serving as a witness to the good old days, and the values that those days embody, which I hope can exist in the modern world." Simple and naïve thematically, his prints nonetheless have a very expressive style. The colors are almost too vibrant, reminiscent of local temple decorations, the carved lines are quick and bold, and the overall picture is dynamic.
Lin's printmaking art culminated in the 124-meter-long piece Celebrating the Matsu Festival. This piece consists of 68 woodblock pieces, each nearly a meter wide and two meters long. The project, which took Lin 20 years to complete, resulted in one of the largest print works in the world.
One of the most important deities in Taiwan, Matsu--whose name means "grand female ancestor"--has been revered since large numbers of Chinese Han settlers sailed across the Taiwan Strait some 400 years ago. Matsu is a guardian of seafarers, just as Poseidon was for the Greeks who sailed the ancient world.
According to the folk legend, Matsu was born into a Fujianese family near China's southeastern coast in A.D. 960. Her original name was Lin Mo-niang, meaning silent lady, because she didn't cry for a full month after she was born. As an adult, she would at times fall into a trance and appear to fishermen in trouble at sea. She died and ascended to heaven at the age of 28; it is this scene that Lin's epic work begins with. Every year, on the 23rd day of the third month in the Chinese lunar calendar, people on both sides of the Strait celebrate the goddess' birthday with religious rituals, parades, folk dances, and musical performances.
After announcing the formidable project at the age of 40, Lin embarked on an islandwide pilgrimage to watch and record the details of relevant temple rites and festival celebrations. He also delved into literature, documents, and oral traditions relating to Matsu. During the first ten years, he sketched two versions of the Matsu festival in preparation for the final work. In the end, the project turned out to be a far more immense undertaking than the artist had initially thought. With numerous woodblock prints to take in, the project demands the attention of the viewer. "Like the characters in the long parade celebrating Matsu's birthday, people must move forward to view this lengthy work," an art critic says. "Viewers themselves also acquire a kind of ritualistic experience."
In addition to touring the island, this epic work has been invited for exhibition to the Eastern European countries of Lithuania and Latvia. In 2003, a piece titled Lion Dance became the first Taiwanese print that has ever been selected for the prestigious Japanese Exhibition, an event that has been around for nearly a century.
Lin has also explored different forms of art, such as sculpture, colored glass, and chiaochih pottery, a style of brightly glazed ceramics that was introduced to Taiwan around 200 years ago by craftsmen from China who were invited to decorate important temples. The skills that he learned to master have been applied to a pottery and glass factory that his family operates in Tainan. "I often remind myself not to stick to one genre," Lin says. "While an artist develops his own unique style, he must not limit his imagination and perspective."
Lin is working on his second epic project, which will be a work in oil paints. He finds oil painting even more subtle and challenging than printmaking. "Going from the indoor woodcut studio to the outdoor expanse of nature, I'm deeply satisfied with the direct emotional expression and the great variety of hues in oil painting." He points out that while printmaking can produce a greatly stylized effect through color and contour, he can teach his students to master the skill in half a year. When it comes to oil painting, however, "three, five, or ten years of training wouldn't ensure adequate proficiency."
Although the subject of Lin's oil paintings is mostly Taiwan, the artist draws inspiration from distant masters. Lin continues to study the works of Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947), a French painter described as a magician with colors. Depicting familiar scenes of everyday life with shades of fantasy, the French painter explored the play of sunlight in household interiors in an exuberant style close to impressionism.
Lin's influences in printmaking also arrive from distant shores. The spontaneous and natural representations in the Japanese artist Shiko Munakata (1903-1975) have stirred Lin's admiration and imagination since he first started studying the art nearly five decades ago.
Because of his achievements in such areas as woodcut painting, oil painting, and sculpture, Lin was recognized in the Who's Who in the 21st Century by the International Biographical Centre in Cambridge, England. Selected from 1,575 candidates, Lin is the only one from the greater China area among the 11 people who were granted the center's Order of Excellence.
For Lin Chih-hsin, a career in art represents a combination of physical and mental strength and patience as well as wisdom--and with it comes the odd dose of mystery. Lin, who long suffered from chronic asthma, discovered after starting work on the Matsu project that he could breathe a little easier. Now, he feels like he has conquered his condition. Maybe the protective power of the goddess has played a part here, and perhaps as a reward for his chronicling of her mercy for the souls bobbing at sea and the retelling of Taiwan's history.