Taiwan Today

Now counted as one of the top luminaries among Taiwan's ink painters and calligraphers, Lee Yi-hong was born in Xigang Township, a southern coastal town in Tainan County in 1941. At 25 he graduated from National Taiwan College of Arts, now National Taiwan University of Arts, in Banqiao, Taipei County--then the only specialized art school in all of Taiwan--and soon began teaching art at a high school in Keelung. By 1969 he had become a devoted pupil of the master painter Chiang Chao-shen (1925-1996), beginning a productive relationship that would propel him to the pinnacle of the art world in Taiwan. Eventually Lee would surpass his brilliant master, and for some time he has been a master in his own right.

In his 30s, Lee also took up photography, joined the Keelung Photographic Society and began winning first place prizes in various categories. These parallel pursuits have given Lee's painting a solid foundation in the manipulation of perspective and in framing views in his own unique manner. Lee is forever curious, and has traveled widely to experience and photograph different scenery, including destinations such as Bhutan, Sikkim, India, Nepal, South Africa, and of course famous spots in mainland China including Guilin, Huangshan, the Stone Forest, Suzhou, Hangzhou and Yangzhou, sometimes taking along his own students to share in the ambiance.

As Lee's career progressed, his works began to gain high praise and he was invited to participate in exhibitions of Taiwan artists sent on world tours by the government, as well as exchange exhibitions with mainland Chinese museums. Lee was invited to teach painting at various places including the New Asia College at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, but kept as his teaching base Taipei National University of the Arts in Guandu, from which he finally retired in 2007.

Master at Work

Beginning more than 30-odd years ago, Lee entered the rarified atmosphere of traditional literati painting when he studied with the master of the genre already becoming rather rare in Taiwan, Chiang Chao-shen, then chief of the department of painting and calligraphy, and later deputy director of the National Palace Museum. From the late 1960s to the 1970s it was difficult to tell Lee Yi-hong's work from that of his teacher.

Chiang's very personal landscape imagery stemmed from the best of mainland Chinese traditions, from his love for and memories of the mountains and streams of his native land and--by dint of his work at the museum--first-hand familiarity with diverse brush-habits of great masters of many past centuries. Once removed to Taiwan as a refugee far from his native home, Chiang's work took on a deep, restrained melancholy that resonated in his depictions of craggy mountains, in spite of the bright orange foliage that dotted waterside scenes next to his lively malachite greens. From the start, Lee Yi-hong's landscapes in the Chiang style differed from his teacher in only this one respect. Whilst in composition, motifs, colors, brushwork and even in inscriptions, the student stuck to his master like a shadow, the profound anguish in Chiang's work did not follow. Instead, Lee's paintings glowed from the start with an irrepressible buoyancy and a joyous outlook on life that have marked his oeuvre ever since.

"As for my teacher Chiang Chao-shen, I hugely admired his lively and sensitive brushwork in the lines, and learned them thoroughly for my own painting," Lee says. "Then I discovered that Chiang's real nutrition came from literature and ancient poetry. I asked myself, 'How can this metamorphosis be transmitted?' and realized it is not taught but learned from internal growth. It was then that I realized the importance of departing from teacher Chiang and exploring on my own."

"I, too, dug into literature, much of it modern. Progress was slow. As I entered this phase, I didn't exclude new and Western influences. At that time I took up photography. Then I moved to the mountains close to the ocean, and would often spend entire days by the sea in the sunny, sandy, blustery, windblown outdoors," he says.

Distinguishing Features

Art historians and good critics search for personal features that distinguish individual masters, as well as traits that eventually become hallmarks of their time. The latter result from mutual borrowing, deliberate or unconscious, but the incorporation of another's motifs, devices, or special brush traits into an artist's own oeuvre usually projects a sense of integrity that art historian James Cahill has called "rightness." These borrowings are not forced or out of place. This is because each item, although "invented" by different artists, is a visual characteristic of their common era--a mark of their time, reflective of the culture and flavor, or Zeitgeist, that the artists shared. In contrast, in forgeries, where a fake Song dynasty period landscape has Ming dynasty period motifs or Ming structural characteristics, for instance, the forced feeling is recognizable because of the ill-fitting, discomforting conjunction of incompatible features, as well as morphological features transplanted whole-hog from different periods.

Works from Lee Yi-hong's more recent oeuvre are simply radiant, as seen in a stunning retrospective exhibition entitled Looking Back, which included monumental and smaller paintings, photography and calligraphy at the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts at Taipei National University of the Arts over the winter of 2007-2008. In the pieces at that show, elements of his late teacher Chiang Chao-shen have receded into the background or disappeared altogether, and echoes of newer, younger as well as older contemporaries now cohabit his vigorous new works. These combine design, drawing from nature and traditional Chinese landscape painting, and culminate in a new vision of vibrant individuality that is Lee's alone.

Lee is the first full-fledged Taiwan-born, Taiwan-raised literati master. The definition of literati painting, or wenrenhua, is for the work to contain not only memorable painting, but also inspiring poetry of the artist's own creation and outstanding calligraphy in his own hand. Nowadays people use computers and no longer write with the traditional fur-tipped brush, let alone compose poetry or write in more ancient prose styles. Lee Yi-hong has worked hard at all these skills and is now the premier living literati painter, bar none, and has created a new pinnacle for Taiwan's cultural attainments.

Among Lee's monumental scrolls is his 1997 picture called Yangmingshan Erzihping. At nearly five meters in height, it is a work filled with the branches and scaly trunks of pine trees. The reference to his teacher is reduced to a thumbnail red maple tree, not one-twentieth the height of the giant green pines.

Zigzag is another favorite motif. The design dominates a bold tree painting, again of monumental scale and of daring simplicity: Juxtaposing earthen bank and zigzagging streams in Rain and Fog of Eighth River (2002), Lee repeats the pattern across the entire length of the scroll, subtly changing only the angle and the size of the pebbles, and yet this seemingly mechanical effect in fact creates a dynamic composition. Other astonishing scrolls that deploy a zigzag pattern include After Winter Comes Spring (2005) and The Plantation (2005), where white paths complement the light branches in mutual crisscrossing. Such works give Lee's painting a totally modern, almost chic look.

Lee has mastered the effectiveness of repeating like leitmotifs. Much as the Japanese Nihonga master Higashiyama Kaii astonished the world in the 1960s with his large paintings using a single color in ever-shifting hues--achieved through heating the mineral pigment to different degrees--here in Taiwan Lee Yi-hong composes monumental vistas using a single motif, the river rock. Juxtaposing rocks of different sizes and at various angles, Lee achieves dramatic results as in his Low Tide at Linshanbi (2002) and Stone Tidal Weir and the Fisherman (2003), from which he developed a series of illusionistic works that disperse highly textured boulders amongst the smaller rocks in the water, where they appears to be floating above the tide, as in The Fisherman (2003) and The Fishery (2003), among others.

"Gradually, having been affected by modernism, I was able to manage new images like the acres of large and small rocks on the beach, the weatherworn textures that were so impressive, even the darkened leathery skin of farmers' faces," Lee says. "From all of these I received new, important visual stimulation."

New, but Not Strange

Over the years, Lee has pursued the difficult task of brushing black ink monochrome onto shiny Japanese gold-foil panel spreads of nearly 4 meters square, such as in An Elderly Round Cypress (2004), which shows the trunk of a decaying cypress, an empty hull with broken branches standing by equally stoic squared river rocks. In an even more astonishing work three years later, Yushan Cypress (2007), the bark markings are eliminated, leaving only a few bold strokes of once-living skin, now glistening in the solitary sunlight of an abandoned gully. All the tree's branches have broken and split, leaving not even the last single tuft of cypress needles that had clung on in the 2004 work.

Along with his larger works, many of Lee' s smaller works also show startling originality and experimentation, incorporating new concepts, but never losing the flavor of Chinese traditional literati painting. In these works Lee shows the modernizing potential of the literati genre in Taiwan at its most promising. Lee plays with scale in works such as Mountain Pavilion, setting the three red trees in saraband right against the walls. In another's hands the exaggerated proportion and the daring self-imposed limitation to two colors, black and red, might easily weigh down the composition. Instead of oppressive monumentality, however, we sense bursting energy here in the almost naughty explosion of red blooms. The red wall theme reappears often, challenging the artist in its insistent horizontality taking up the entire width of the work with horizontal lines. However, each fresh viewing evokes a sense of glee. In Lee's oeuvre, joy radiates directly from the paper as from a child's heart.

Brush, Paper, Ink

In recent decades Lee has thickened his application of washes to the point of opacity, deviating from the translucency marking traditional Chinese inkwash painting. This, he explains, best describes Taiwan's streamside rocks that acquire layers of mud, lichen and other deposits that in time dry up, turning the rocks grey. Indeed, many huge grey boulders stood sentinel in the paintings on display at the retrospective, giving Chinese painting a new look.

In line with Lee's experiments with the application of brush and ink, he has also tried using different types of paper, and with amazing results. In the late 1980s, he experimented with splashed ink, juxtaposing different forms and formal effects, but the results were still legible as landscapes. For a while, tree trunks in his works merrily swelled out of pooled ink. By the time of the 2007-2008 exhibition, the pooling was applied on the back of paper to form distant mountains. The remainder of the painting was done on the front side, creating a fresh new effect.

"New paths opened up when I started investigating materials like papers and paints," the artist says. "In exploring papers I found, for instance, that the front and back of two pieces of thinner papers can also be painted on, resulting in two, three, even four painted sides that can be mounted together as a single painting. This can be actually very effective."

The Kuandu Museum show exhibited several examples of back-painting, even double-paper painting where markings and ink traces on separate sheets of papers are mounted as a single painting. The brushwork on each side of the paper is integrated, producing a see-through effect. Lee is also an extraordinarily generous and sharing artist; he does not withhold secrets to his craft. For example, the labels at the retrospective exhibition carefully listed the type of paper used for each work. This is of great help to aspiring artists who may wonder at the particular effects Lee achieves in certain works.

Painted Word

Lee's world is charged with life and gaiety. Love for his native land and for his subjects illumines each work. There are bright flowering trees, leafless wintry woods lining pebbled streams, homestead courtyards peaking from the woods--the tenor is always a positive vitality with no trace of the brooding or bitterness sometimes seen among many painters today.

Among the most delightful of Lee's new works are a number of inkwash nudes, lovingly limned in strong, robust brush strokes. In one work, a figure lies relaxed, mirthfully surrounded by the Buddhist Heart Sutra, which declares colors--objects of the five (illusory) senses--to be void and void to be colors. It is rare to find inkwash nudes of such beauty and accomplished brushwork as in these works where gentle eroticism is fired with Lee's virile brushwork and masterful calligraphy in xiaokai (small, formal) script. If Lee Yi-hong can develop the genre into a series, it would provide Chinese painting with truly outstanding examples of the nude that are easily on a par with the best of Henri Matisse.

For centuries, one of the most endearing features of Chinese literati painting has been the artist's inscriptions on the painting. Sometimes the inscriptions include those of friends and later admirers; together these encapsulate the passage of time and the long or fleeting friendships into one composition of text and imagery. Self-inscriptions come from the heart as if the artist were talking to himself, sharing his most intimate thoughts in verse. The inscriptions may also record the day's events, letting us in on some of the artist's personal history. Nowadays this centuries-old tradition has all but died out, but finds in Lee Yi-hong an unabashed champion.

Artistic Journey

In 2001, Lee took friends and students on a voyage to the Suzhou- Hangzhou-Shaoxing area of mainland China. Setting off from Shanghai, they visited various famous scenic sites, stayed at quaint inns and traveled on boats and overland. Lee observed every little detail and recorded his impressions in an enthralling narrative handscroll some 20 meters in length entitled Touring Wu-Yue and Jianghuai. Such titles evoke at once the presence of history, as Wu and Yue were the ancient kingdoms respectively of today's Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces during the Warring States Period (fifth to third centuries B.C.). To this day Wu and Yue retain their shorthand names.

Naturally, for Lee and his Taiwan party, it was a look at a history far older than Taiwan's, a chance to see sites long known to them from books and legends, sites that still remain standing, albeit in ruins. These were destinations legendary figures had once graced and where colossal events had taken place, all now re-presented in the guise of quiet lanes, blooming trees or thriving shops. For the group, such views inspired a double exhilaration, one in which the past breathes audibly in the colorful present. On this long handscroll Lee would pause at passages recording highlights of the day, and in the tradition of self-inscription, immortalize their various experiences.

In his newer, colorful works of mountainscapes in his native Taiwan, we begin to see echoes of Lee's contemporaries, including the hoary "non-painter" Yu Cheng-yao (1898-1993), who was featured in the then Free China Review, the previous name of the Taiwan Review, in July 1986. In Lee's works, however, the mountains and craggy peaks are stacked tightly, breathless but glowing, and his brushwork, far superior to Yu's, carves deep crags into the ancient pinnacles, as in Border of Heaven (2005), which again, is a whopping 4.8 meters in height. In Lee, Yu's legacy finds a worthy spokesman and gains perfection in the upgraded brushwork.

"Paintings done with oil and pigments are entirely different. I don't consider merely painting with ink--often in the manner of oil painting, or without any emphasis on brushwork--as real ink painting," Lee says. "Modern artists' [inkwash] paintings can be entirely new, but they must never lose the root of ink painting, that is, painting centered on brushwork, traditional brushwork."

Lee's works combine not only new texturing and washing techniques, but also a stark and compelling use of colors that expand the palette of Chinese literati painting. With breathtaking audacity, Lee "lights up" the skies above the Border of Heaven and the last 317 centimeters of the 25-meter-long handscroll Journey to Yushan, combining pinkish oranges with sky blues in streaks that move across the horizontal expanse of the work, his 2007 chef d'oeuvre. The work brilliantly integrates the best of past traditions with timely innovations. The scroll is a journey in time along Taiwan's--and Asia's--highest mountain after those found in the Himalayas, with its pinnacle soaring 3,952 meters above sea level and (so far still) perennial snow. Lee has repeatedly traveled to these domestic peaks and taken photographs both of and from them, and it is these visits that form the basis of this virtuoso, luminous work. In light of masterpieces such as Journey to Yushan, there can be little doubt that Lee Yi-hong will go down in history as one of the very few true titans of 20th-21st century Chinese painting.
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Joan Stanley-Baker is an art historian and art critic based in Taipei.

Copyright © 2009 by Joan Stanley-Baker