Taiwan Today

The young ink painter Peng Kang-lung shows a remarkable talent for expressing emotion through exaggeration of form and the diverse textures of landscape.

The first view of an ink painting by Peng Kang-lung (彭康隆) can be slightly unsettling, not unlike hearing a weird variation on a familiar piece of music. Although based on the classic leitmotif of an idealized landscape framed in two­-dimensional space, the basic melody of these unusually large-scale works has been transformed by the artist's composition, tonality, and brushstrokes, all of which are quite atypical of traditional landscape paintings. Closer inspection reveals myriad improvi­sations on long-familiar themes, until at last the parts flow together in the viewer's mind to form a harmonious whole, undeniably old yet dramatically new: a rhapsody in ink.

Peng's works adhere to established principles of ink painting, taking landscape as the subject and adopting a concept of perspective that may strike the Western viewer as curious. Classical Western painters would employ fixed focal points, converging lines, and figures of differing size to convey depth. Their Chinese counterparts adopted a two-dimensional viewpoint through use of fluid perspectives, and Peng does the same. He also works with traditional materials: ink, Chinese brushes, vegetable and min­eral pigments. But there the similarities between him and his predecessors end. Compared with classical ink paintings, Peng's come across as more emotional­ and vastly more individual.

Peng is a man of many talents. He is a water-ink painter, held in high regard by his peers, but he is also an art teacher and a painter in oils. Perhaps his greatest gift is an ability to create different atmospheres and express intense feelings through a variety of textures. In Blowing Snow, for exam­ple, dense, swirling brushstrokes cover the whole space, with only a bare outline of moun­tains lurking behind the flurries of snow. Heaven help any traveler unlucky enough to be caught here! Contrast this with Autumn Wilds, where dry brushstrokes and rubbed char­coal combine to create an atmosphere of immobility and silence. Against the background of the stony mountain, a single tree speaks of life—but the tree is already withering. This work, a reminder of mortality, inspires feelings of disquiet, perhaps even of desolation.

Peng Kang-lung was born in Hualien County, in 1962, of Hakka parents. At thirty­-five he seems too young to excel at an art which demands such long practice for matura­tion. He became interested in painting while a student of architecture at Hualien Industrial Vocational Senior High School. During his time there he received some training from the owner of a local gallery, and began a fine arts society with several of his schoolmates. Encouraged by the girl he first loved, he came to Taipei to take the entrance exam for the National Institute of the Arts. He failed the first year, but in 1983 he succeeded.

In 1984, during his sophomore year at the Institute's Fine Arts department, one of his teachers was Ho Huai-shuo (何懷碩), a famous contemporary Chinese landscape painter and art critic. Ho recognized that this young man had talent. Evening Rain, a small rustic landscape done the same year, shows that even then Peng knew how to create a misty ambience with subtle tsun-fa (皴法), a technique used for representing irregu­lar surfaces (see box).

During the late eighties Peng's works were selected for display at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum and the Taiwan Provincial Art Exhibition, but he did not have an indi­vidual exhibition until 1991. It attracted much attention. "Peng's drawing skills go way beyond those you'd normally expect from somebody his age," says calligrapher Li Yeh­-shuang (李葉霜). "It's impossible to tell that these were done by such a young painter."

Architect and art connoisseur Chen Tzu-ying (陳梓楹) goes further. "Among the twenty thousand or so ink painters now at work in Mainland China and Taiwan, only a few can rise above the constraints of tra­ditional drawing techniques," he says. "I haven't found anyone who approaches Peng for the majesty of his landscapes, for sheer density, and for the ability to affect viewers." Since Chen came across Peng at that first exhibition in 1991, he has bought more than thirty of the artist's paintings.

Nobody would challenge Chen's judgment on the majesty of landscape in Peng's paintings, which is largely ac­complished via exaggeration of shape and individualistic composition. Lin Chuan­-chu (林銓居), former editor of Art of Col­lection, a monthly magazine analyzing trends in the art market, highlights one recurring feature of Peng's landscapes: the principal scene, whether majestic mountains or seemingly endless forest, almost fills the paper, relentlessly squeezing a sin­gle tree, or perhaps a boat, into the bottom corner, where that object will inevitably lead the viewer's eye into the picture—­what the French call a repoussoir.

A good example is Chill of Spring. The main subject is a massive mountain, rearing up in the center, which occupies more than half the available space. In the foreground, at the mountain's foot, a row of trees swept by strong winds lean back­ward. The artist employs dry brushstrokes (the application of a lightly-inked brush to a wet surface) to accentuate the solidity and immobility of the mountain, using splashes and dots of ink to depict the frail leaves and thus soften the hardness of the background. The entire expanse is covered with pigment.

The subordination of everything to the principal subject is even more marked in Fine Snow. A dense, rocky mass of mountains occupies all the space except for the right bottom foreground, where we see moored a tiny boat, covered in snow. Crags pile closely one upon another, made even heavier because the sky has been altogether elimi­nated. A single wisp of cloud, floating from the left side, bisects the picture horizon­ tally to alleviate what would otherwise be almost unbearable heaviness. The boat, absurdly small in contrast to the towering mountains, is in fact the key to rendering an impression of three-dimensional space, because it is the only feature to suggest the pres­ence of a river between the rocky foreground and the mountains behind.

Such devices would likely be regarded as iconoclastic in classic ink painting, which accords primacy to the art of leaving space as one means of heightening a work's dynamic tension. Traditional painters often emphasize hsu-shih hsiang-sheng (虛實相生, liter­ally "empty-solid interaction"), the technique of manipulating the relationship between the concrete and the abstract into a state of balance, thereby creating a sense of rhythm. Indeed, some critics have commented that Peng' s biggest defect is his awkwardness in employing abstract notions of space. "Peng needs to make a big effort with hsu-shih hsiang­ sheng," says Ho Huai-shuo, Peng' s earliest mentor. "His preference for creating impos­ing mountains causes the concrete aspects of his work to overwhelm the abstraction without counterpointing it. As a result, the overall composition remains imperfect."

But not everyone shares this view. "Peng doesn't have to worry about the problem of concreteness versus abstraction," comments Kuan Chih-chung (管執中), another con­temporary ink painter. "On the contrary, he's developing his overemphasis of the con­crete into a personal style."

Peng agrees. "I know my works are thick and heavy, but it's out of my control," he says. "Just as my personality is reluc­tant to allow other people space, so I leave little room in the paintings." He continues in the same blunt vein: "I believe that the relationship between human beings should be heavy and thick... my ideal relationship is neither superficial nor transitory, but deep and eternal. And I'll become more and more thick and heavy!"

Peng does not spend all his time paint­ing with ink. He is very interested in oil painting as well. "Ink painting doesn't allow me to spend time thinking, or to overpaint or erase," he says. "I have to fin­ish each work in a very short space of time. But painting in oils is a long, complicated business. I have time to think about every last detail, from the overall composition down to how many layers of pigment I'm going to use."

Oddly enough, given his preoccupa­tion with ink, he teaches mostly western techniques and media. "The visual impact of Western paintings is much stronger," he explains. "It's difficult to teach ink paint­ing, whether we're talking about technique or the spiritual level. "

Peng is also a teacher. He currently has about fifty students, ranging from elemen­tary schoolchildren to housewives. "In my studio, I try to discover each student's talents and tastes," Peng says. He is obviously fond of his class, although he pretends a degree of exasperation. "I'm bothered to death by these squirmy children," he laughs. "Their parents treat my studio as a nursery." Maybe—but the artist's affection for his class is obviously reciprocated, and one stu­dent even brings him lunch every day. "I really don't know what will happen to these children in the future," Peng muses. ''They're living in such a material world. I'm just trying to let them feel there's something beautiful out there."

Teacher and oil-painter though he is, Peng's lasting interest is with ink paint­ing. He has at least one thing in common with his classical predecessors: he does not regard landscape as an image of the external world, but rather as a representation of a state of mind. However, he dismisses traditional paint­ers' humanistic ideals, such as the all-important search for spiritual transcendence, or the belief that human beings are an integral part of nature.

By rejecting such traditional themes and their concern with anonymous spiritual perfection, Peng is able to inculcate his work with greater emotion and individuality. Conceptually, however, he is closer to modern expressionists than to the great masters whose techniques he adapts. Peng endeavors to inspire such fundamental emotions as anger, yearning for serenity, and helplessness, through experimentation with brushstrokes and exaggeration of shape.

The Angry Mountain ranks among his most conspicuous expressionist works. In this painting, the artist whips up feelings of fury that far transcend scenic observation. The vigorous and restlessly twisted brush­ strokes, which represent traces of melted snow, have transformed the mountain into a howling white monster. The strong con­trast between the white snow and the tow­ering black peaks makes for a dreary atmosphere, but the interlaced brushstrokes of the torrential river in the foreground, echoing the unquiet snow, reinforce an im­pression of irrepressibly ill-tempered nature.

Peng smiles when this is pointed out. "No, you won't feel placid when you see my landscapes," he says. "They look like chunks of wall standing there, blocking your way. A lost world, maybe. A time when humans were in harmony with nature. You think: Can this lost world ever return?' For me, ink painting is a form of protest against human beings' betrayal of nature. It's a kind of exile, somewhere I can shelter my soul from a chaotic world. I don't give a damn for any humanist ideals when I'm creating my works."

Not many people would detect Peng' s conception of the modern world from his paintings, yet all who see them laud the unusual texture of his landscapes and the way in which they urgently express a variety of emotions. Kuan Chih-chung sums it up thus: "Frankly, I can't see how Peng's paintings reflect the relationship between human beings and nature. His real gift lies in expressing personal feeling, subjective emotions, via ever-changing brushstrokes."

Peng's mentor Ho Huai-shuo is of the same opinion. "He's good at grasping a misty and obscure atmosphere and weaving together the vigorous, mottled texture of land­scapes," he says. His point is illustrated by A Fading Chilly Night with Sudden Rain. Peng there creates a silky texture, using fine brush strokes and subtle aquamarines. The round hill, swathed in dreamy ambience, blends into fog. The "mountain" here is no furious monster, but rather a domestic cat that has fallen asleep.

"In my work," Peng says, "the skills of traditional ink painting have turned out to be texture." Unlike his forebears, who often employed sparse lines to represent an ideal landscape and left generous space to encourage meditation in the viewer, Peng invites his audience to appreciate landscape through a combination of dry brushstrokes and wet paint. Moreover, he has a stunning ability to adopt and merge different styles of brush stroke. "Traditional landscape paintings consist of lines," Peng says. "But I eliminate outlines, and I transform other lines into mass."

Peng is a diligent artist, producing an average of five to eight paintings a month, although he paints virtually nothing from the beginning of June through September. "I'm not in the mood to draw then," he says simply. Four years ago, he moved to the com­munity known as "Garden City," located in a mountain area near Wulai, twenty kilo­ meters south of Taipei. There he made friends with abstract painter Chuang Pu (莊普) and sculptor Li Kuang-yu (李光裕), both of whom inspired him to experiment with a new sense of voluminosity and increased dynamism. His house, built against the side of a mountain, has a marvelous view. The living-room, with its distinctive moon win­ dow, is open to the sky and to nature.

Peng is a friendly man, who likes to talk. He produces a painting from the wooden box where it is carefully stored. "This was done not long after I met my wife," he remi­nisces. "At that time I felt we were intimate and yet strangers, somehow. I can remem­ber exactly how I came to do that painting. It was one morning in 1990, early spring. It was drizzling outdoors. I woke up thinking of her and went to work at once. I chose a sort of gray-green color, to fit the three characters of her name." [His wife's name is Huang Ching-chih (黃菁芷); the characters respectively mean yellow, lush vegetation, and angelica.] "It took me less than a morning to finish that painting," Peng says. "And I knew I could never do it better."

He gave this painting to his wife. He also dedicated another excellent oil paint­ing to her—he does his ink paintings at home, reserving the messier oils for the studio—and obviously regards her as an important artistic influence. "My work changed [after I met her], along with my temperament. I become less haughty and aggressive than before. My recent works are more powerful, but at the same time more reserved than my earlier ones. That's thanks to my wife, to her tolerance of me."

Apart from his wife, it is hard to identify those who have shaped Peng Kang­-lung. The artist himself says that he was greatly influenced by Ho Huai-shuo, the man who first recognized his talent. "From him I learned how to sim­plify the details of nature and transform them into signs," he says. "A picture is composed of signs." He also acknowledges a debt to the famous con­temporary collector and painter C.C. Wang (王季遷), whose landscapes made him realize the importance of texture, al­ though he disagrees with Wang's methods of producing it. In the early paintings it is also possible to detect the influence of the Ching dynasty individualist painter Kung Hsien (龔賢), one of a group of austere, re­clusive artists who determined to break with the past. Like Kung Hsien, Peng em­ploys a limited pictorial vocabulary and consistency of composition—some basic elements repeat themselves to form a larger shape by accumulation, until the larger shapes constitute the whole picture.

A viewer might find the hasty, rather "scribbled" touches in After the Style of Huang Pin-hung reminiscent of the epony­mous artist Huang Pin-hung (黃賓虹, 1865-1955). The same could be said of The Blade of Cloud. But what about those drip­ and splash-styled brushstrokes in Peng's The Snowy Woods? Don't they bear an almost uncanny resemblance to Jackson Pollock's Action Painting?

This diversity is one of Peng's great­est strengths, at least according to collec­tor Chen Tzu-ying: "At the beginning, the stony texture of Peng's paintings was what caught my eye. Then I began to notice that each work had its own individual style and I became fascinated by his diversity; I re­member thinking: 'How can all these works have come from the same man?'"

Painter Kuan Chih-chung's perception is slightly different. "Peng's early paint­ings echoed his teacher Ho Huai-shuo and the masters of the Ching dynasty," he says. "But he soon stepped out of their shadow and now he has his own 'soul.'"

Actually, no one is keen to see Peng develop a signature style—at least for now. Chen Tzu-ying, for example: "I'm happy that Peng doesn't have a fixed style, that he makes changes from one picture to another." Calligrapher Li Yeh-shuang agrees. "Peng's absorbing the skills and styles of many schools," he says. "He's like a sponge."

Kuan Chih-chung makes the same point more bluntly: "Peng still can't quite han­dle the interrelationship between the detail and the overall composition of a picture.... It's good for him to remain immature at this stage, though. It's better to make mistakes now than develop a style that becomes too set to be changed later."

We should all be content to wait. Too many painters have mastered the technical skills of brush and ink, only to prove themselves unable or unwilling to rejuvenate and invigorate this ancient art form. But Peng, by successfully combining different picto­rial media and concepts, has done exactly that. Flaws of composition or detail may yet remain, but his merits far outweigh his defects. In Peng's paintings, the ethereal line disappears, to be replaced with solid, rough texture, and with a sense of relief we note that Chinese ink painting has at last stepped off its pedestal. No longer does it concern itself exclusively with the unattainable ideals of humanity integrating with nature, or spiritual transcendence, or whatever. It has returned to the real world. When we view Peng Kang-lung's paintings, we feel the urgent charge of feeling, the emotion that links us all; it is this quality that binds his works, so different in other ways, to make a har­monious and melodic rhapsody in ink. We hear it and are profoundly moved.

The painter Kuan Chih-chung died in September 1995, shortly after he was interviewed for this article.