84-year-old artist Lee Shih-chiao "A painter must be willing to suffer."
Sitting back in his sofa, a cigarette in one hand and a walking stick in the other, 84-year-old Lee Shih-chiao (李石樵) looks like a typical grandfather. The famous painter does not talk much. When he does speak, his words, in idiomatic Taiwanese, are always thought provoking. "A painter must be willing to suffer," he says when asked to comment on his career as an artist. Be fore he gained his present stature, he and his family often had to live modestly. "When I was young, people even turned down paintings I offered as gifts," Lee re calls. "They said they didn't have any room to display them." But times have changed. Last September, his oil painting The Bath (浴) was auctioned in Taipei for NT$12 million (US$480,000).
Lee is a member of the first generation of Taiwan artists to study Western painting. He was born in Taipei county in 1908 during the Japanese occupation (1895-1945). Being the third son of a well-to-do farming family made it possible for him to study art instead of the typical choices of law or medicine. His parents never discouraged him from painting, perhaps because they were too busy with his seven brothers and sisters to worry over his education.
In 1927, when Lee was in the fifth-grade, his watercolor painting Taipei Bridge (台北橋) was selected for the first Taiwan Fine Arts Exhibit. It was a decisive moment in his life. At the age of fifteen, he entered the Taipei Municipal Teacher's College, which was the only place in colonial Taiwan for young artists to study Western art.
In spite of his precocious beginning, Lee's career did not always go smoothly. In 1929, after marrying, Lee went to Japan for further study, but failed the entrance exam to the Tokyo Academy of Arts two years in a row before finally passing. A number of deaths and illnesses in the family soon forced him to return to Taiwan. But as soon as he could get away, he was back in Japan. After graduating in 1935, Lee was offered a job at the Taipei Municipal Teacher's College, which he turned down in order to pursue painting full-time. Over the next decade, he spent six months each year in Taiwan and six months in Japan. To earn money to support himself in Japan, he painted portraits of many rich landlords in central Taiwan. For each small canvas, he was paid around one hundred dollars, enough to live on in Tokyo for two months in those days.
Lee believes that decade was the most important period in his career. "If I hadn't stayed in Japan, my painting career would have come to an end," he says. During these years, Lee's works were frequently accepted in some of Japan's most prestigious art shows including the Imperial Exhibition. He became the only Taiwan painter to participate in the event seven times. For his achievements, he was granted credentials which allowed him to take part in the exhibition without first participating in the preliminary selection competition.
His Young Chao-chia Family (楊肇嘉氏之家族), was selected for the seventeenth Imperial Exhibition in 1936. Before painting, Lee was invited to spend six months with the Young family in Taichung to get to know the personalities of each member. The same year, his Reclining Nude (橫臥裸婦) gained him some notoriety when it was declared pornographic by the Japanese authorities in Taiwan and barred from exhibition. Although both paintings show sound technical proficiency, they in no way compare with his later works.
Success in Japan meant it was time to go home. In 1944, Lee returned to Taiwan and, following Japanese custom, opened his studio to young artists where he taught without charging a fee. He himself had benefited from free instruction while in Japan. For many years, his studio in a Japanese-period building on Hsinsheng South Road was open to all artists. "Anyone who was interested in painting could come and try," Lee says.
Thousands of people have come to his studio to learn how to paint, including well-known local artists such as Wu Hsuan-san (吳炫三). His students call him the 'painting doctor' because he can diagnose a problem in their work at a glance. Lee does not lecture and his comments are usually quite terse. Hsia Hsun (夏勳), a professional painter, has also studied with Lee for many years. "The master doesn't like to talk much when he teaches," Hsia says. "His comments are sometimes cryptic, like a Zen master's. Once when I was painting, for example, he came up and said 'go get some glue.' I couldn't figure out what he meant. When I got home, I kept thinking about his words. What do pigments and glue have in common? Finally, it dawned on me. He was telling me that I had to create a smoother transition between colors-I had to glue them together." Unfortunately, the landlord took the studio back in 1982. Now a modem high-rise stands in its place.
For many years, Lee refused to take a job teaching art at a local college, even when money was short. Desiring to devote all his time and energy to painting, he stuck to his small studio. "I was afraid that I would be influenced by students if I taught in the schools," he explains. It was not until 1963 that Lee felt confident enough to start teaching professionally. He began at his old alma mater, which had been renamed the National Taiwan Normal University after the war, and has since taught at the Chinese Culture University and the National Taiwan Academy of Arts.
A close-knit family -- the artist with his grandchildren and a relative in front of a painting titled Knitting(1935).
Over the years, Lee's style has gone through many changes. His works encapsulate the history of modern Taiwan painting. "A painter must be able to think and respond to the times he lives in," Lee emphasizes. Although he has worked in a variety of styles over the years, Lee's reputation rests primarily on his early realist paintings. His most representative works were done immediately after Taiwan was returned to China in 1945. Market Entrance (市場口) and Construction (建設) are generally considered his signature pieces. According to Pai Hsueh-Ian (白雪蘭), a local art historian and critic who prepared a study of Lee's paintings for the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in 1989, these paintings "faithfully reflect the social injustice of the times."
Market Entrance, was done in 1945 when Lee was thirty-seven. It depicts the crowded Yungle Market, then the busiest downtown district in Taipei. At the center of the painting is a proud lady in sunglasses dressed in the latest fashions from mainland China. In front of her, a scrawny dog begs for scraps from a shabby, bare foot street vendor. The artist's intention is clear: to compare the rich few with the poor masses. "My purpose was to document the hardship people suffered just after the war," Lee explains.
His great concern for working people and society is also the focus of his 1947 work Construction. The war was over, the Japanese had left, and people were looking forward to rebuilding and getting on with life. Lee's technique is realist, but the scene is an idealistic depiction of the construction of the library behind Taipei's presidential building. Reminiscent of the WPA murals produced in the United States during the 1930s, the painting depicts a wide range of people including workers, their children, street vendors, and young, college-trained engineers. The thirteen figures in the painting represent a full cross-section of society. The canvas seems to hum with activity. "When I painted those figures, I focused on portraying their strong physical builds," Lee recalls. "Market Entrance and Construction are my favorites because they were done at the peak of my powers. I didn't think I could ever surpass them."
According to Pai Hsueh-Ian, during the 1950s Lee began to feel that he could not go any further with realism. He developed an interest in artists like Pablo Picasso, Paul Cezanne, Paul Klee, Marc Chagall, and Bernard Buffet and was soon experimenting with other Western styles such as cubism, surrealism, and expressionism. "These Western painters have really not influenced me much," Lee says. "I am very familiar with Picasso's techniques, but they won't work in Taiwan. Our lifestyle is so different here. We have to find our own way." A few years later, he began painting his Moonlight Series, a group of dream-like works, some of which are a fusion of cubist and surrealist techniques. In the 1960s, Lee departed from purely figurative painting and produced a number of abstract works which show the influence of Klee.
But in the 1970s, Lee returned to realism and focused again on painting human figures. In this period, he painted many large canvases filled with nudes as well as a number of paintings depicting joyful family life. Even though Lee prefers a quiet life and generally maintains a low profile, he was forced into the spot-light again in 1976 when his 1972 painting of three nudes, Three Beautie (三美圖), was reproduced on matchboxes in a promotional effort by Hua Nan Commercial Bank. The bank printed the painting along with a quote from Lee:
"You must be able to feel a painting. If an artist paints Venus, he must be able to hold her." Incredibly, someone reported the matchboxes as pornography to the authorities. "It was not a funny joke," Lee recalls.
When he lost his studio in 1982, Lee moved to the United States to live with his children. He still visits Taiwan from time to time. Since moving abroad, he has focused on landscape painting, especially the parks and the rural areas of America. These paintings tend to be colorful but rather impersonal. The human figures are generally indistinct, mere accessories to the landscape. When painting in Taiwan, he favors Taipei street scenes and views of Keelung harbor.
Lee's work has been well preserved. He attributes this to the efforts of his late wife. "I called her 'Lady of National Treasures' because she preferred financial hardship to selling my paintings. If it hadn't been for her, there wouldn't be nearly so many of them left," Lee says. In the last few years, Western-style realist works by senior artists like Lee have en joyed a resurgence in Taiwan's art market. A small painting might fetch as much as NT$300,000 (US$ 12,000).
At the 1992 opening of the Lee Shih-chiao Museum the artist shares his thoughts on paintings with friends and admirers.
Lee remains unfazed by all the attention and high auction prices. Instead, on July 11, 1992, just before his 84th birthday, he opened the Lee Shih-chiao Museum in Taipei. Among the four hundred works in the museum's collection are Market Entrance, Construction, and Three Beauties. However, due to space limitations in the museum, only fifty canvases can be displayed at one time. Lee has also established a foundation to care for the paintings. The organization is currently seeking donors. "Only by taking these steps can my works be kept together so that the public can appreciate them," he says.
Pai Hsueh-lan says that Lee's life has been filled with dramatic successes and frustrations. He enjoyed a great reputation as a young man and he is held in high esteem again today. He is different from other senior Taiwan painters; because he has always been more concerned with art than with the market, he seems aloof from the world. Even in old age, he still paints almost every day. "I wish I could paint the whole world," Lee says. "An artist is a lot like a marathon runner. He may receive a great deal of applause in the course of a race. But no one knows how he'll finish.