Taiwan Today

April 1, 2012 was a very special day for watercolorist Hung Tung-piao (洪東標), as he was on the verge of realizing his dream of painting Taiwan’s coastal scenery while making a ’round-the-island motorcycle tour. After a year of planning and preparation, at 9 o’clock on that sunny spring morning, the 56-year-old artist straddled his motorcycle, which was already loaded down with painting gear. He departed from New Taipei Municipal Hsinchuang Senior High School in Xinzhuang District, New Taipei City—the school from which he had retired from teaching in 2007.

During Hung’s ensuing 56-day trip, he traveled 3,000 kilometers and painted more than 100 locations. Five months after he returned home, 118 of his watercolor paintings of Taiwan’s coastline—each marked with the particular scene’s latitude and longitude—were exhibited at Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei. Displayed along with the paintings were Hung’s books Wow, Formosa!, a large-format tome containing photos of the exhibited works, and 56 Days When I Was 56, which documents the entire process of the trip in text, photographs and paintings. Watercolorist Zheng Wan-fu (鄭萬福) notes in the preface of the latter book that while coastal scenery is a common subject for Taiwanese artists, Hung is likely the first to have completed a ’round-the-island series. “In addition to the detailed planning and endurance the trip required, it takes a great deal of passion and superb watercolor technique to execute such a project,” Zheng writes. “Works from the trip are phenomenal both in quality and quantity.”

Hung, who was born in 1955 in Yilan County, northern Taiwan, showed great interest in drawing and painting as a child. A pencil and a piece of paper, he recalls, could keep him quiet and occupied for a couple of hours while his mother was busy running errands or doing housework. Such talent did not go unnoticed for long, as Hung won numerous art competitions as a junior high school student.

When he was in senior high school, Hung decided he wanted to study in a university art department. “Most parents at the time didn’t see art as a profession, but I got some support from mine,” he says. “Their only requirement was that it had to be a normal school, since that was what we could afford.” (Taiwan’s national normal universities focus on training secondary school teachers.) Hung spent all his free time preparing for the university entrance exam in art, and, after three attempts, was admitted to the Department of Fine Arts at National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) in Taipei in 1975.

Students in the NTNU department are required to study a variety of mediums including oil painting, watercolor painting and sculpture. Hung performed well in each but found that he liked watercolors best. He notes that watercolor painting was introduced to Taiwan by Japanese artist Ishikawa Kinichiro (1871–1945) in 1907, a time when Taiwan was under Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945), and saw its golden age between 1975 and 1990. “Back then, the economy was taking off and the number of art collectors was increasing,” he says. “For them, watercolors were a good place to start a collection, as watercolor paintings were—and still are—cheaper than oil paintings.”

Then as now, market considerations have exerted little influence on Hung’s preference for watercolors. “I guess it has more to do with the characteristics of different art forms and the personalities of individual artists,” he says. “The feeling of lightness and transparency, the control of water and color and how paper responds to colors are just more ‘me’ than oil painting, in which layers and layers of paints are piled on a piece of canvas.”

After graduating from NTNU, Hung started teaching art to high school students and spending the rest of his time honing a watercolor technique known as segmentation. Artists following the conventional approach attempt to capture the light and shadow of an object at a specific moment. Segmentation, on the other hand, involves integrating the lighting and shadows that play upon an object at different times, while still retaining the object’s basic shape. Watercolorist Hsieh Ming-chang (謝明錩) notes that Hung’s works reveal a moderate approach to segmentation. “Based on his aesthetic approach, you can see that Hung respects nature and perfectly maintains the transparency of watercolors,” Hsieh says. “That’s quite different from the traditional segmentation approach, which artificially disassembles and reconstructs nature.”

Hsieh explains that watercolors make segmentation extremely difficult. “You can easily cover a mistake up with another layer of color in oil painting, but that isn’t workable in watercolors because of their transparency,” he says. “In watercolor painting, it takes precise control of various techniques to combine the segmented blocks while also keeping the painting neat.”

Hung held his first solo exhibition of segmentation works at a Taipei gallery in 1980. He went on to gain recognition as a top artist at various local art competitions and took first prize in 1984 in the watercolor category of the Taiwan Provincial Fine Arts Exhibition, which is one of Taiwan’s largest national art competitions.

In 2003, Hung became a resident artist at the Peninsula Arts Festival, which has been organized by the Pingtung County Government in southern Taiwan since 2001. Each October, 10 artists working in different mediums are invited to live on the Pingtung Peninsula for a month and create works inspired by its environment. “Sketching and painting in nature brought back the good memories of my school days,” he says. “Once again, I had the opportunity to immerse myself in the natural world, feel the breeze and the sun, take in the colors and translate all that directly into watercolors.”

After two decades of painting and establishing a solid reputation for his ability at segmentation, living and working in Pingtung’s beautiful natural environment led Hung to consider making a dramatic change in style. He explains that segmentation is a very rational process, as the artist has to spend a lot of time observing an object, disassembling its surfaces, analyzing the changes of light and shadow and reconstructing it in a studio. Naturalism, meanwhile, is driven by sentiment, as the artist sees a scene, is touched by it and expresses the resulting emotion through painting. “Art, after all, is about emotion,” he says. “Fancy techniques are just tools for translating emotion into painting.”

While naturalist painters strive to be faithful to nature, they also modify a scene to convey its emotional impact. It is difficult to render the feeling of a nighttime scene, for example, when one is painting in the darkness. Hung’s solution is to sketch a scene during the day and then bring in its evening patterns of darkness and light—the moon, a streetlight or light from a window—to render the desired feeling. Modifying a scene in this manner is very difficult, as it takes years of practice and sophisticated skills to perfect the play of light and shadow.

A New Approach

Hung did not become a naturalist painter overnight, as he struggled with the idea of abandoning a style he had already mastered and received recognition for in favor of taking a new approach. Eventually, he came to the conclusion that he had to keep moving forward. “I’d been painting rationally for 20 years and it was time for a change. I needed to face some challenges,” he says. Since completing his last segmentation piece in 2006, Hung has focused exclusively on naturalism.

The painter’s quest for inspiration has led to travels throughout Taiwan. Since he took early retirement from New Taipei Municipal Hsinchuang Senior High School, Hung has had more time to work with government agencies to create numerous series portraying specific locations. He received a commission from the Taiwan Forestry Research Institute, for example, to create a series featuring the nation’s botanical gardens; from the Chiayi County Government in southern Taiwan to paint Aogu Wetland Forest Park; and from central Taiwan’s Yushan National Park to paint scenes of the country’s largest national park.

The productivity and talent Hung has demonstrated in two different styles have made him one of the most influential watercolorists in Taiwan. His works were included in a 2008 exhibition organized by the National Museum of History in Taipei City, for example, to celebrate 100 years of watercolor development in Taiwan. Along with Hung’s paintings, the exhibition showcased works by influential masters such as Ma Pai-sui (馬白水, 1909–2003), Max Liu (劉其偉, 1912–2002) and Shiy Der-chin (席德進, 1923–1981).

Hung’s influence stems not only from his watercolor paintings, but also from his teaching and promotion of the art form. He and several other artists working in the medium, for example, co-founded the Chinese Asia-Pacific Watercolor Association in 2006. Hung, who served as the association’s president from that year until 2012, notes that he helped form the association because interest in watercolor paintings had been declining since 1990. “Some believe the decline resulted from a market trend that placed more emphasis on ideas than skills, while others thought it was due to collectors’ mistaken belief that watercolors were difficult to preserve,” he says. “The market wasn’t my concern, but I thought it was a pity that there weren’t enough opportunities for people to learn something about watercolor paintings and maybe grow to like them.” Hung’s approach to restoring interest in the medium was to organize many large-scale exhibitions, seminars and sketching activities, as well as to publish relevant books. “He was passionate and efficient about organizing those activities,” says Hsieh, another co-founder of the association. “More importantly, he managed to convince other artists to take part in the activities and work together to promote watercolor painting.” It is difficult to quantify the extent to which Hung has helped revive interest in watercolors, whether in terms of the number of artists working in the field, market prices or public awareness, but he has undoubtedly breathed new life into the art form, Hsieh says.

After stepping down as president of the association, Hung finally found the time to realize his dream of painting local scenery during a motorcycle trip around the island. “I’d waited 30 years to get the chance to make that tour,” he says. “But when you look at it from another perspective, I guess the wait wasn’t really that long. The coast line had waited 500 years for a painter since the Portuguese sailors named Taiwan Ilha Formosa [when they sailed past the east coast in the 16th century].”

The nation’s shores have finally received some attention, but there are still many other picturesque places awaiting the painter’s brush, and that is why Hung, fueled by a passion for translating emotion and scenery into watercolors, never leaves home without the tools of his trade.

Write to Jim Hwang at cyhuang03@mofa.gov.tw