Local color and Taiwan

Taiwanese 'local color' ( 地 方 色 彩 ) can come in many ways. It can be related to China, but there are also Japanese and Austronesian alternatives. Moreover, China aesthetically is a complex phenomenon, we can see there levels of the vernacular and of the official culture, the vernacular can be from the South or the North of China. Thus,

306 Vladimir Kapor (2008), ‘Local colour revisited: an essay in conceptual genealogy’ in Postcolonial Studies, vol. 11 (1), p. 45.

307 Edward Said (1977), Orientalism, London: Penguin, p. 41.

Minnan or Hakka cultures can be the main inspiration. Artists associated with 'local-color' are painters Li Mei-shu ( 李 梅 樹 , 1902-1983), Chen Cheng-Po ( 陳 澄 波 , 1947), Liao Ji-chun ( 廖 繼 春 , 1902-1976), sculpturer Huang Tu-shui ( 黃 土 水 , 1895-1930) and others.³⁰⁸ Local color of Taiwan is originally a project of Japanese colonial politics, introduced through the system of exhibitions. The first artworks with Taiwanese local color can be found in Imperial Exhibitions ( 帝展, they were hold in Japan, 1919-1936)³⁰⁹ and Taiten or Taiwanese Exhibition (臺展, also 灣展).³¹⁰ Through Japan in the beginning of the 20^th century Taiwan receives influence of Western art and the idea of local color. Japanese has tried to show its leading position in Asia through dissemination of these ideas. Colonial administration of Taiwan and Korea justify themselves through the ideas of 'cultural progress' and 'modernization'. Taiten in particular was dedicated to bringing art and culture to the 'uncultivated' (' 陶冶'³¹¹) people. This system of colonial cultural politics constitutes what Xue Yan-ling ( 薛 燕 玲 ) calls 'ambition of cultural leadership by the imperial Japan' ('日本帝國想在亞洲文化主導權的企圖心').³¹²

Li Mei-shu (李梅樹, 1902-1983) seems to occupy more significant position than any other painter related to Taiwanese local color aesthetics. Li Mei-shu has his own

308 For a brief introduction in Taiwanese local color tradition see Xue Yanling (1998), “Difang secai” in Encyclopedia of Taiwan, nrch.culture.tw/twpedia.aspx?id=4706. (accessed online on the 3th of June, 2018).

309 See Li Jin-fa (1998), “Dizhan” in Encyclopedia of Taiwan, http://nrch.culture.tw/twpedia.aspx?id=4675 (accessed online on the 3th of June, 2018)

310 For more on art and politics at the age of Japanese occupation as well as the role the exhibitions play, see Jason C. Kuo (2000), Art and Cultural Politics in Postwar Taiwan, Seattle: University of Washington Press, pp. 32-83.

311 See the translation of speech by Hidehiko Guro (石黑英彥, head of the Bearau of Culture and Education), dedicated to the first art exhibition by colonial government in Xue Yan-ling (2004), Rizhi shiqi Taiiwan meishu di diyu secai.

Taichung: Guoli Taiwan meishuguan. taiwaneseart.ntmofa.gov.tw/b3_3.html (accessed online on the 3th of June, 2018) 312 Xue Yan-ling (2004), Rizhi shiqi Taiiwan meishu di diyu secai. Taichung: Guoli Taiwan meishuguan.

taiwaneseart.ntmofa.gov.tw/b3_1.html. (accessed online on the 3th of June, 2018).

memorial gallery³¹³ and his birthday is celebrated as the Mei-shu's month ( 梅樹 月 ).³¹⁴ This art festival is held annually since 2012 and takes place in the town of Sanxia as well as in other locations. Li Mei-shu's heritage receives commemoration unlike any other Taiwanese painter. So it is logical to concentrate on Li Mei-shu for a brief sketch of Taiwanese local color tradition.

The main source on the art by Li Mei-shu is the 'Li Mei-shu Memorial Gallery'. The gallery has a slightly random collection of the artist's works. Commercial portraits and nudes coexist with well done artistic accomplishments. The curators of the gallery emphasize the painting Washing Clothes in a Clear Stream (清溪浣衣, 1981³¹⁵), a late work, which, unfortunately, falls behind some other works by Li. Li Mei-shu skillfully represent a bright sunny day. Two dozen of people are sitting on the shores of the river in two groups, one at the riverside close to the observer and one group is around 150 meters away. Water is in the motion, partly it is a natural flow of the river, partly it is waves created by human muscles and clothes. Light is refracted by the movement of the liquid, mirrored figures and sky can be seen in it. The technique used to portray water strongly reminds that of photorealism, a method to create hyper realist paintings with numerous mirroring surfaces by using photographs.³¹⁶ Probably a photograph is used by Li Mei-shu as well. All people wear new bamboo huts and tidy new dresses. It seems they all are females, but it is not clear, Li Mei-shu does not show a single face.

Everyone's hair is of a dark hue, together with bamboo hats it refers to Asian background of the locale depicted. Grass is heavily sunburnt, so that traces of Taiwanese heat are captured by Li's brush. Washing shows people sitting near the shore from the

313 See website of The Li Mei-Shu Memorial Gallery, limeishu.org.tw (accessed online on the 4th of June, 2018).

314 See entry ‘2018 梅樹月’(na, nd), at the website of the Li Mei-Shu Memorial Gallery,

https://limeishu.org.tw/culture/news/5a8180c61899920802ed3b52 (accessed online on the 4th of June, 2018).

315 Please, see the illustrations.

316 Craig J. Peariso (2013), ‘Styleless Style? What Photorealism Can Tell Us about 'the Sixties'’ in Journal of American Studies, vol. 47 (3), p. 743.

back, but such a view can be accomplished also by a photographer. Such task does not require a painter. A painter can show locals from the inside, not the outside. To show what is missing in the painting Washing Clothes in a Clear Stream, it can be compared to A Religious Procession in Kursk by Ilya Repin (1844-1930). Repin shows the people of different age acting differently. He portraits social roles (a bureaucrat and a priest, a young beggar and an old beggar). An observer can spot in A Procession brutal conflicts and merry everyday interactions. In the case of Washing everyone is just sitting in the same kind of hat and that is it. But local folks go to this shore for decades, much more must be going on than this. Everyone is the same, just wearing funny hats – it is a perspective of a tourist, not a native 'local-colorist'. A much better decision would have been to paint the same scene from the river, to find some 'local types'³¹⁷ and to portray them, to show faces.

Li Mei-shu has used the theme of the washing of clothes at the river bank before

Washing. This theme is also central in A morning at the river bank (河邊清晨, 1970). A morning is a very good painting. In fact, it is better than Washing from the viewpoint of

local color. A morning shows a face, there is some interaction between people: one figure is standing, another is turning to the standing person. It is not clear what is going on between the two, but something can be sensed, one person is wearing simple clothes, her back is bent in a bow-like fashion, bamboo hat is held in the hands. The other person wears a more fashionable dress, her back is straight, her haircut is more elaborated.

Maybe it is the wife of a boss and a wife of an employee are having a greeting. The dim light of A morning is another positive site of the earlier painting by Li. It is not only a pictorial accomplishment, but also shows something of a local color value about the life in Sanxia in the 70s. Everyone wears bamboo huts despite the fact, that there is no sun yet. People come very early and will work long after the dawn will break. The artist is more attentive to the bamboo huts: some huts are new and shiny, other ones are older,

317 A term used by Russian local colorists for good representatives of some local culture.

darker, one hut is damaged.

There are also numerous paintings by Li Mei-shu where he paints his family. They are very good paintings, but the local-color element is weakened due to personal idiosyncrasy: characters of those paintings aren't 'local types', but concrete individuals the artist knows well.

Landscapes in general seem to be not that relevant to local color, because local-color is about people. Definitely not every landscape is an artwork of local local-color, but the border between genres is blurred. A possible criterion is if the artwork represents the relations between nature and humans.³¹⁸ When artwork does not represent these relations, when it is natural beauty alone – it is a landscape. Chen Cheng-Po's urban landscapes are nice exceptions, due to the attention to the fate of the town, its major architectural features, like a temple, a wharf or a lighthouse. Chen Cheng-Po in this way shows how elements of the westernization and the industrial age penetrate the traditional Taiwanese world. However, Li Mei-shu's picturesque views of Taiwanese mountains are not of this kind. Li's landscapes like A mountain stream (溪水, 1973), A spring daybreak

in Jilai (奇萊春曉 , 1973) or A dawn (黎明, 1968), are not related to local color. The

disinterest in human side of Taiwan of these landscapes reminds the artworks by Japanese during the colonial period, for example by Ishikawa Kinichiro. In the case of a Japanese painter, like Kinichiro, this coldness can be understood as a sentiment by the representative of 'the main nation' of empire toward a colonized 'little brothers'. Liao Xintian also spots some elements related to this coldness, thus in Ishikawa Kinichiro's works "electric poles were a rare sight" but "Taiwanese landscape artist deliberately emphasized modernity"³¹⁹.

However, in the case of Li Mei-shu the source of this distance is unclear. Rural

318 Or between nature and any rational agents in general.

319 Liao Xintian (2007), ‘The Beauty of the Untamed: Exploration and Travel in Colonial Taiwanese Landscape Painting’

in Refracted Modernity: Visual Culture and Identity in Colonial Taiwan, (ed) Yuko Kikuchi, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, p. 60.

scenes by Li often feature his family members and create an impression of family portraits rather than local color artwork. On the other hand, Li's urban artworks, like The

red blouse ( 紅 衣 , 1939), The new costume ( 新 裝 , 1965) or The Enjoyment of a cool weather ( 納 涼 , 1976) shows local color of vibrant lifestyle of metropolitan Taiwan.

Probably Li is an urban realist painter and a metropolitan local colorist. His upper class origin and financial success as a landscape painter during the Japanese and as a portraitist during the KMT limit success of some of his local color projects while strengthening other sides of his art.

Religion plays a crucial role in the creation of the 'local-color'. The Zhushi Temple (清水祖師宮) in Sanxia, the decoration of which was Li Mei-shu's task for years, can be a place of incorporation of 'local-color'. The only problem is that by itself it is rather 'a source material for local-color' rather than 'local-color'. You cannot artistically represent local-color by being potentially a good example of it. Someone has to pick such example and entangle it in the artwork or in a novel. So, a hypothetical novel on Li Mei-Shu, or a story his son tells during excursions (how his father didn't want to finish the temple, because of the believe that after the work is finished the artist should die³²⁰) are perfect examples of local-color. The relation with birds Li Mei-shu and Sanxia have – the 'birds-characters' by early Li, birds from Zhushi Temple – are naturally poetic treasures. But they are not yet aesthetically reflected or interpreted. Someone should show the interactions – of Li and Japanese occupants, of Li and KMT, of Japanese and KMT, of Japanese and Sanxia, of KMT and Sanxia. Finally the relations between Li Mei-shu and Sanxia should be clarified. It is a story of Taiwanese youth going to war in the name of distant Japan and Li Mei-shu going to study in Tokyo School of Fine Arts. It is also a story of birds and humans.³²¹ But Li Mei-Shu contributes not much to this as a

320 I'm very grateful to Professor Ju from NCCU for the introducing to me Li Mei-shu's son.

321 Li Mei-shu and Sanxia share a special relation with birds, as it is shown by early birds-characters by Li as well as his late decorations of the Zhushi Temple full of avian motives.

storyteller, more as a participant. Probably he holds an elitist position in his community, and because of it he is separated from commoners. The distance between artist and people artist paints in Washing Clothes in a Clear Stream hints on this elitist isolation. Li Mei-shu paints Sanxia, but in later years he does it from the height of an ivory tower. On the other hand, it is not the case with many other local colorists of Taiwan. Chen Cheng-Po, for instance, seems to be always deeply connected with his community, and he probably deserves much more attention. Moreover,

Chen Cheng-Po's death in 1947 came in the roundup and execution of notable intellectuals that accompanied the February 28th Incident. An aura of martyrdom, therefore, further endears him to young Nativist painters in Taiwan today.³²²

And of course, artists-martyrs are sublime. This sort of the sublimity, however, comes not directly from their art, but from the historical connotations which cover their artworks. Often, a historical tragedy prevents us from seeing the original intent of the artists. Chen Cheng-Po's ''subject matter, though, was not foreign but very close to home: the idyllic Taiwan of fifty years ago.''³²³ Chen Cheng-Po's native island is seen in his art as beautiful, and sublimities of the mountains in Chen Cheng-Po's landscapes are subordinated to the main idea of the Ilha Formosa, an old Western name of Taiwan which means a 'beautiful isle in Portuguese. As I've said in the introduction, the transition from the aesthetics of the beautiful to the aesthetics of the sublime does not mean that beautiful artworks are impossible or that there are no sublime artworks before the transition.

322 Gary Marvin Davison and Barbara E. Reed (1998), Culture and Customs of Taiwan, Westport: Greenwood Press, p. 98.

323 Ibid., p. 97.

在文檔中 論台灣前衛藝術的美學——從康德觀點出發 - 政大學術集成 (頁 103-110)