daydreamed for the realm of sweetness in fine arts during my taipei tour

Daydreamed for the realm of sweetness in fine-art pursuits during

my Taipei tour

Taiwan is a metropolitan, as well as an Asian utopia, for the pursuit on fine arts and cultural/creative industries. Last year November, I, together with my two lifeguard friends, had a visit to Taipei. We lived in the Creative Chinese Culture Hotel of

My unforgettable artistic Taipei tour (Vincent LEE Kwun-leung 李冠良)

Simending (西門町 ), a hub for shopping, snack-eating and evening entertainments where let me comprehend how a metropolitan and cosmopolitan mode of artistic extravaganzas can integrate with the humanistic mode of art-event managements. Moreover, putting aside on the worry about the predictable loss of Mainland financial or tourism entrepreneurs due to the failure of passing the “Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement” (CSSTA); Tsai Ing-wen, ROC President with Democratic Progressive Party background, has articulately defined creative industries as the prior asset for Taiwan’s GDP growth, as she officiated the opening ceremony of a Taiwan Comic and Illustration Fair and showed an intimate connection with the art enthusiasts from the general public. So, during my tour in Taipei, I never felt this place as being polluted or poisoned by the heavy-manufacture-oriented values of contemporary Mainland China, or to say, there’s no red-capital colonization on this piece of Marine Formosa.

I name this Taipei tour as an “artistic tour” because lots of sightseeings we got in touch with were related to fine arts. For example, I visited the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (台北市立美術館). It located at the downhill side of the Grand Hotel Taipei (圓山大飯店), an official institute for the ROC government officials to diplomatically greet the foreign leaders and regularly organize Chinese painting sharing workshops among the bureaucrats. There’s also a boutique selling Manchurian cheongsams nearby, and the fashion design of those cheongsams originates from the court-lady beauty cultures of the past Qing Regime. The Taipei Fine Arts Museum is surrounded


by spacious garden areas, whereas you can find several sheltered cafes with romantic and youthful sentiments nearby. The snacks there are made of fresh raw ingredients, and some of them are rendered by natural grilling skills. Tasting snacks after appreciating masterpieces inside Taipei Fine Arts Museum within this place share similarities with the leisurely episode of “Luncheon on the Grass” painting by Claude Monet.

Before entering the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, I found a cottage with an indoor exhibition space showing some narrative paintings created by a group of artists from


a local painting society. At least it gives people an impression that, even though the Taipei Fine Arts Museum values the curatorship of universal contemporary-art masterpieces, the corresponding area still forebears other alternative styles of “Stuckism” painting creativities. (The concept of “Stuckism” comes from the avocation and anti-Saatchi art movement of Billy Childish and Charles Thomson in 1999)

My Taipei tour coincided with the exhibition period of “Taipei Contemporary Art Biennial” at Taipei Fine Arts Museum. I could thus appreciate how the young and amateur Taiwanese artists interpreted the notion of contemporary arts in different mediums. As I saw from the historical sequence of the museum curatorship records, Pak Sheung-chuen did represent Hong Kong art scene to collaborate with Taipei Fine Arts Museum for certain conceptual-art exhibition projects as well. The Taipei Fine Arts Museum successfully fabricates a liberal and experimental exhibition environment which shares similarities with the cored ideal of M+ in Hong Kong.

The “Taipei Contemporary Art Biennial” was held at both the G/F Gallery and 1/F Gallery. When I entered the G/F Gallery, I was attracted by a series of small porcelain paintings with grayish colour tones. These paintings were vague in contexts, and the pigments were made in glazes. The awarded artist told some sorts of stories. I was surprised that porcelain paintings could emerge in the Biennial as a new medium and a new form of aesthetic expression. The whole set of painting displays concerned the matter of spatial distribution, and the works appeared to be relaxing in visions.


In front of the porcelain paintings, there were some architectural models with different materials and compositions. These models projected how different awarded artists created their ideal domestic environments, which meant, to introduce the elements of “interior design” to a fine-art biennial event. It is just like the ideal of Bauhaus, that there’s no deliberative separation between “fine arts” and “design” as both assets can be sought for crossovers whenever encountering with different purposes in the creative industry.

Among all the awarded architectural models, I love this series of cheerful Mongolian yurts, which are fabricated by colourful stained glasses with mirror-based effects of light reflections. These yurts are greenhouses indeed, as the surfaces absorb the solar energies for the internal generation of electrical power.


On the 1/F Gallery, I found an awarded artist who portrayed the blending trees with mint-liked greenish tones under the windy circumstances. Oil paintings are still valued despite of the contemporary-art trend in the 21st century. The key point is whether you can convey a new message or a new visual language through the use of oil on canvas or not. These blending trees seem to be a mixture between pine trees and coconut trees. It looks fresh and interesting. The thin colour layers make art lovers feel that this is not a piece of aggressive painting at all.

These two awarded tree paintings are no longer subjected to Classical Realism at all. They are a kind of Expressionism, whereas it stresses the representation of one’s subconscious understanding on particular substances. Maybe you can say that the artist was creating illusions. But, this kind of illusions successfully made his works appear to be “youthful” rather than “subtle”.

In Taiwan, you can not accurately predict what kinds of paintings the museum curators or the Biennial adjudicators would appreciate. All kinds of styles can become nominated or awarded masterpieces. Being a Taiwanese painter only needs to follow his/her intuitions or aesthetic experiences during studio-art creations, and he/she can look forward to emerging as a qualified artist with unique visual languages. Every young artist can create his/her miracle and legends.


Gesture drawing surrounded by cursive typefaces is a common kind of decorative exhibits in cafes. I could not imagine that, such form of figurative expression in ink and watercolour mediums could also be nominated as an awarded Biennial exhibit. This reflects that the Taipei Fine Arts Museum forebears “Romanticism” (either French or Italian style) as one of the important interpretations in the mechanism of “Contemporary Art”.


When I visited Jiufen (九份), I had to hike under the freezing and rainy weather. But, the mountains and cliffs of Jiufen were so awesome, especially for their attainment


upon the cloudy layers. The foggy vision made Jiufen highland look like a fairytale realm, whereas lots of suburban apartments located at the downhill areas. I could not resist such graceful creation by our Lord at all.

Indeed, Jiufen was formerly a zone for the exploration of natural resources. Now, there’s a thematic park commemorating the past contributions of the mining labours there. Inside the park, I found a country art museum with humanistic sentiments. There was a joint exhibition inside the museum which the participating artists portrayed the episodes of Jiufen in different life perspectives and different mediums. I particularly admire a piece of Neo-Chinese-Ink painting, which describes the landscape structures of Jiufen mountains and cliffs with vivid spiritual essences, vibrant structural brushstrokes and semi-moisturized calligraphic leisures.


The “Art Taipei 2016” is an important international art fair in Taiwan every year. This art fair is coincidently held during my vacation in Taipei. I then spare a Saturday to visit there in World Trade Centre 101 by taking the Taipei Metro.

A gallery promoted Liu Guosong (劉國松)’s Modern Chinese-ink paintings during the “Art Taipei 2017”. Liu Guosong, as a Taiwanese art master, is also renowned in Hong Kong for his equivalent level of contributions to the Hong Kong neo-ink developments as Lui Shou-kun (呂壽琨) did. Liu Guosong has ever taught Chinese ink painting at CUHK Fine Arts, and he notes his devoted Hongkongese apprentice called Chan Shing-kau (陳成球) to operate the Hong Kong Modern Ink Society and persist with the inheritance of Modern Chinese-ink painting in Hong Kong art academia.

Liu Guosong initiates a revolution on the middle methodicalness while rendering the brushstroke fabrications for illusionary landscape painting. He invents the “Cramping and Peeling-Off Strokes” (抽筋剝皮皴 ) that reserve the white linear patterns with tensions. Master Liu dares to adopt newspaper, cardboards, plastic cloths and other materials as a substitution to Chinese brushes. Moreover, he persists with the experimentations of visual effects through ink-rubbing (拓墨), ink-staining (漬墨) and water-rubbing (水拓) techniques.


One of the important highlights in my visit to “Art Taipei 2016” was that, my Taiwanese artist friend from my Facebook network, Liu Tsung-jung (劉宗榮), had his oil painting exhibited in the art fair. Liu Tsung-jung is as old as me. He is a social-campaign activist, as he keeps counteracting against the corruptions of Kuomintang bureaucrats, landlords, overbearing entrepreneurs and the Communist-China influences. Indeed, his oil painting presents his ability in striving for an equilibrium between traditional realism and contemporary visual enlightenments. Indeed, Liu Tsung-jung emerged as a famous artist because his oil painting which portrayed the


occupation of Taiwan Legislature in Sunflower Student Movement successful won the influential exposures within the press media level. His “Sunflower” painting was displayed in front of the Judge’s Desk for a very long period of time. Liu Tsung-jung explains a fact that art cannot depart from politics, and artists have to care for the social issues and fight for justices throughout their creative lives.


Did I showcase my art talents during my Taipei tour? Of course I did. During my visit to Shifen (十分), my two lifeguard buddies and I bought a Heavenly Lantern. By using Chinese brush and ink, I wrote the auspicious blessing idioms onto the paper surfaces of the Lantern before letting it fly away from the rail track. Lots of local Taiwanese and foreign tourists, as well as the young staffs from the Heavenly Lantern shop, paid extra attention to my calligraphic strokes. They seemingly admired my proper Chinese characters because not many clients would be that serious to the calligraphic beauty as I did while brainstorming about their wishes.

For these years, I did not have much self-confidence on my calligraphic capabilities at all. Even though I was taught and valued by Dr. Daniel Lau Chak-kwong during my days at HKBU Academy of Visual Arts, I just took his Art History, Art Criticism and Chinese Seal Engraving courses due to the limited quotas of his renowned Chinese Calligraphy course. Moreover, I did not study Chinese Calligraphy Histories as similar as how the CUHK Fine Arts students and alumni learnt from Prof. Harold Mok Kar-leung or Prof. Vincent Tong Kam-tang’s research courses. I only obtained some fragmented awards from the external calligraphy competitions during my Visual Arts studies at Cheung Chau Government Secondary School. Under such background without in-depth calligraphy training, I felt surprised and thanksgiving that people in Shifen still appreciated my Chinese characters.

It is a miracle that I could do something as similar as Ko Chen-tung (柯震東 ) and Michelle Chen (陳妍希) did in their “You Are The Apple of My Eye” (那些年．我們一起追的女孩 ) movie episodes during my Taiwan tour. Putting aside the tough strife


for livelihoods in Hong Kong, I was allowed to taste a bit of sweet romance in a public suburban area for a short while.

The experiences of absorbing nutrients from the Taiwanese art scene have given me an alternative perspective of hope towards the possibility of pursuing a fully-pledged fine art career. Taiwanese are generally more longsighted in ensuring young artists with trustworthy resources and liberal environments to rediscover their uniqueness in art expressions, as well as gathering lots of collectors to support artists’ creative fruits. Taiwanese artists dare to reserve their truthful personalities, and they are the experts of maneuvering Sino-Western aesthetic crossovers within the Asia-Pacific region.

Writer: LEE Kwun-leung Vincent (李冠良)


daydreamed for the realm of sweetness in fine arts during my taipei tour

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