May 2023, Taipei
Question: How did you become interested in art growing up in Hualien?
Q: How did the nature around Hualien inspire you?
A: The scenery around Hualien was very beautiful. My family were sugarcane farmers. We lived close to an inland mountain range, across from a coastal mountain range. Riding my bicycle to school every morning, I could see the coastal mountains. I couldn’t reach them, but the shimmering light of the river was beautiful. I thought, Someday I have to go there. Those mountains actually weren’t so far. I was just unable to ride over there back then. Later on I realized they were actually not very tall and only seemed so because we lived in a valley.
Q: At one point you were interested in art criticism. Why? And why did you not pursue it?
A: I think most artists and art critics say only vague and polite niceties. On Yongkang Street I’m known as “Roastmaster Long”; all my criticisms I say out loud, and all my compliments are concrete and on-point. In university, I took a course on art criticism, but dropped it when I found out that the teacher made simple questions unnecessarily complex. His essays were all mostly about reviewing art history, expressing only a few of his own thoughts at the very end. Art criticism shouldn’t be like this.
Q: How did Ho Huai-shuo, your teacher in university, influence you?
A: In middle school or high school, I saw a television program introducing him. I thought, How does he manage to invest Chinese landscape paintings with such a feeling of solitude, with such emotion? Traditional Chinese paintings tended to sublimate all emotion into yijing (“mindscape”). Moreover, Ho’s brushwork is not focused on linear expression, but rather on expressing texture and microstructure. At the time, the ways I employed water and texturing were completely under his influence, to the extent that some of the teachers of Western painting criticized our teacher, saying “Your students are too much like you. You aren’t teaching them or elevating them.” We debated this for a long time in a hallway. At the time I began to think I had to make my own way.
Q: Your 1989 graduation work, a four-panel Landscapes of Four Seasons, already showed a certain stylistic individuality.
A: This was because I was actually closer to fellow students in the Western painting department. One time, a younger student of Western painting took a few sheets of rough hemp-fiber paper from me to paint on. In ink painting we care about the twists and turns, the variations in strength and rhythm in brushwork. He had none of that, but what he did looked better than my paintings! He treated the paper as nothing but a material and created interesting textures and flavors on it. This was an inspiration to me also.
Q: What was the motivation behind the graduation work?
A: I wanted to use four colors to represent spring, summer, autumn, and winter respectively. Spring I painted in green. In summer, Hualien experienced frequent heavy rainstorms that shrouded entire mountains in black, so I painted a black summer. Autumn was red, and winter white. These landscapes were all from my imagination. I painted large and imposing mountains because I was on a mission to restore the monumentality of Song Dynasty landscapes.
Q: Those mountains cannot be seen in Taiwan, especially not snowclad mountains. Did Song Dynasty monumental landscapes feel emotionally distant?
A: The worlds I wanted to express couldn’t be expressed through Taiwanese landscapes. I had to rely on imagination. Quite on the contrary, Song landscapes felt very close to me, drawing me to imitate and learn about them. Unfortunately I didn’t quite have the training. A Song landscape is robust when it needs to be, fine when it needs to be. I couldn’t paint in an overly fine way, so I simply painted the worlds I wanted to paint.
Q: How does brushwork differ between oil painting and ink painting? How has your experience with oil painting influenced your ink painting?
A: Oil painting tends to be heavier and focus more on microstructure, but I paint in oil the same way I paint in ink. I bring my brushwork training in ink into oil painting. I don’t need to describe too much and can resolve something in a few strokes. To put it more accurately, my oil painting has influenced my ink painting, and vice versa, and back again.
Q: Shitao states in his Comments on Painting that one “does not establish any one method and does not forego any one method.” Does this resonate with you?
A: To forego a method or not, to use a method or not—this is where a painter’s limitation is revealed, and once that happens it’s all over. I hope that every time I paint I try something new, something that leads me to another world. Recently I reviewed all of Huang Binhong’s works and found that his color, ink, and dots are all distinct, and do not correlate to specific forms or objects in predictable ways. He expands his ink dots to achieve spectular visual impact.
Q: How did you come upon the idea of painting flowers?
A: When I was 32, I felt that I had reached a deadend in ink painting. Then I came upon these flowers called king proteas, which struck me as having the same forceful presence as my mountains. So I made some oil paintings of them. I didn’t think of these as artworks and never showed them, but a collector bought them all from me. Later, after I broke up with an ex-girlfriend, she sent all the dried flowers in her flower shop to my studio, filling it up. One day I had nothing to do and started painting them. My students said to me, “Teacher, these paintings look like a new beginning.” At the time I was tired of painting landscape, and my brushwork became flavorless. Because flowers are different in form from landscapes, when I painted flowers I created lines that were completely different from landscapes. My brushwork became freer.
Q: Around 2014, you started to combine large boulders painted in ink with flowers.
A: That was because I was a landscapist after all and didn’t want to make a living selling bird-and-flower paintings. I wanted to find a way to reincorporate landscape and let people slowly accept my landscape paintings. In the past people didn‘t accept my landscapes, and conversely those who did didn’t like my flowers.
Q: How do you think about the boundary between landscape painting and bird-and-flower painting?
A: All my compositions are about combinations of void and solid, presence and absence. For example, each flower needs to be set off by something next to or behind it. The void passages in my paintings are the subjects, but they are not the focus. The focus is rather the brushwork that sets them off from behind.
Q: So whether you’re painting landscapes or flowers doesn’t matter to you fundamentally?
Q: How to you understand bijing momiao? Is it brushwork that is elegant or referential to classics, or has a calligraphic flavor?
A: It’s brushwork that a painter thinks that he or she can show off.
Q: You make your transition from landscapes to flowers sound like a matter of course. However, flower and landscape paintings each have their distinct sets of techniques and developmental histories, as well as representative practitioners. Over more than 1500 years, there have been only a handful of painters to have mastered both genres, and none of them have actually merged them as you have.
A: That is because they were bound by the rules of brushwork and by rational thinking. I treat both landscapes and flowers as brushwork, which in fact does not differentiate between subject matter. I now find that my landscapes lack visual impact without flowers, and my flowers without landscapes are unremarkable. Moreover, my flowers have too few leaves and don’t really look like flowers. They are ideas of flowers, anatomically different from actual flowers.
Q: But you still have to manage the scale of flowers in relation to trees and rocks, and then in relation to space and compositional depth. In practice, subject matter does matter to the composition, doesn’t it?
Q: In your recent works, the use of color seems very intentional and calibrated, as if skirting the boundary between beautiful and garish without crossing it.
A: I used to hate this Versace magenta. It’d make me nauseous. However, at this age I somehow have come to find the subdued reds of traditional ink painting too feeble, so that I need this bright magenta to support my compositions, but it has to be applied well—in gradual, slow, and very diluted layers. If you create tonal gradations within a single wash, you end up making something very vulgar. I am very particular about this.
Q: Many works from your 2018 exhibition had red palettes, and many of their titles alluded to body parts and organs. Why was that?
A: I started using reds already for the autumn mountain in my graduation work. Since then I have used reds to paint flowers, gradually developing a monochromatic red series. The titles were given by someone else. I myself wasn’t thinking about organs. I was focused simply on translating into color the brushwork of ink painting and the forms I wanted to render.
Q: Does it cross your mind that your works may make viewers uncomfortable? Some people sense in them a certain fiendish or even diabolical air. What do you think about that?
A: Usually when others are uncomfortable, I am the most comfortable. My reds have to be strong to satisfy me. If they are weak, I can’t even convince myself. How can I move someone else? “Fiendish” is actually a term of praise, since righteousness is gone from this world, and since we have no use for those properly beautiful things from the past. I am not a polite person. It’d be torture for me to paint politely. I paint with savage abandon—fiendishly. “Fiendish” means supreme refinement. I love this characterization.
Q: When you’re faced with your own works, do you ever find them alien?
A: Every one of my paintings feels alien. I don’t want to look at them. If I do, I’m always tempted to make changes to them, because I never see a painting as finished. Sometimes when I encounter my old paintings at collectors’ homes, I feel that I haven’t progressed, because those works were energetic expressions of vitality. I want unbridled vitality, not perfect compositions. Some people say I am technically excellent, but I don’t think I have any technique at all. What’s important is vitality. Without it my own self doesn’t exist.
Q: Your recent works also have vitality, but perhaps of another kind.
A: Right. The vitality there has been refined, whereas the vitality of my past works was an explosion of primal energy. People change—it can’t be helped. The flowers that I paint now are full of problems, but if I paint them perfectly, the overall force of the composition strangely disappears. When I paint in a less intentional way, my compositions are forceful and full of vitality! I can’t resolve this dilemma myself and can only find a compromise in it. If this was 30 years ago, my paintings would be rejected, because they don’t have any refined and magnificent brushwork and inkwork. Now that we are used to technical virtuosity to the point of finding it tiresome, my individual character emerges distinctly.
Q: There are about 8 monumental compositions in this exhibition. What challenges does painting at such a scale entail?
A: Painting at this scale is more interesting. I paint more fluently and excitedly, because there are more problems to solve. For example, a single flower cannot sustain a large composition, and I need to paint a string of flowers. How then do I manage the relationship between them? A large painting needs to be filled. How do I vary the composition while making it coherent? I need to exploit the resonances between different brushwork methods, different structures, and different subject matters. Even when painting the same subject, do I use the same color? What parts do I make bright, and how bright? Where do I make dark, and how dark? All these questions need to be thought through.
Q: Speaking of light and dark, how do you understand whiteness in your works?
A: There are many kinds: the reserved blank and negative white spaces of Chinese painting, the white highlights of Western painting, and the whiteness of objects themselves. I also think of whiteness as a kind of aura, suitable for delineating different space cells.
Q: In a colophon from the 1990s, you wrote that it was a mistake for some ink artists to subvert ink painting using Western forms.
A: They turned Chinese painting into Western forms of expression. I thought this was to “resurrect a soul in a different corpse”—a kind of pastiche involving simply switching one set of materials for another. How could it be called Chinese painting? I’ve learned a lot from classical Chinese paintings, but my brushwork is not pure Chinese brushwork. Yet I still work within the amorphous confines of Chinese painting and seek breakthroughs within them. I don’t wish to control my paintings with technique. I’d rather be guided by them, giving them what they ask of me. In this way I can make something new.
Q: That is a rather subtle point. It’s not about materiality, nor the medium itself, nor the refinement or sophistication of brushwork and inkwork.
A: What I’m concerned with is the relationship between one object and the next. Say there’s an empty space between a flower and a rock. What do you put in that space to evoke a mindscape, or to imply an ethos? This flower may not look pretty, but does it have personality, and does it warrant repeated viewing? I want a flower to have personality, but I can’t become preoccupied with its form. So my flowers don’t need to be very pretty. I repaint them over and over, but without spoiling them and without losing the flavor of brushwork. My whole world becomes the world of flowers—a bit cautious, a bit constrained, but not so much so that it strikes a viewer as beautiful. It is nothing at all, and it simply exists like that.
Q: Do you find these worlds in classical paintings?
A: When I look back at works by the past masters, I’m always surprised by how they can make their worlds look so full of interest. They can bring out visual flavor within a tiny area, or overturn the aesthetics of a whole composition with a single touch of the brush. Years ago I saw a colorful album by Hongren that was very elegant and just perfect. Such a painter’s work rewards prolonged viewing and warrants study and critique. I’m always charmed and pleased by paintings that achieve creative breakthroughs within the confines of existing conventions.
Q: What other painters do you like?
Q: Do you see these aesthetic values as salient to ink painting or common to painting in general?
A: All painting works like this. All great painters are on paths leading towards the same destination. Ultimately what matters to them is not technique, not personality, but emotional character (xingqing). Without character there is no painting. What I find the most admirable and captivating in works by old masters is always what is revealed within an instant, within a minute turn of the brush.
Q: How do you understand temperament, and what is the relationship between temperament and brushwork?
A: Temperament is the spontaneous expression of one’s self—whether it is noble or base, elegant or vulgar. What you see as your mission as a painter determines what your temperament is and what kind of paintings you make. There are many experienced painters with excellent brushwork, but they keep repeating themselves, leading to a loss of feeling in their work. I heard that one famous Qing Dynasty painter said to another that the latter “surpasses others in being raw (bushu, lit. ‘uncooked’).” To be raw is to be creative, to be vital. I’m glad that no matter what I paint, my friends always give me feedback. What they like is not well-honed brushwork, but brushwork with temperament. So one can’t paint in the countryside or as a recluse on a mountain. One has to live in the city.
Q: If neither subject matter, nor genre, nor brushwork is important, why not paint pure abstraction?
A: Different objects bring forth different emotions, and this keeps a painting from becoming uniform. I have certain feelings towards this flower, and certain feelings towards that flower, and when I paint them I bring different emotions to them. I paint every single flower in a different way, so that my painting doesn’t become boring. It’s interesting to think about these variations. I don’t like abstract painting because it is about variations in pure technique. After a while it feels hollow. In every painting I am exploring rather than painting. After each flower I don’t know how the next will turn out. When one flower appears ugly, I can make it beautiful by pairing it with the next. In my paintings there aren’t even whole flowers, but simply the suggestions of such. Through the variations between dark and light, dry and wet, large and small, these suggestions gain the formal substance and the vitality of actual, live flowers. So flowers are just an excuse: I borrow their forms to manifest my world.
Q: You have a very clear idea of what you’re pursuing aesthetically.
A: When you (Craig L. Yee) saw me paint, you were shocked. Even when I’m surrounded by people drinking and eating and chatting, at any moment I can simply dip my brush into ink and start painting as fluently as cursive calligraphy. This is because I’m aware of exactly what my composition needs. I’m very relaxed. I don’t paint well if I paint seriously. I paint well if I don’t. Sometimes you realize it’s not really you who is painting, but a spirit guiding your hand. You have no idea how you’ve painted a certain stroke, and afterwards you can’t recreate it on purpose.
Q: Can this state be described in terms of the concept of early Chinese philosophical notion of wuwei (non-action) ?
A: Wuwei is what literati and scholars theorize about. The moment a painter picks up a brush, he or she is “acting” already.
