Chen Hsih-hsien turns calligraphy into social art

Calligrapher Chen Hsih-hsien injects an innovative grassroots element into Chinese calligraphy. (Photo by June Tsai)

By June Tsai

As digital tools replace handwriting in the computer age, many people still find calligraphy, from grinding ink to actually writing, a good means of self-cultivation. Yet Taiwanese artist Chen Hsih-hsien approaches the art as performance, storytelling and a form of exchange with people and the times.

“The traditional functions of calligraphy have largely been lost or replaced, and what makes a calligraphic work interesting today is the modern expression of an individual’s feeling, a practice of contemporary, localized aesthetics,” Chen said in an interview July 1, 2012.

Chen, author of four books and several community cultural projects featuring his calligraphy, knew from the beginning of his career he did not want to spend his time alone in a studio imitating classical writing styles that evolved in ancient China.

“As the child of a poor family from southern Taiwan, I am not able to write like a Chinese court calligrapher of long ago, nor can my writing catch the charm in the style of Emperor Huizong of the Song dynasty [960-1279], however hard I work at imitating it,” Chen said.

“Imitating ancient masters is only the first step toward becoming skilled in character writing, but that is just a technical part to the art,” he said.

Chen draws his materials from daily life and reflection, rather than from texts written by ancient Chinese literati. For him, calligraphy is a way for the artist to interact with his environment and society.

Born in Tainan City’s Baihe District, the 44-year-old Chen learned to write with brush and ink in school like most people of his generation, but really developed an interest in the art in his early teens, when he spent most of his free time on it.

At the age of 19 he made up his mind to pursue nothing else for the rest of his life.

At university, Chen managed to spend up to six hours a day practicing all character styles, from the oldest oracle bone script through seal, clerical, standard, semi-cursive to cursive scripts.

After completing his military service, instead of looking for a regular job, he returned to Baihe, determined “to spend the next 20 years being poor and just doing what I like to do.”

He rolled up his sleeves and renovated a former pigsty, left unused after the family stopped raising swine, into a studio suitable for his own use.

Chen’s rendering of the seven-character idiom “All things in their being are good for something” is dedicated to children in a Tainan home for the disabled. (Courtesy of Chen Hsih-hsien)

“In the studio where I used to help feed the pigs, I did three things: practice calligraphy, read and watch foreign art films.” Chen said works by directors like Andrei Tarkovsky, Yasujiro Ozu and Francois Truffaut led him to think about how their movies succeed in transcending national and cultural borders to touch people’s hearts, and how calligraphy could do the same.

And Baihe, known for its 200 hectares of lotus fields, inspired him. Taking walks barefooted and talking with lotus farmers gave him ideas for many calligraphic works.

“The lotus is traditionally an object for aesthetic projection of the literati, but in Baihe, it represents hot, sweaty labor,” Chen said. The forms of the Chinese characters in his calligraphy began to reveal the figures of farmers—male and female, young and old— with local mountains as backdrop.

“I saw characters in the swaying of a palm leaf, in the breeze over a field of lotus flowers, in my pace walking down a country road.”

Chen fashioned Chinese characters into imagery from things all around him, with resulting works of a single character or groups of characters amounting to simultaneous abstract paintings and concretized ideas.

He believes this kind of Chinese calligraphy can communicate with people, in particular those who do not read Chinese.

Stephane Corcuff, a French specialist on Taiwan’s history and geopolitics, was one of the first to appreciate the unique effects of Chen’s work. He notes how Chen shapes the two characters representing “Taiwan” into the form of the island, and how a work titled “Love” reconfigures two instances of the character meaning “love” to depict a kissing couple.

“Chen’s genius lies in his reinventing the calligraphy of Han characters. He revisits Chinese culture and makes it Taiwanese.” Corcuff organized a traveling exhibition of Chen’s work in France in 2008, where the calligrapher also spoke about his work and staged a performance of calligraphy writing, attracting a fascinated crowd.

In a performance style he developed, Chen writes on a large sheet of paper hung on a wall, or on a standing board, with his brush strokes coordinated with music.

In his pieces, he uses expressive lines, colors and spatial arrangement to tell stories. “Book of Love,” published in 2005, for example, presents a series of works all using the character for “love” to relate the tale of a man and a woman looking for love, courting, having a relationship and separating.

Chen’s calligraphic version of the three characters for “Taiwanese,” as printed on this student satchel, resembles the shape of the island. His series of book bags will be part of the JAALA International Art Exhibition in Tokyo in August. (Courtesy of Chen Hsih-hsien)

“His calligraphy has become something of a multidimensional thing, where emotions, plots and even social background are condensed into a character,” commented Chen Jing-jieh, publisher of the artist’s latest calligraphic story, “Sunrise, Sunset.”

These works are the result of hours of labor and patient waiting. After almost 20 years of focusing on one thing, Chen Hsih-hsien said, he can now confidently find the right characterization for an idea.

Chen Jing-jieh believes that the calligrapher’s creativity comes from his solid technical base and powerful ability to put ideas into practice.

“In this sense, Chen has caught what was essential to the old masters,” the publisher said. He explained that great calligraphers such as acclaimed Song dynasty poet Su Dong-po were men of action who wrote about real experience and valued communication with their contemporaries.

Chen Hsih-hsien’s free sourcing of traditions for border-crossing experimentation has extended to the wider community through public art projects. In 2004, he collaborated with other artists to transform a 1.5-kilometer mango tree-flanked village road into a Baihe landmark.

He also organized a calligraphy competition for local students and art lovers in the lotus flowering season, which has become a characteristic tourist event.

In recent years, Chen joined local handicraft businesses to develop calligraphy-based cultural products. An ongoing project making book bags printed with his calligraphic renderings of local identities from around Taiwan, such as “Chiayi ren,” or “person from Chiayi,” “Kaohsiung ren” and “Tainan ren,” has generated a lot of business.

This series will be displayed in the 18th JAALA International Art Exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum Aug. 11 to 19. With this show, Chen said, he plans to articulate the rising Taiwanese subjectivity for a foreign audience.

His willingness to make friends and share ideas is the secret to his success, Chen believes.

“I have been looking for characterization outside of characters,” he said. “Real contact with people and their stories is what gives me ideas for my art, and I hope my work possesses the power to speak directly to people everywhere.”

This article first appeared in Taiwan Today July 21, 2012.

Poetry as liberation: Walis Nokan

Walis Nokan explains how writing poetry is a way to free one’s imagination in Taipei June 8, 2012. (Courtesy of National Taiwan University Taiwan Indigenous Peoples Resource Center)

By June Tsai

Walis Nokan fits many descriptions: aboriginal activist, prolific writer and critic, elementary school teacher. But in the eyes of many local authors, he is most of all a poet of Taiwan.


According to poet and professor Xiang Yang, Walis deserves recognition in Taiwan’s Han Chinese-dominant society not because he is aboriginal or because he has won just about every important literary prize on the island, but because his work speaks for Taiwan’s indigenous peoples.

“Moreover, his writing will not let his contemporaries ignore the country’s aborigines, who have been marginalized for four centuries by a succession of colonial powers, and forces them to reflect on their own Han Chinese identity,” Xiang Yang said in a literary salon June 8, 2012.

Walis’ recent publication, “Couplets the World Has Left Behind,” integrates his dedication to poetry and concern for aboriginal culture and education.

The two-line form allows one simple metaphor to be formulated in each poem, Walis said. “It can evoke imagination from the most homely things, and offers easy access to literature for everyone.”

Walis’ own first encounter with literature was serendipitous. One day while preparing for the senior high school entrance exam, he chanced to read the literary supplement of a newspaper at the office of the borough chief in Mihu, his home village in the mountains above the Da-an River in central Taiwan. He was 15.

“That such a different thing could have been composed using the same characters that appeared in our Chinese language textbooks—I was totally amazed,” he said.

Following the test, he entered the five-year teachers training school in urban Taichung. He read as much literature as he could from the school library, feeling as if he were discovering a new continent.

It was also in this period that he first became aware of his ethnicity. “I didn’t know the Atayal were an ethnic minority in the Taiwanese population until I went to study in Taichung, where I also met someone from another indigenous tribe for the first time. He was a Bunun.”

Walis began scribbling poetry, too. “I wrote things that were very vague but looked beautiful,” he said. He was influenced first by modern poetry of the 1960s, which adopted esotericism in the face of the propaganda and censorship that dominated Taiwan’s cultural scene at the time.

Then, from the grassroots literary movement of the 1970s, “I learned that a good poem is not necessarily difficult to understand,” he said. After more reading, he developed a clearer idea about good poetry. “I appreciated the rich possibility of rhythmic modulations in neatly arranged lines.”

After completing his schooling in 1980, Walis served in the military before taking up a teaching job in 1983. All this time, he continued to go by his Chinese name, Wu Jun-jie—as was required by law.

Soon teaching and literature were not enough to keep the young poet satisfied, as he became more aware of the economic and cultural predicament of Taiwan’s aborigines.

He wrote incessantly about the situation, with his articles appearing in newly established newspapers after the government lifted martial law in 1987.

Many aborigines of his generation became activists, riding on the wave of open political opposition. They called for the return of aboriginal land and correction of unjust treatment of aborigines imposed through government policies and legal decisions.

In 1990, Walis and his wife, Liglove A-Wu of the Paiwan tribe, began to publish the bimonthly “Hunter Culture,” which helped educate Xiang Yang and other contemporary writers about indigenous affairs. As the major contributor, Walis visited aboriginal villages throughout Taiwan to collect stories.

“The journalistic work at the grassroots level made me realize how cultural bankruptcy and the social collapse of tribal villages had been ignored,” he said. “Traditional cultures and languages were swiftly being lost, outside developers were making inroads into tribal areas, and almost all traditional land had been sold to nonaboriginals by the 1990s,” he continued.

“During the two years we put out the magazine, I was sleepless almost every night, eager for a revolutionary change. But I knew a cultural campaign would go a longer way than a political one for the indigenous peoples.”

In 1994, the government changed the official reference to aborigines: “Shanbao,” or “mountain people,” with its discriminatory overtones, was replaced by “yuanzhumin,” which literally means “original inhabitants.” It also allowed indigenous people to use personal names in tribal languages, although they had to be written in Chinese characters. Ten years later, Romanized names could be registered alongside the version in Chinese.

Walis had been using his Atayal name since 1990.

He decided to leave the city to return to Mihu in 1994, to be a language teacher in the elementary school. Following his homecoming, his books—collections of poetry, essays and journalistic works—began to come out one after another.

After the Sept. 21, 1999 earthquake carved a cliff out of the mountain on which the village stood, community reconstruction work became another major project for Walis.

Today, he continues to stick to his belief that cultural work is the key to making positive changes in the lives and future course of indigenous communities. Poetry is his latest tool.

“Couplets the World Has Left Behind,” divided into 14 thematic section on topics ranging from mundane objects and places to daily activities and international events, evolved from a homework assignment Walis gave his class in early 2010, requiring students to put down their thoughts on the top 10 international events of the previous year.

To demonstrate for the children, Walis produced some couplets on Palestine. In “Last Words,” he writes: “Dear children, our home and country/are over there on the side of Israel.” In “Identity”: “Our history is contraband/the diaspora cannot be recorded.” In the forum, Xiang Yang used this poem to introduce his comments on the situation of Taiwan’s indigenous peoples.

A later poem in the book’s “Study” section, by playing with the title of the authoritative Chinese lexicon, “Ci Hai,” or “Ocean of Words,” urges students to be as creative as possible: “After we bid farewell to the ocean/the land of writing emerges.”

“If you ask me, I’m the worst poet in our village,” Walis joked, indicating that the Atayal, with their oral tradition, are natural poets.

“I just wanted to show my students that they too can write poetry, and about anything they see, feel or read.”

According to Walis, Chinese literature, as it is taught in school, may have just the opposite effect. A formal Chinese essay, for example, is supposed to comprise four movements: the opening, follow-up explanation of the theme, further development and conclusion. “For me, that is too rigid a formula.”

Couplets help liberate thought, feeling and expression, Walis believes. In the past few months, he has been invited to libraries across the nation to demonstrate how he uses the two-line form to encourage students to write.

Poetry in Taiwan, Walis said, has been made a thing for the academic elite, and distanced from the average reader. “People end up reading no literature after school, and lose the ability to appreciate it,” he noted.

“It’s just like modern people with their shoes on all the time—they’ve become strangers to the feel of earth and stone.”

Fortunately, as Taiwan’s aborigines have become aware of the importance of cultural diversity, efforts to revive their languages and traditions have borne fruit in recent years, he said.

The literary exercise, in which students associate the world with words, helps them improve their Chinese language on the one hand, and learn to value what they have from their indigenous roots on the other.

“Today’s world is characterized by full-blown globalization and capitalism, which are impossible for aborigines to resist entirely,” Walis said.

“More language skills will help children adapt better to the larger society, absorb different cultures more easily, and speak for themselves, so that the exploitation of the past will not be repeated.”

(This article first appeared in online Taiwan Today July 1, 2012.)

Action-art helps Shih Jin-hua make sense of life

Conceptual artist Shih Jin-hua measures the height of Taipei Artist Village building with his forearm, fingers and thumbnails. (Courtesy of Taipei Artist Village)

By June Tsai

The Taipei Artist Village building in central Taipei is as tall as "49 forearms plus four open distances between the index and middle finger plus seven thumbnails." The distance from TAV to the entrance of the Taiwan High Speed Rail at the Taipei Railway Station is 2,294 "Size 10.5 New Balance shoe steps" long. The nearby Section 2 of Civic Boulevard is 334 "Spitting Johnnies" long--one "Spitting Johnnie" being the spitting distance of a mouthful of whisky.


Conceptual artist Shih Jin-hua used parts of his body along with various actions related to it as a measure of things and distances around him while working as an artist in residence at TAV from April 7 to July 20, 2008. The result was his solo exhibition "Living Beyond Measurement," which ran from July 18 to Aug. 31. To some, the artist's keeping at arm's length those standard units of measurement and inventing his own might be considered cute. Yet for Shih, the action-art project is more than a whim, having become a way for him to make sense of his life.

The Kaohsiung-based artist was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of 17, forcing him to use insulin to control his blood glucose levels. In 1983 at the age of 20, Shih began to monitor his blood glucose levels by himself, carrying out blood tests and keeping a close watch on his diet and level of physical activity. "I have to try and know when to inject insulin so that it will work at the right time to bring down my blood glucose level as eating raises it," he said Sept. 22. The balancing act became a routine part of life.

Year in and year out, Shih took note of the blood glucose levels, recorded them as dots on a graph, connecting them into fluctuating lines on sheet after sheet of paper and finally exhibiting them as a single document. The work, not yet finished after 25 years, is given the title, "Being Level--Glucose Records."

However, the measurement series carried out at TAV is an extension of his work started as the "Manhattan Project" when he was an artist in residence with the New York-based P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Museum of Modern Art from 2003 to 2004. That residency included 23 projects, of which Shih completed 15. One plan was to measure the Brooklyn Bridge in units of his own body. The artist estimated the length of the bridge at between 700 and 800 "fully prostrating Shih" long, but in his preparations for the attempt, he was unable to perform more than 400 of the movements before suffering stomach cramps. In the end, Shih was unable to finish the project, and all the while the risk of life-threatening hypoglycemia loomed over his work.

"I felt frustrated. Monitoring, injecting--such medical control never really made me 'healthy' as those readings only served to tell me when to do, or not do, something," Shih said. Life was reduced to dots and numbers, but death still threatened with ultrahigh or ultralow levels of blood glucose. "It has always been a mystery to me how I live to the next dot," he said.

"I began to ask: Who sets the standard? Is the medical technology reliable? I don't even trust myself to tell me about my own body."

For Shih, there was no getting around the sense of meaninglessness of the medical treatment. Instead, he went along with it, and eventually found that turning the daily activity into art gave him strength to live on. "The pain has to be suffered anyway. Now it makes sense in two ways--it's medical and aesthetic."

Shih also began collecting the medical waste from daily insulin injections. "I didn't mean to collect them at first. I just did it for hygiene's sake." The result is "Pearl Rosary," a photographic printout of used needles, test sheets, cotton balls and bottles in plastic bags, with one Ziploc bag containing one month's waste. "Together the bags represent the number of years I have lived. In that sense, these bags are like pearls." Shih, having collected around 200 bags to date, said the work would continue for as long as he lives.

"I try not to let the blood taken in vain, but to extract some meaning from the medical practice--it might accumulate to something in the end."

Explaining that art helps him deal with anxiety about the meaninglessness of life, Shih, a Buddhist, said his solution is "to make art and life interact with each other, and make rules according to their interaction so that life continues and art sprouts naturally, as it should."

In the work "Body Inscription," Shih records the act of prostrating himself in prayer on a set of soft mats, using a digital counter to record the number of times he prays in this way, and registering the acts in a computer spreadsheet file. The "action sculpture"--captured in digital photo printouts--was started in 2001 and is ongoing. The traces of these repeated acts are also seen in images of the worn mats. "We borrow this body from death. Before the outer form is 'recycled' by him, I intend to make the most out of my body."

Some might wonder if the end result of his daily process--medical waste, computer printouts, hand written graphs, pens and pencil shavings--could be called a work of art. Yet for Shih, art, like this body, is but a tool. In making art, Shih works through his anxiety and reflects on how bodily life, which is destined to demise, could be lived. In pondering Shih's work, the viewer might also start to question the worldly rules and standards we all follow, the definition of success and the meaning of life. Thus, the artist has done his job.


(This article first appeared in Taiwan Journal Oct. 3, 2008.)