Taiwan painter blends art and life in retrospective

"Hunted Bird and Still Life" (1967) suggests sacrificial rituals.

By June Tsai

For Taiwanese painter Liu Keng-i, there is no distinction between art and life—there is just the work he does.

“Painting is my life. I have tried to capture the scenes in my life as they pass in front of me,” the 72-year-old artist said Jan. 20 at the opening of “Aria of Life,” a retrospective on his art and life at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

Sixty oils and pastels as well as dozens of pieces of handcrafted furniture, on view in the TFAM through April 3, provide a glimpse into the mind of this visionary artist.

Images in his works appear blurred, in a manner reminiscent of impressionism, to the extent that human expressions cannot be read and objects and natural forms have more shape and shadow than detail.

Upon a closer look, the objects give way to the exercise of color and composition: shades of brown, red, green, white or blue begin to play a greater role than the objects in reaching the aesthetic goal Liu has in mind.

“Trends in art come and go, but I chose to follow on what the preceding generation of Taiwanese painters accomplished, trying to improve my skills from that basis, broaden my vocabulary and enrich the connotations of each painting,” Liu said.

Son of the renowned Taiwanese painter Liu Chi-hsiang (1910-1998), Liu Keng-i acknowledged the lifelong influence of his father, who was representative of the Japanese-educated generation of Taiwanese painters. Liu Chi-hsiang studied art in Japan when Taiwan was under its colonial rule (1895-1945), marrying a Japanese woman.

At the end of World War II, the Lius moved back to the family home in Tainan, southern Taiwan. The homecoming did not prove to be blissful for an ambitious painter such as Liu Chi-hsiang.

“The February 28 Incident in 1947 and the white terror rule that followed led the country into isolation and cut off the cultural resources most needed for a spiritual life,” Liu Keng-i wrote in an article commemorating his father.

He described his father as a quiet man who loved nature and freedom. In the turmoil of the transition from colonial rule to the Kuomintang government in postwar Taiwan, the family lost its land, allegedly to a government agent. Liu Chi-hsiang then took his wife and children to Kaohsiung, where they settled down in a small village. He was admired as “the father of Western painting in Kaohsiung.”

The younger Liu began painting under his father’s tutelage at the age of 18. Music had been his first love. “I enjoyed Bach’s music. His pieces create a musical church, and I felt the peace and comfort inside it.”

Religious architecture made a similar contribution to his pictorial art. In a dimly lit local temple he discovered a brown tone that fit his expressive purposes. Liu used this color to probe the effects of light and shadow, and he immediately knew that the element of contrast was what he wanted to grasp.

With this epiphany, around 1960, he knew that he would always be a painter. He spent the 60s in a brown period that has influenced all his later work. “It took me almost 30 years to realize that my personal style and interest in the twilight zone of the mind had already emerged at that early stage,” he wrote later.

A typical example of the period is “Self-Portrait” (1963), in which layers of brown in varying shades and thicknesses outline a male profile with one hand holding a brush, half raised to a canvas. It seems all outlets for the painter’s expression are stopped up by thick clay.

Besides the exercise of color for self-expression, exhibition curator Liu Yung-jen detected a theme of death and ritual in his “Hunted Bird and Still Life,” painted in 1967. This image evolves in later works exploring the dialectical relationship between life and death.

In 1969, Liu moved to Hengchun in Taiwan’s southernmost county of Pingtung, where he began working as a crafts teacher in a local school.

During this time he was inspired by his father’s ardent pursuit of joy in the contemplation and depiction of nature. The experience of living in the tropics, where things grow—and decay—quickly left a lasting mark on his art. “I’ve been trying hard to make what is transient in life permanent,” he said.

It was also during this time that Liu first tried his hand at making furniture. Most of his pieces are wood, made using mortise and tenon joints, and show the precision of which the artist is capable.

In the beginning, Liu only wanted to make furniture for his apartment. He took to the activity, however, applying his art training to woodworking and sourcing local timber. In the process, Liu said, the furniture went beyond being merely functional and took on the character of sculpture.

Another turning point came when he married Tseng Ya-yun, also a painter. With her support, he quit teaching, moved to Kaohsiung City and became a professional painter in the early 1980s.

Of particular note in the exhibition are some works with his wife as the model, including “Portrait of the Artist’s Wife” (1984) and “Woman in Red” (1985). In these paintings he began exploring the symbolic possibilities of the color red.

To fend off the pettiness and atrocities he saw in the human world, Liu said, he sought elegance, nobility and spirituality in red.

At the time Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s No. 1 port city, was booming with the expansion of heavy industry and an export processing zone. While huge foreign reserves piled up, the countryside was scarred by heavy pollution.

“Natural landscapes swiftly disappeared and became only memories,” Liu said. “In the meantime, in the 1980s and 1990s social movements such as environmental protection picked up strength as people struggled for a more livable world.”

Affected by the social atmosphere, Liu put his longing for nature, expectations for change and political criticism into his art. The faceless figures in “On the Way to Execution” (1992), for example, seem to represent a victim and his persecutors, making a statement about human rights violations.

Having lived in different cultures, moving among the Taiwanese, Japanese and Mandarin languages, Liu has also been particularly absorbed in the issue of identity.

“On the Bridge” (1993), for instance, expresses hesitation about which way to go, as well as a desire to return to nature.

In “Crying Dawn” (1996), a shadowy person dressed in red holds a body covered in white cloth against a blue and brown backdrop, forming a highly symbolic image: something unknown is taking shape.

This work in a way represents the general sentiments of the time, Liu said, as Taiwan was holding its first direct presidential election. It was a critical crossroads, as a person or a country without a clear identity is at the juncture of death and rebirth.

The issue of identity has continued to preoccupy Liu since he began spending most of his time in New Zealand more than 10 years ago.

“Nature is my spiritual homeland, and not much is left of it in Taiwan anymore,” Liu said. The south Pacific country offers many quiet moments in which he can reflect and paint, in contrast to the hustle and bustle of Taiwan.

Liu’s art, consistent in style throughout his career, exudes pensiveness, perplexity and great expectations with regard to life and society. Taken together, his work amounts to a metaphor for an artist who is continually asking questions about his life and art.

This article first appeared in online Taiwan Today Feb. 18.