Red Gold Fine Art

Period: 9/14 - 10/27
Opening Ceremony: 9/14 15:00

Chia Chi Jason Wang

The artist Lee Chun-shan (1912-1984), who moved to Taiwan from China along with the Chinese Nationalist government in 1949, eventually became the mentor of a generation of avant-garde artists, spearheading the development of modern painting in Taiwan. In July 1950 he published a short newspaper essay titled “Art and Contemporaneity,” and in its final paragraph he pondered, “What kind of painting do we need?” He offered two conditions that should be met: “First, it must possess contemporaneity. To achieve such ‘contemporaneity’ we must found our studies on European painting techniques, but we must also not neglect the special character of the Chinese people and the local color of the land.” He continued, “Second, we must engage in in-depth study of classical art and discover precious material from the artistic treasures of dynastic eras, as a means to create new art.” But at the same time, “We must not to be bound to classical art.”[1] His views influenced many of his student acolytes, especially the membersof the Ton Fan Art Group, which was founded in 1957.

In 1955 Lee Chun-shan moved to Yuanlin in central Taiwan to teach. In 1957 he took a permanent position at Changhua Girls’ Senior High School, where he remained until retiring in 1979. According to J.C. Kuo’s own recollection, he began studying under Lee as a high school student when he was still living in Changhua and continued until he graduated from university. While preparing for the college joint entrance examination, Kuo wanted to drop out of the medical department examination and switch to fine arts, and Lee personally visited his home to persuade Kuo’s father to agree. Clearly, the mentor-student connection between the two ran very deep. Lee introduced a pedagogical method based on Freudian psychology, which became a major inspiration for Kuo’s art. Likewise, Kuo was profoundly influenced by Lee’s advocacy of combining a foundation in Western painting techniques with the special features of the Chinese people and local color, plus in-depth study of classical art.

In the early 1970s J.C. Kuo had a preference for painting human bodies with deformed shapes. His style lay somewhere between semi-abstract and non-geometric, and images of bodily organs suggestive of sexual reproduction could occasionally be seen. After Lee Chun-shan settled in central Taiwan, whenever young artists sought him out for instruction, he always taught them individually. While he did not teach his students painting techniques, his teaching methods based on psychology and psychoanalytic theory still inspired Kuo in terms of the forms he expressed, leading him to explore dreamscapes and subconscious imagery.

Taiwan of the 1970s was still dominated by Chinese nationalist identity. From the mid-1970s through 1979, Kuo spent five years surveying and researching traditional Taiwanese handicrafts.[2] Ever since the High Qing era, Taiwan’s population of immigrants from southern Fujian had been gradually increasing. For more than two centuries, Han Chinese culture had become mainstream in Taiwanese society, and handicrafts reflecting the lifestyles, rituals and beliefs of ordinary people from China had been introduced, localized and transformed into Taiwanese traditions. Beginning in the 1990s, Kuo made good use of his understanding of Taiwanese folk art and his folk art collection, transforming them into vivid images—such folk deities as the Eight Generals, Mazu, Qianliyan, Shunfeng’er, and Crown Prince Nuozha—to represent the collective consciousness/subconscious, values, beliefs, and cultural perspectives of ordinary Taiwanese folk.

Chinese classical art also became another source of inspiration from which Kuo absorbed forms. By 1983 at the latest, he was already adopting linear iconography of warriors, knights-errant, and winged immortals from stone reliefs of the Eastern Han dynasty for the male images often featured in his paintings. However, Kuo replaced the slender lines of the stone relief figures with the rough, masculine, broad bands of black that can be seen in China’s woodcut movement of the 1930s.[1] In the early 1990s, he even researched Chinese mythology. Combined with the heroic imagery he had earlier borrowed from classical art, he endowed these myths with a fresh, new visual form and narrative approach, which sometimes reflected the social realities of Taiwan at the time. In addition to Chinese mythology, allusions to the ancient Greek mythological hero Sisyphus also frequently appeared in his paintings around the turn of the century. Images of playing babies, found in New Year woodblock prints from workshops in the town of Yangliuqing near Tianjin, which have been popular in northern China since the Qing dynasty, were also images that Kuo, beginning around 2000, borrowed over and over, reflecting the widespread propensity among ethnic Chinese to wish for offspring and prosperity.

A local consciousness centered on Taiwan itself was long suppressed by Chinese national identity. It was only in the 1970s, when the international status of the Republic of China was severely called into question, that Taiwanese consciousness began to emerge. Consequently, the Native Literature movement, with its emphasis on social realism, was on the ascendent. J.C. Kuo abandoned his earlier “amoeba-style” abstract painting and surrealism in favor of photorealism. In 1979 he released what he called his “real life” paintings, with a new objective of “reflecting reality.”

From the late 1970s through the 1980s, Kuo worked for advertising and printing companies successively.[1] The glossy, glamorous images of female models customarily appearing in European and American fashion magazines seem to have caught his eye and become the frequent subjects of his paintings. From 1983 to 1987, he often juxtaposed historical images of Chinese men with fashionable Western women. He depicted the masculinity of the men with bold, broad, black lines, while he employed the production methods of print advertising to give the women an enchanting appeal that was extremely beautiful and colorful. Using a mixture of representational and abstract while compressing ancient and modern, Chinese and Western styles into the same picture, Kuo achieved a dramatic sense of conflict. And by juxtaposing classical or traditional images with modern human figures, he created an Oriental aesthetic all his own. Rather than plagiarizing or imitating tradition, he was altering it, even attempting to deconstruct or subvert it. He took the present era in which he lived as his standpoint, producing a sense of family with a very modern sensibility. At this stage, Kuo had established his own distinct painting vocabulary and style.

In 1989, Kuo quit his day job to become a full-time artist. Slightly earlier, in July of 1987, martial law had been lifted, after keeping Taiwanese society in chains for nearly four decades. With the end of martial law, Taiwan-centric consciousness was set free, and it became a major subject of expression in Taiwanese contemporary art of the 1990s. Many artists who had lived under the yoke of the White Terror were keen to speak out and discuss how to re-create Taiwan’s own distinct culture and how to articulate its history and contemporary situation. J.C. Kuo was one of the major iconic artists who seriously grappled with these issues.

Throughout the two decades of the 1970s and 1980s, Kuo’s painting style gestated and took shape, while also being tempered by the realities of life, so that by the 1990s he was able to unleash his full creative energy.[3] From the outset he blended Chinese and Western elements, the classical and the modern. He then focused on Taiwan as the subject of his narrative, while also enriching the texture and expressiveness of his images with readymade objects that reflected the material culture and values of contemporary society.[4] A reading of his paintings feels like viewing a series of stage dramas that travel through time and space. In fact, they all refer directly to Taiwan. They all express the feelings he has gained from his long-term observations of social phenomena and history. The compressed characters and scenes, the dazzling array of forms and symbols, and the dense collages of readymade objects often seem too much for the eyes to take in, even producing a leaping, confused psychological sensation.

For decades, J.C. Kuo has observed the lives and longings of common folk. Simulating or appropriating various forms of visual art from history, amalgamating images that seem incongruous at first glance, and juxtaposing heterogeneous symbols, he has crafted a unique narrative method and established a powerful style that can be compared to no one else.