Contemporary Taiwanese Literature and Art Series II – Art 當代台灣文學藝術系列2──美術卷

Li Yihong─Pioneer Ink Wash Painter in Postwar Taiwan
臺灣戰後水墨的拓荒者 李義弘
Wu Chitao 吳繼濤

李義弘（1941~ ） Lee Yih-Hong (also Li Yi-Hong)
Born in Tainan County, Taiwan, Lee Yih-Hong graduated from the National Academy of Arts. He has long been committed to integrating traditional techniques and creating new ideas for ink-and-water painting in Taiwan.
Lee Yih-Hong records nature through photography, painting, and calligraphy. He also introduced a new technique into the field of photography; he combines photography with fresh ink, and adds images with precise levels to make the work look peculiar and innovative. His paintings of rural southern Taiwan established his fame. In recent years, his landscape works have focused on fusing the mountains, light, clouds…. into a harmonious texture. His composition tends to be simple, and the images are more minimalistic. He is the winner of the Zhonghan Literature Award and Wu San-lien Arts Award.

Li Yihong was born in 1941 in southern Taiwan. He didn’t receive much in the way of formal schooling, but since he was a rather weak and sickly boy from early on, frequent visits to the local Chinese pharmacy soon became a staple of his life. Watching the ancient doctor-cum-apothecary write out prescriptions with an old, dilapidated writing brush in a spidery hand (while feeling his patients’ pulse with the other) was enough to wake the youngster’s interest in calligraphy and drawing, and it was his budding zeal and passion for the arts that paved the way for his later career as a painter. After gaining acceptance into the National Academy of Arts (now National Taiwan University of Arts), he learned the ropes from widely respected teachers and artists such as Fu Juanfu (傅狷夫) and Gao Yifeng(高一峰).

The winds of change and modernization were blowing through Taiwan’s ink wash circles by the time Li Yihong graduated, and it was more or less by chance that he found a sympathetic teacher and mentor in Jiang Zhaoshen(江兆申), at the time deputy director of the National Palace Museum in charge of the books and paintings department. Their affiliation and friendship would last for 27 years, from 1970 until Jiang’s death, and the older man’s influence, both in terms of ink wash skills and literati aesthetics, helped Li to define his own creative position and artistic approach. Incorporating both tradition and innovation into his modus operandi, the young artist soon began to make photography an important element of his creative process, using it to sample useful themes and motifs for his art. This is particularly obvious in his early work, and after ten years of honing his individual style he held his first solo exhibition at the Spring Gallery in Taipei, which made a big splash in the ink wash community. The following year Li received further recognition in the form of the Sun Yat-sen Art and Literature Award, and in 1984 he was offered a position at the National Institute of the Arts (now Taipei National University of the Arts), where he taught painting until his retirement in 2007.

Traveler and Photographer
Local motifs have always been one of Li’s main sources of inspiration for his work. The sights, scenes, and landscapes of our island, in particular its natural scenery, are captured by the artist’s brush with a style and authenticity that are rooted in a deep sense of aesthetic harmony. This was something he largely developed under the aegis of Jiang Zhaoshen, the abovementioned deputy director and one of the curators of the National Palace Museum, a man that aided Li in making sense of the things he saw, heard, and experienced, and was a formative influence on his use of lines and color, as well as his succinct and focused style. The other crucial component in Li’s unique creative mélange is his professional-level skill with a camera, the fact that he made the viewfinder one of his chief tools. During the 1980s, works such as Tainan Confucius Temple with its poignant red walls and ancient trees, or White Clouds in a Blue Sky with its deliberately concise chunks of color, were like a breath of fresh air, opening up new possibilities for a long-established art form.

In 1986, Li Yihong traveled to India and Nepal. Upon his return, he held an exhibition titled Journeys in Northern India, and works like Ancient Mountain Town, Old Temple High in the Mountains, Bodhisattva, and Dal Lake all speak of the artist’s fascination with the Buddhist tradition, as well as showing the profound impact the foreign vistas had on his imagination. Here we find a focus and spirituality that transcends the limitations of conventional Chinese landscape painting. Two years later, he released a series of paintings titled Song of Trees. Some of these works have a stark, almost forbidding quality, such as Old Buddy and Verdant Vibrancy, while others, including Field Tree, are brimming with bucolic nostalgia. Another work from the same year, Eerie Autumn Yard, also displays the thematic originality and multi-layered textures that established Li as one of the most important ink wash artists of his generation.

Since times immemorial, traveling and observing the world around have been mandatory for visual artists wishing to find fresh ideas. By visiting different places, taking photos of his environment, and sketching from life, Li Yihong managed to gain a deeper understanding of the nuanced and intricate relationship between natural scenery and the mood of a painting, between reality and composition. In the prime of his life, Li published Nature and Painting (自然與畫意), in which he attempted to merge the media of photography and ink wash painting into a unified concept. The publication had a huge impact on students of drawing and sketching at the time, and it continues to influence the discourse on artistic representations of the world to this day. Meanwhile, Li’s travels to Europe, India, Nepal, South Africa, and China, among other places, further nourished and fertilized his imagination, enriching his mental vision and enhancing the breadth of his artistic scope, especially with regard to the sheer magnificence and beauty of the natural world. Around 2001, having reached the ripe age of 60, Li began to communicate his travel experiences via a series of scroll paintings, such as Realms and Rivers, Pines on Huangshan, and Yuliao Guandu, guiding the audience’s view from the near to the far, and offering oscillating perspectives of subtly entwined actuality and illusion, object and reflection. In this way, he updated the conventional content and form of traditional ink wash painting, imbuing the genre with new meaning and complexity through innovative modes of expression. This period in the artist’s life was marked by a growing focus on his living environment, something that went hand in hand with a decade-long period of introspection in Sanzhi, an area at the northwestern tip of Taiwan. His mature and increasingly sublime style is a reflection of his ever-deepening love for his native soil, nothing short of an attempt to capture the soul of the land.

Exploring Artistic Imagery
During this period, Li started to deliberately emphasize local scenes and motifs. Aware of his growing attachment to the rugged northern coastline, he shifted his focus away from compositional refinement towards almost scrupulous attention to his actual surroundings. Five paintings with Balian Creek (八連溪) as their overarching theme also serve as a kind of testimonial about his experiences working with jiaobai bamboo paper, a special kind of rough-textured paper made in Puli’s Guangxing Paper Mill. From 2002 onwards, Li made ventifacts one of his main subject matter, employing a blend of black and color inks to depict the rugged coastline with its assorted windkanters and other types of interesting-looking terrain shaped by wind and water. Letting the various tints and hues bleed into each other, and applying the traditional Chinese texturing technique called cunfa (the “wrinkle method” 皴法) the artist recreates the lines and silhouettes of rocks and sea in a fashion that is both realistic and impressionistic, underscoring his standing as a modern literati painter with a particularly deft and elegant style. Adding a new twist to the conventional jimofa (the “layer method” 積墨法), a technique that uses distinct shades of black and gray to convey nearness and distance in landscape paintings, Li applied the same principle to colored ink for even more impressive and lifelike breadth and depth. As a whole, these compositions are held together by vigorous brushstrokes with a strong calligraphic quality. At 60, decades of practicing calligraphy had made Li an expert at structuring his paintings’ space to perfection, while his sure, swift strokes render all vistas stunningly vivid, as can be witnessed in works such as Linshanbi at Ebb Tide or Ventifacts at Shimen. These paintings also laid the groundwork for later works, including for example the Tiaoshi Coast series. Li Yihong once said:

Our natural environment affords painters an endless amount of material that can inspire and provide them with nourishment for their creative minds. Take the huge boulders crashing from steep mountainsides, for example, only to crack up into smaller pieces that are slowly carried down rivers and creeks until they reach the plains. The flowing water shapes these rocks and stones into a myriad of forms, until their surfaces, ledges, and corners are often as smooth as glass, with no apparent lines, cracks, or other obvious traces of texture.

Li elaborated in more detail when talking about the build and structure of rocks and boulders in the Balian Creek near Sanzhi:

When the creek’s water levels are low, many rocks will be jutting out from the water and exposed to the sunlight, which reveals the mud and debris adhering to the boulders. . . . When the tide is going out, even the littoral rocks are glistening in grayish-white hues. Therefore, when painting seascapes, or more specifically coastal scenes, it is usually not necessary to use cunfa or other traditional techniques for depicting rough shapes and textures.

At this point in his career, Li Yihong was frequently traveling to Hualien, and on these trips he would take many photographs to serve as templates for paintings to be executed in fine detail after his return. Particular favorites were scenes featuring the Liwu and Shakadang Rivers with their wealth of huge rocks and boulders strewn across riverbeds meandering through steep, majestic gorges. In many ways, Li’s output from this period is a thematic extension of his series of works picturing Taiwan’s craggy northern shorelines with their assorted wind-and-water-faceted rocks. In works such as The White Boulders of Liwu River and Liwu River Gorge the artist aims to capture the magnificent beauty of marble boulders with their veined and speckled texture, while Sparkling Liwu River and Towering Cliffs by the Liwu River, two oversize paintings, show the dramatic precipices and narrow ravines that make up the Taroko Gorge’s most spectacular stretches, giving the viewer a vivid sense of the dazzling heights, striking depths, and at times almost overwhelming feeling of closeness and cool seclusion that are all part of the experience. The various inks are allowed to run and blend with each other to generate layers of sublime shades, tints, and hues, all serving to create the almost three-dimensional quality and abstract aesthetic appeal that are two of the hallmarks of Li’s freehand imagery. In 2013, Li painted a hexaptych titled Tiaoshi Coast, sort of a culmination of his artistic “craggy rock” journey that had taken him from sketching from life to more abstract modes of expression. The piece is teeming with the artist’s passion for his subject matter, a fact that is visible in the delicately executed texture of the rocks, using traditional cunfa and chromatic shading for depth and a fascinating interplay of light and shadow, with the rocks and boulders appearing like contrasting reflections in an artistic photograph.
His bravura brushwork and consummate skill with lines and other calligraphic elements gave Li the confidence to further expand his artistic scope in works such as Acacia Grove and Cold Spring with their succinct style and composition. In pieces like Mount Jade Cypress and Mount Jade Tieshan, basking in a kind of subdued golden glow, the astute observer may perceive the freshness of the artist’s impressions from his ascent of Mount Jade, with cypresses vaguely visible in the thick mists, like coiled and twisted dragons perched ominously in front of a dark cave, and spots of bright verdancy in the distance showing here and there through the thick foliage of the immediate surroundings.