A Hundred Rivers Make an Ocean:Eclectic Artist Chen Houei-kuen

June 25 is Chen Houei-kuen's 95th birthday, and in celebration, a retrospective of his work is showing at the Culture Center in Taichung County. The exhibition includes prize-winning gouache paintings from his early years, landscapes painted in France, and brush-and-ink paintings made during climbs of Mt. Jade (Yushan), as well as memorabilia, such as an easel used by the artist, a book of art criticism in French with dense handwritten notes in Japanese, and that old artist's standby, a beret.

An orphan's dream

"Everyone was young once and has things from then worth remembering. Though I am 95, when I think back to the early part of my life, it seems like yesterday." Chen, who suffers from failing eyesight and poor hearing, sits in his home and recalls his early years in the manner of a storyteller.

Chen was born in Lungching Rural Township in Taichung County during the Japanese occupation era. His family had some landed wealth, but his parents died when Chen was still a child. Not much over ten years old, he had to bury his own grief and help his grandmother look after his younger siblings. When he felt sad, he would sometimes go to his parents' grave and weep, or quietly make mud figurines which he would place on the tomb, thinking back to happier times when he and his father would copy together from an ancient Chinese ink painting instructional book.

When Chen was in fourth grade, a teacher who noticed his interest in making mud figures told him about Huang Tu-shui, the first Taiwanese sculptor to study in Japan. This made a deep impression on the young Houei-kuen. After entering Taichung First Middle School, in a classroom being prepped for art classes, he came upon three French fine arts magazines and an introduction to the Tokyo Academy of Art. He came away from this experience with a clear sense of direction, including a desire to study fine arts in Japan and a wish to go to France to see famous paintings for himself.

Most of the Japanese-era artists from Taiwan graduated from Taipei Teachers College, so they were well prepared when they took the test to study in Tokyo. But Chen had to learn the hard way. He recalls his first try at the Academy of Art entrance exam, which included a drawing test. "I finished in two hours, and couldn't add another stroke. Then I saw the others slowly working as their drawings took shape, and I knew for sure that I wasn't going to get a very high score," he says with a smile.

Drawing on his own resources

After failing the exam, he enrolled in a special preparatory school in Japan to formally study drawing. The memory of what happened after that is still clear to him: "I got a perfect score, the first time anyone had done that in the 41 years since the Tokyo Academy of Art was founded."

After testing into school in Tokyo, in 1930 Chen married Kuo Tsui-feng, who came from a well-known family in Chiayi. After their marriage, Kuo went with Chen to Japan to study painting. After graduation, Chen brought his beloved wife back to Taiwan. With his quiet and refined spouse, who soon gave birth to a son and daughter, Chen bathed in the warmth of a happy family life. In his first gouache work to be entered in an official exhibition, "Untitled," the woman, wearing grey-green brocaded Western style attire and with head slightly inclined, can be seen as a depiction of the perfection of the artist's wife through Chen's own eyes.

Chen's gouache painting, built on a foundation of rigorous training in drawing and academic study, manifests the refined texture and almost transparent quality of glue painting. In both the Japanese and early post-war eras, Chen had gouache paintings selected for prestigious exhibitions and was also invited to serve as a member of exhibition review boards.

Misfortune

But then tragedy struck. As an old Chinese saying has it, Heaven is fatally jealous of great beauty, and such was the fate of Kuo Tsui-feng, who passed away in 1935, leaving Chen alone to cope with two small children crying for their mother. The infant son, entrusted to the care of another family, died soon thereafter.

Four years later, Chen married Hsieh Pi-lien, a colleague at the primary school where Chen taught, but the shadow of death hung heavy over this new household as well. Two infant children died one after the other, and Chen's second wife said goodbye to him forever in 1941.

When Chen married his third wife, Chuang Chin-chih, he was worried that the curse would continue, and he refused to even have their photo taken together out of fear that his bad luck would be passed on to his nearest and dearest. But the third try proved luckier, or perhaps the grim reaper was kept at bay by Chuang's lively and passionate nature. In any case, Chen Houei-kuen finally found a stable, durable family life.

After control over Taiwan was given to the Republic of China at the end of World War II, Chen was hired as a professor of fine arts at the newly established Taiwan Provincial Normal College (now National Taiwan Normal University). Shortly thereafter, the famous master of Chinese painting Pu Hsin-yu was brought to the same institution. Chen, who had long admired Pu's work, and who didn't stand on ceremony, asked to become a student of Pu's despite the fact that the two were colleagues.

But Chen soon found that he could not follow Pu's path. Few landscapes in Taiwan, except Mt. Jade to a slight extent, resembled the mainland views Pu painted. Moreover, the interpretive sense brought to these scenes by Pu-a member of the former Manchurian ruling class-was far removed from Chen's own mindset in approaching painting and nature. Finally, Pu's landscapes reflected his own cunfa technique, which Chen did not share.

Having studied all art, West and East, ancient and modern, in great depth, Chen declares: "A great artist cannot rely exclusively on tradition, or be a prisoner of tradition. Rather, he has to digest tradition and adapt it to himself, so that it becomes a force for innovation."

Paris: It's the real thing

The year 1960 was the most important in the life of the then 54-year-old Chen Houei-kuen. Since seeing those French art magazines in middle school, Chen had never given up the dream of seeing the original works in person. He said to his students more than once: "You aren't a real artist if you've never been to Paris." As for his wife's hope that their daughter Tchen Yu-hsiou would study in Japan, Chen felt that "in Paris you get the original merchandise, in Tokyo you only get second-hand." At an age when most artists have settled into a fixed style, he studied French from scratch and-with the humility of an acolyte approaching a holy man-took a one-year sabbatical and flew to Paris.

The first thing he did was go to the Louvre, where he was overwhelmed by the light and colors that he saw. "The first two weeks I was very flustered." Then he settled down, and "began by working a little bit every day." He would leave the house at 5 a.m., taking with him two canvases and a simple lunch, and paint various subjects in the different lights of morning and afternoon. On rainy days he would take his sketchbook and a notebook to a museum. Chen has returned to Europe six more times since, and produced nearly 300 oil paintings.

Painting from life is the approach favored by Chen, who avows: "I am completely faithful to the scenery." But, one might ask: Isn't it troublesome to carry and set up a canvas taller than a man on Taiwan's Mt. Jade or France's Mont Blanc? Chen responds, his voice filled with conviction: "Faced with nature, even a canvas that big isn't big enough!" Chen has always been strongly opposed to those artists who only go to a place and photograph it, then work from the photo.

Study, study. . .

After returning to Taiwan from France, having been profoundly affected by his contact with modern Western currents, including impressionism, post-impressionism, fauvism, cubism, and so on, Chen entered a seven-year period of study of the techniques of the various schools. Few of the canvases he made in this period have ever been made available to the public.

Chen's approach to painting is to have a plan, a target, a method, and a step-by-step procedure. Once, to capture just the right visual sensation you get looking down a narrow mountain road, Chen went to the same place annually for eight years, comparing old works with current ones, analyzing and studying them in turn. The result is the famous series "The Descent, Tanshui."

Determined to break down barriers between Eastern and Western art, Chen has devoted a lifetime to the study of glue painting, brush-and-ink, and Western currents. "Chen Houei-kuen has followed the road less traveled," says Ni Tsai-chin. If Chen had stayed with glue painting, which he had already mastered, he could have been considered in the same league as other older-generation artists. But he had "been there, done that," and decided to explore new territory, finally successfully creating his own unique style, which combines gouache, brush-and-ink, and oils, uniting the textural power of Western oil painting with the elegance and delicacy of Chinese ink painting.

By 1969, the 65-year-old Chen knew that his time had come, and "I let myself just paint in as free and carefree a manner possible." This was the period that produced his finest and most unique works. Many of Chen's family are disappointed with how late recognition came to Chen, and at the fact that Chen did not get the favored treatment accorded other members of the older generation. But Chen just says calmly, "What was the rush?"

Peak performance

Just look at the subject most beloved by this old painter: mountain landscapes. In his depiction of the main peak of Mont Blanc, Chen employs Western perspective to express the sense of space and the power of the mountain, while incorporating the cunfa technique from Chinese landscape painting to represent irregular surfaces. The painting also uses the precise lighting and rich, saturated blocks of color typical of impressionism. The result combines the chunkiness and strength of an oil painting with the elegance of line and lightness of touch of brush-and-ink painting.

Yet the painting is neither of these, but rather gouache on thin calligraphy paper. All of the elements of the painting are, one could say, retuned to a quarter tone off of normal pitch, creating a unique tonal combination that is nonetheless harmonious, and bringing out, as Ni Tsai-chin puts it, "all the potential of Taiwan's hybrid culture."

A poem Chen wrote on the painting of Mont Blanc expresses clearly where he has been and what he has sought: "Great works achieved only late in life after long study/ Riding the clouds all those times to Europe/ It is my character to seek out and absorb every influence/ With a joyous sense of exploration, as if sightseeing./ I came to Mont Blanc out of love for mountains/ Why do I so enjoy depicting high mountains?/ Because when I assemble my gear and climb to the top/ I also reach the apex of my personal accomplishment, at the top of the world. . . ."

Chen spent a lifetime in academia. He was a strict teacher, and students were often less than enchanted when he held them to his own rigorous standards. Yet, at teacher-student get-togethers, Chen was known to get up and dance a few steps while singing old Japanese nakashi songs. And once, at a masquerade party held by the NTNU Department of Fine Arts, Chen arrived wearing a pair of long-johns, leaving the attending students and faculty agape. It was only when everyone saw that he was carrying a French imperial-style hat that they realized he had come as Napoleon, with the long-johns serving as white breeches.

Chen is unrestrained, romantic, and passionate by nature, with the inner world so typical of the naive artist. Not surprisingly, his painting style-having gone through the baptism of impressionist aesthetics, and having absorbed other aesthetics through experimentation-ended up in the same place, with a childlike purity and directness all its own.

Nonagenarian naif

In 1982, at the age of 76, Chen, carrying with him a block of delicate calligraphy paper 200 cm tall by 100 cm wide, set up for a week at the Toshogu Shrine in Nikko, Japan. Using light and delicate lines, he scrupulously depicted every tiny detail of the palace gate. Behind the structure, he depicted a handsome pine tree in light inkwash, subtly extending the painting spacially. After returning to Taiwan, the old artist spent a year filling in the minutiae of the piece, such as the precise patterns on the gate in gold, jade-green, and other colors.

Art critic Ho Huai-shuo reminds us that, however difficult a feat it was for Chen to combine Chinese and foreign styles into a single coherent mode of expression, it is even more impressive that he then rediscovered a naivety and purity that allows him to see the world "in the same way as a new-born child."

In the last year or two, the old artist has not been able to paint due to failing eyesight. Yet, with the help of a magnifying glass, he routinely peruses art magazines, and he still hears an inner voice telling him to finish an uncompleted canvas that hangs on the wall of his study.

Quoting from Lao Zi, he says, "The ideal thing is to be like water, which benefits all things without struggling against them." The older he gets, the more he sees nature as the source and ultimate destination of all things, as the most sublime of summations. "In my landscapes, I have sought to capture the real nature of Nature," he says.

Looking back over his life, Chen does not mind that he chose a long and winding road before finally gaining recognition in his later years. He is gratified that he always followed his own compass, and was happy doing so. He has remained ever young at heart, living in the land of art, a magical place where time is of no consequence.

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This work combines the lighting and color techniques of impressionism with the traditional Chinese technique for depicting irregular surfaces (cunfa). Chen Houei-kuen, a painter of the older generation, created a unique landscape style by combining Western and Chinese elements with gouache.

Main Peak at Mont Blanc (2) 1973 Gouache on paper

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Chen spent a year depicting in rigorous detail the gate of the Toshogu Shrine in Nikko, Japan. There is a naivety and directness in his work that is at the same time charming and tasteful. Gate of Toshogu Shrine 1982 Gouache and ink on paper

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(left) Chen (front row, first at right) like other painters of his generation, studied at the Tokyo Academy of Art, and he was also active in the Taiyo Exhibition, but he gained recognition only much later than his friends. No matter; he cares little about such things.