Producing a style with color
It is no easy feat for a painter to create their own personal style. When Wang tested into the Department of Fine Arts at NTNU in 1963, with guidance from well-known teachers such as Huang Chun-pi, Lin Yu-shan, and Chang Te-wen, he had to study both Chinese and Western painting, and the school encouraged students to do sketching from life as well as creative works.
Wang at that time was inclined to use modern painting methods to express his own ideas. Wang, along with classmates Su Hsin-tien, Wu A-sun, Tosi Lee, and others, together formed the “Hua-Wai Painting Association,” which extolled visual shocks. Wang experimented with ink-wash, oil painting, spray painting, and prints. “I was hesitating at a crossroads between being a Chinese- or a Western-style painter, and didn’t know where to go, but I faced up to it unflinchingly.” This is not only the painter’s self-description, but is a struggle and a process that everyone who wants to honestly express themselves in art must go through.
In 1980, Wang left the teaching profession and fortuitously ended up at the side of Huang Chun-pi. Wang says, “My return from modern painting to relatively traditional ink-wash painting began when I was with Huang Chun-pi.” He discovered that the two had different angles on appreciating paintings, and often what he would consider good, Huang would just shake his head at. This caused him to reflect on the question: What is the difference between us? So he began copying works from books published by the National Palace Museum, beginning with the very basics. Thus he relearned, painting by painting, how to do traditional landscapes, and so confirmed his path as a modern ink-wash artist.
Wang took the principles of Western painting-from-nature, sketching, and perspective that he had absorbed in his time at university and applied them to traditional ink-wash painting. He took nature as his teacher, singing her praises with brush and ink. Wang also applied colors to traditional landscape painting, with the fluctuations of the seasons—the new greenery of spring, the deep blue of summer, the red maples of autumn, and the white snow of winter—becoming the color schemes of his paintings. He traveled the world, integrating beautiful scenery from many lands into his brushwork. Not only the red-tiled houses of Taiwan but also the dazzling cherry blossoms of Osaka, the magnificence of European castles, the vitality of a Moroccan fish market, and the dignity of India’s Ganges River all have made guest appearances on his Xuan paper. But he always likes to mix a little black ink into his poster colors to reduce their brightness and ensure they are not too gaudy. He is insistent that you have to keep the charm of brush and ink in ink-wash paintings.
All along his path, Wang says, he has kept firmly in his mind the search for beauty. “Beauty” is the yardstick in the minds of painters, and Wang describes himself as an aesthete. “Beauty of course has personality,” says Wang, and moreover the expression of beauty definitely requires skill and effort. It is not something you just come up with in a moment of inspiration, but is produced by following your heart on a sturdy foundation of basic skills.
The antiques filling this room give the “Half-Farming Hut” an air of refinement and tranquility.