In 1981, Lee Ming-tse, then 24 years old, won the sixth Hsiung Shih Award for New Artist of the Year for the painting Chinese Style; in 2009, now aged 52, Lee held a major solo exhibition at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts under the title “I Love Taiwan and Love Southern Taiwan Even More” (also the name of one of his recent paintings). The artistic road leading from a “China” label to a “Taiwan” tag certainly deserves a closer look.
Chinese Style is the work that made Lee’s name as an artist. Painted with acrylic on rough plywood, the pure, unmixed colors are applied in broad, even strokes to form emblematic patterns and designs. In style, it is reminiscent of a certain type of literary illustrations. As a tetraptych of sorts, Chinese Style was also a statement of unconformity at time when the prevailing aesthetic fashion was moving in very different directions. Even so, the painting won both the critics' favor and the prestigious Hsiung Shih New Artist Award.
Since then, Lee has come a long way as an artist. Encouraged by his early success, he spent the last 28 years developing his style and flair as a painter. The Kaohsiung solo exhibition had a strong retrospective quality about it, as it gathered paintings from all the different phases of the artist‘scareer, most of them on temporary loan from museums, galleries, and private collections. Together with a selection of his recent work, this made for a representative overview of Lee’s oeuvre. The organizers had divided the exhibits into five distinct stylistic and thematic categories: (1) Quiet Cultivation: from absorbing the essence of Western masters to the development of Chinese-style illustrative techniques; (2) Unbridled Exploration: from the world of martial arts to free-flowing rhythmic aesthetics; (3) Merging Past and Present: from Mr. Lee, the Dandy to reflections on rising thoughts; (4) Subtle Chiliocosm: from condensed grassroots culture to the all-encompassing grand view garden; (5) Harmonious Transformation: from inspiring Daoist deities to inspired street theater. With its comprehensive selection of works from all his creative periods, the exhibition allowed visitors to trace Lee Ming-tse’s development as an artist in considerable detail. In this context, it is important to remember that Lee’s growth as a painter coincided with an era of rapid political, economic, social and cultural change in Taiwan. It is especially interesting to see which of Lee’s works met with particular acclaim and admiration from critics and collectors, whose preferences may well serve as a barometer of fluctuating artistic and aesthetic tastes against a backdrop of changing times.
Today, Taiwan is a highly industrialized technological society at the cutting edge of the information age. This means that we are constantly exposed to visual images and stimuli offered up by newspapers, magazines, and other print media as well as TV, movies, and other forms of electronic and digital media. These ubiquitous pictures present the world from a specific angle, thereby forcing our visual habits and expectations into certain very narrowly defined channels. Even our emotional involvement, and the way we think about and describe the world in which we live, are increasingly determined by a rigid framework of one-dimensional logic: we feel and sound more and more alike. Media reports about Lee mostly tend to focus on a number of clichéd factoids, such as his autodidactic background and lack of a formal art education, his penchant for doodling, martial art comics and figures in ancient costumes, his “naivete” and childlike innocence, and the distorted landscapes, puzzling places, odd characters, and strange reveries found in his work.
Actually, it would be quite wrong to insinuate that on some level, Lee Ming-tse is an “amateur” or a “dabbler.” True, he never received any kind of formal or regular training in art theory, but he did graduate from a junior college arts and crafts department, where he must have learned the basics of drawing, gypsum sketching, watercolor painting, visual design, and chromatics. In a way, it is not even correct to apply the labels “no formal education” or “autodidact” to Lee, and it would be particularly misleading to use such labels to explain his unique artistic style. Any artist worth his salt has to go through a tough school, which mainly consists of the challenges posed by artistic history and tradition, and the competition offered by his fellow artists. In other words, to grow and establish his own style and flair, an artist needs to transcend established formats and patterns, and go beyond long-standing or customary aesthetic ideals. Of course, in the “real world,” in the everyday grind of trying to make a living, this translates into having to break through the bottleneck of artistic mainstream values, and come up with something “fresh” that will spike the interest of museum directors and exhibition planners. You have to entice critics to write about you and your work, and get galleries and museums to allocate some of their limited exhibition space to your paintings. You also need to tap into the sales channels provided by commercial art galleries, and make sure that your work appeals to collectors (i.e., that your paintings are seen as good investments with a potential to increase in value over time). Interaction with society, and the need to attract people’s attention, will necessarily change an artist, and thus, art itself. As an individual, the artist finds ways to relate to society, and allow society to relate to him, in a meaningful manner. Society gives the artist more than just the material means to pursue his creative ideals: it also provides all kinds of stimulation and inspiration, and within the framework of this interactive meaning system, this leads to dynamic responses from the artist, be it by way of reflection, rejection, or absorption. Then, as time goes by, experiences sink to the bottom of our unconscious, where they are deposited as sediments of memory, which continue to interact with our conscious, and thus with society at large. In this way, we all constantly adjust the parameters of our shared meaning systems, enabling us to adapt to a world that is always changing. What the artist does more than anything else is to put these processes into sharp focus, and utilize them for his creative work.
Phrases such as “martial arts comics style, figures in ancient dresses, distorted landscapes, puzzling places and odd characters” can only serve as a very superficial description of Lee’s themes and motifs. Would you really believe that all there is to his art are a few visual elements and doodles, plus a selection of eccentric reveries, haphazardly thrown together at the spur of a moment? As a rule, an artist’s visual vocabulary is developed over long years of practice in a trial-and-error approach that eventually yields a coherent artistic language—no matter what the specific medium of communication may be. Art is always an extension of ideas, and form always a concrete manifestation of abstract concepts: this is how the artist communicates with the world, the fountainhead of his dialogue with humanity.
As is the case with most artists, Lee’s different creative periods are by no means clearly demarcated, be it stylistically, thematically or chronologically. Before one phase comes to an end, the first hints of things to come appear in his output, foreshadowing future themes, motifs and expressive methods long before they reach maturity. For the astute observer, many overlap phases may be distinguished, in which works are produced that display several characteristics usually assigned to separate periods in the artist‘s career. A good example would be Lee‘s “Chinese Style" series with its powerful local imagery and symbolic realism, and its predilection for female heads in profile. But other paintings from the same period, such as Black Horse and White Horse (1983) from the “World of Martial Arts" series, show a fondness for broadly applied intersecting colors and stylized tangled limbs, while Picasso (1983) employs blocks of color to produce spatial arrangements reminiscent of visual hallucinations, and capable of producing optical illusions. Or, if we fast-forward 10 years to the 90s, we find that in this phase of his career (“Mr. Lee, the Dandy”), paintings such as Banana Flower (1993) and other depictions of human figures or Buddha heads, all placing a marked emphasis on nose bridges, are in the company of structurally much more complex and chromatically much more diverse works such as Chernobyl (1992).
In the period reaching from Chinese Style (1981) and Taiwan Style (1982-3) with their touch of oriental mysticism to The World of Martial Arts (1983) with its clear-cut imagery, Lee Ming-tse absorbed the techniques of Western cubist masters, a dialectical process that led to the introduction of new elements into his art, including virtual images and spatial arrangements, and screen-like polyptychs—all expressions of the artist’s novel approach to space. It is worth mentioning here that Lee’s use of screen-style fold-out polyptychs marked a first in the history of Taiwan’s art, allowing the painter to break away fiom the limitations of two-dimensional forms of visual art, and opening up promising vistas in the realm of installation art and illusionary art. And looking at Streets of Tamsui (1985) and A Great Chiliocosm (1986), we discover many landscape elements that will reappear later, like building blocks that can be reassembled and rearranged as required. These two paintings also contain the first signs that the artist is moving from plain, broadly applied colors to a richer, more complex palette. Both Streets of Tamsui and A Great Chiliocosm retain certain aspects of the Chinese Style period, such as figures dressed in Tang dynasty clothes, and both also show the use of multiple angles and inverse perspective. Viewers are treated to sweeping bird’s-eye views that allow them to take in the many details at their leisure and enjoy the visual comfort of wide spaces. ln A Great Chiliocosm, we see a conglomeration of cottages and old buildings, train stations and bus stops, women chatting idly in the park and processions of people welcoming the statues of local deities being carried through the streets; we see lookers-on lining the winding roads, and rivers crossed by bridges in the far distance. All of this is painted in soft, warm shades of sapphire, yellow and green, the perfect hues to convey the artist’s deep nostalgia and love for these images. Here, Lee’s superb command of visual language and his outstanding sense of color are on full display—this is clearly not the stuff of weird reveries, and certainly not the result of slapdash doodling.
In the early 90s, a time when Taiwan’s society was fermenting with change, Lee returned to Kaohsiung, where he took up residence above a friend’s folk art and handicraft shop. While living there in seclusion, the artist could not remain wholly unaffected by the great transformations brewing on the outside: post-martial law Taiwan was a place where political and economic structures underwent significant modifications, where local cities and townships grew in size and importance, and, last not least, where new forms of economic activity and a more permissive society led to across-the-board innovation and liberation. The flip side of this was that many time-honored customs, traditions and values were often swept aside, that the “old Taiwan” was beginning to disappear. Much of this is reflected in Lee Ming-tse’s work, albeit often in a roundabout manner. A case in point is “Mr. Lee, the Dandy,” with a good many visual signs and symbols derived from Taiwanese folk arts and handicrafts. “Mr. Lee, the Dandy” is really an extension and elaboration of the characters found in the “World of Martial Arts" series, as well as a manifestation of the artist himself. Only now, instead of brandishing a sword and wearing a ninja mask, he chooses to appear in the shape of an ancient scholar, with a folding fan in his hand and a young gentleman’s cap on his head. With A Dandy (1992) and At Ease (1992), Lee’s artistic vocabulary becomes more and more clearly defined, as figures and characters in a mock-ancient style serve as emblematic symbols for the painter’s intent. ln amalgamation with a wide array of pictorial elements from folk art and handicraft (including items such as ceramic vases, old-fashioned wooden armchairs, large oblong wooden tables, flowers in mirrors, fake hills, and stained glass designs), these characters breathe life into compositions strongly reminiscent of classical Chinese landscape painting.
A figure we frequently encounter in Lee‘s work is “Mr. Lee, the Dandy.” Usually he is dressed in classical Chinese attire, with a scholar’s cap on his head and a folding fan in his hand, strolling at his leisure through artificial sceneries inspired by Tang and Song dynasty landscape paintings. Sometimes he is stripped to the waist, at others he appears very lonely and isolated, lying on a large but empty bed. Or, in Shou Slum, he turns into a naked monster with many arms, wielding weapons to defy the deities. For the artist, the characters and personas he “invents” are conduits for communicating subtle feelings and half-conscious desires. In this sense, “Mr. Lee, the Dandy" represents the diversity of life, the endless possibilities and countless situations people might explore. This also makes the “Dandy” a linchpin of Lee Ming-tse’s art, a creative element that is crucial to understanding his oeuvre.
With the “Rising Thoughts" series (from 1993 onwards), Lee entered a phase of more contemplative and introspective work. Paintings such as Transparent Wind, Stone-like, Mind Meditation, and Unmoved show large Buddha heads, their contours drawn with smooth, well-balanced lines, which are in stark contrast to the bridge of the nose, which is invariably done in coarse-textured strokes. Lee hereby emphasizes the space between the eyebrows, which in Buddhism is where the mind is focused during deep meditation.
