Story of Lin Chuan-chu, farmer and learned man/man of letter (文人)

Cultivating otium

Story of Lin Chuan-chu, farmer and learned man/man of letter (文人)

“In Latin, otium was time free from the obligations of political life and public affairs (i.e. from negotia), which could be devoted to caring for one’s house, farm, or to one’s studies; whence the word went on to signify the studies themselves: literary activity.”[1]

And lo, in the rainy north of the island of Taiwan, specifically in the coastal town of Jinshan[2], that ancient activity became flesh some six decades ago. Born to a large family of farmers, with great determination and talent he was able to transform ‘material’ attachment to the ancestral land in the ability to tap lifeblood from nature, wherever he may be. This brings to my mind the words of Italian songwriter Fabrizio De André: “… in a whirlwind of dust other people saw drought, I was reminded of Jenny’s skirt at a dance many years ago. I felt my land vibrate with sound, it was my heart; so why cultivate it again, how can we imagine it improved?” [3]

When I visited him for the first time in May 2017, Lin Chuan-chu led me and his old friend Wu Yiming, a fellow painter from Shanghai, on a walk in the surroundings of the house he’d recently built on a plot of land inherited from his father on the hills above Jinshan. Sitting in actual comfort on a small bridge amid the vegetation (fig. 1), heads covered by a small straw hat and an imposing rustic banana leaf headgear, the two friends challenged each other to recite Tang poems. Classical poetry has always been one of their shared passions, alongside the regular practice of calligraphy and ink wash painting, shuimohua 水墨画, which they both feel fully represents them, in spite of anyone considering it a nostalgic anachronism. Later we went for a swim in the sea, keeping our balance on the narrow footpaths dug on the steep cliff (fig. 2); in places, freshly bloomed wild lilies popped up amid the greenery, proud in their springtime liveliness (fig. 3). These look so much like the flowers depicted in some of Chuan-chu’s recent works (百合花 n. 17, 18) they seem to be an exact copy, setting included. As I’ve gotten to know the painter better throughout the years, I noticed he likes to return again and again to the same places, until he knows them down to the smallest detail, painting them in every season and every hour of the day. It is this skill — the observation and detailed study of any aspect of life that catches his interest — that determines his approach towards what we are concerning ourselves with here: nature and painting, reading and writing. Nature and reading as inexhaustible sources to make full use of; painting and writing as mediums to exercise patiently in order to express a sensibility polished through decades of study and connections.

Patience is surely required when Chuan-chu paints the landscapes that strike his inspiration, brush stroke after brush stroke, sitting for hours on often uncomfortable makeshift seats. He likely started cultivating it as a child, when cutting by hand the grass growing on the narrow passages separating one rice field from the next (titian 梯田) with distinctive precision. Yet that daily relationship with the farmland, made up of physical exertion and wearing strain, rather than making it disagreeable to him nurtured his deep familiarity with nature. So much that he can identify with it, put something of himself into each brush stroke, embracing its slow rhythm and tethering the flow of minutes and hours to a personal time, not always dictated by the soulless, unchanging ticking of a clock.

It is hard not to see some innate predisposition in his great determination to study and love Chinese classical culture. This passion led him to pursue his studies in Beijing[4], even against his father’s wishes, who’d rather have his son follow in his footsteps and dedicate his wisdom to farming. Farming knowledge in Jinshan during the 1960s and 1970s had remained unchanged for generations, prior to the introduction of fertilizers, chemical herbicides and modern machinery. In his installation and performance works from the 2000s, Chuan-chu pays homage to his parents’  and ancestors’ memory, by recontextualizing his work in the fields as a young man in a museum or artistic setting, in order to publicly reaffirm the worth of those practices, so crucial for human survival and yet so often ignored or disregarded. One example is the 2007 initiative launched by the JUT Foundation for Arts and Architecture in Taipei, in connection with a construction company, which granted Chuan-chu the use of a plot of land downtown long enough to plant rice in the flooded soil, bring it to maturity, and harvest it in small sheaves. The artist shared the process with his nine-year-old son, so as to pass down at least a small part of his own formative experience. Around the field, buildings grew by leaps and bounds — and so did the slender plants in the cloudy, nourishing water.

Yet, even as he ventured into more current art forms, Chuan-chu was already aware of the ‘interdisciplinarity’ of traditional Chinese ink wash painting, informed and connected as it was to calligraphy, poetry, music, literature, and the in-depth knowledge of nature. It is widely held that ancient Chinese painters did not use to paint en plein air, but rather had to work to internalize natural features until they made them their own and were able to reproduce them without hesitation, once they had achieved ‘emptiness’ inside themselves. A legendary example is the Tang era painter Wu Daozi: sent by the Emperor to the Sichuan province to learn how to depict it faithfully, the story goes he returned without any notes, everything fixed in his mind. But Chuan-chu was influenced, as early as 1988 at university, by a shuimohua professor who took inspiration from the open air tradition: painting before the very landscape one wishes to portray in order to reproduce the natural forms authentically, being aware of atmospheric and seasonal changes yet reaching some unitary basis under that changeability. The ability to retain and express the essence of nature is technically developed through constant exercise, through years of practice and the production of an abundance of sketches.

Here, as in many other aspects that tend to be ignored, the East and the West can reach a deep convergence of opinion. One example is François-René de Chateaubriand’s Lettre sur le paysage en peinture (‘Letter on the Landscape in Painting’) (1795), which urges students to apply “to the study of nature itself: it is in the middle of the countryside that one should get their first lessons.” Adding, “Let us beware of believing our imagination to be more fecund and richer than nature. What we call great in our mind is nearly always confusion.” And again: “… landscape should be drawn in the nude, if we want it to resemble reality (…). Studies made in the atelier, copies of copies, will never replace working from life.”[5] The same opinion is held by Carl Gustav Carus, who talks about landscape painting in terms of “infinity of the world unfolding so truthfully before the artist, nature moves around him in apparent freedom and anarchy, obeying nonetheless immutable, timeless laws (…). If the artist’s soul understands clearly and originally the inner purity of life, and reproduce its forms in faith and truth, we shall always obtain a representation of real beauty.”[6] Still, despite sharing such similar theoretical premises, it is interesting to observe the great difference between Romantic oil and watercolour paintings of the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Century and Chinese ink paintings on paper or silk.

The dedication to en plein air painting has been an essential part of Chuan-chu’s life since 2008, when he returned from Xintian (新店)[7]^[6] to Jinshan and rediscovered the appeal of the landscape here. Since then, the artist has immersed himself into dozens of different locations, letting himself feel the breeze and the warmth of the sun, breathing in the scents brought in by the wind and squinting before the shimmer of marine radiance, falling in love with the delicately or luridly hued flowers, tracing in wonder the contortions of tree trunks (虬, figg. 45, 46, 47, 48, 83, 86). Different locations, as I said, though at times they repeat — like the porous stone on the beach at Changbin (港邊的沙丘, fig. 15) or a rock off the coast in Jinshan (燭台嶼, fig. 59) —, different depending on the light, the season, the hour of the day and thus worthy of being observed and carefully depicted again and again. Chuan-chu is not drawn to famous places, to the ‘breathtaking,’ spectacular, or dramatic views; he’d rather his observation and interpretation give meaning and value to quite ‘common’ views. The textures of the depicted surfaces challenge him to use his brush (bifa 笔法) differently than within the traditional 'cunfa' 皴法[8]^[7], thus overcoming established habits and taking on novel brush strokes, abstract in themselves but able to recreate, set against each other, a vibrant visual perception that gets very close to ‘real’ perception. Technical research for Chinese painters is traditionally “un procédé de connaissance fondamentale répétant un processus créateur”[9]^[8], and Chuan-chu highlights the creative, individual aspect that is so important to modern art. It is in fact an active process with the goal of recreating the technique of nature itself, although in a completely unique and personal way.

Chuan-chu has built a compact painting kit that has everything he needs for his work; besides the indispensable black ink, it includes a set of supports and mineral hues (caimo, 彩墨). One of his well-deserved sources of pride is the ability to evaluate the exact amount of water needed for every single brush stroke, so that after he has applied the paint, he pulls back a nearly clean brush.

In a 2017 illustrated book featuring his paintings, titled ‘Travelling Landscape’ (在路上的风景)[10]^[9], Chuan-chu quotes Mark Rothko: “intuition is the highest manifestation of reason (or rationality)” (直觉是理性的最高表现). I do not think this can be only interpreted one way, and besides, there is a huge difference between Rothko’s works and Lin Chuan-chu’s. The intuition the American painter speaks of might be based on the awareness of being, due to a constant identification with the painting gesture, the exclusive interpreter of a ‘reality’ whose objective existence is completely arguable, and of expressing it in a unique way. That mysterious, supernatural aspect that is an essential requirement of artistic expression is still based on practices cultivated with discipline and steadfastness. Chuan-chu feels similarly, having made of his life a journey to be decoded and decrypted through brush strokes, that is, the particles making up the world to a painter’s eyes. A concept that’s steeped in tradition and yet fully belongs in the modern spirit, while also reclaiming the crucial significance of our relationship with nature, so often neglected in the prevalent ‘metropolitan’ culture.

The otium cultivated by Lin Chuan-chu in every moment of his days — reading ancient Chinese or foreign texts from every era of the past; reciting by heart classical poems or pruning the greenery around his house; practicing his calligraphy or taking a walk along the beach; jotting down his comments and dreams in his clear, airy handwriting on the notebooks he always keeps on hand — is a rich, complete form of ‘life,’ animated by a consistency that binds every gesture together and imparts them a deep meaning.

Monica Dematté

Vigolo Vattaro, January 4th, 2023

 Translated by Dafne Calgaro