A Spiritual Song “iMeet” – A Writing about Kuei Hua Lin’s First Solo Exhibition
Kuei Hua’s is an unpretentious artist who always mentions that she is not academically trained. For her, painting is the mixture of curiosity, dream, and a series of amazing accidents, which ultimately leads her to a life with a painting studio many professional painters long for and a great amount of outstanding works – without even knowing how and when. Now, she is organizing the very first solo exhibition in her life. It is indeed a legend for someone who graduated from the Department of Home Economics at National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU), who has admitted the lack of talent in art since childhood, who has worked as a middle school teacher for two years, who has studied nutritional science in the United States of America but never finished the degree, who has stepped into the business world for financial concerns, and who has diligently worked for almost thirty years to help fulfill her husband’s dream. How should we define such a painter? Is she an artist? How should we view her works? With what standard should we examine them? When we try to answer these questions, each definition of “professional artists” comes to our minds one by one, with which we carefully evaluate her artistic talent, her professional career, her artistic practice, and her works of art. Then, we come up with even more questions.
However, perhaps we should put down such a thread of thought about whether she is or she is not an artist, and return to a more fundamental question : why does Kuei Hua want to make art? Why did she walk into the painting class at the community school in Pasadena when she was 42 years old? Why did she decide to become a “freelance artist” when she moved back to Taiwan in 2007? Why being a “Sunday artist” no longer satisfy her ? Why does she continuously study more and more art theories, know more and more artists’ works, spend even more time on art, and devote stronger passion to her artistic exploration? How comes her leisure recreation become the life pursuit of a full-time artist? What is her spiritual support which attributes to the unique quality of her artworks when she marches toward the world of “professional artists?”
Art and Existence
It is a basic assumption in the art-making studies that human beings are motivated by the desire to create “form,” or the “significant form” as how Clive Bell (1881- 1964) puts it. Such a desire also evokes the interest in other people’s creative works. It is a common behavior shared by all humans, totally independent from any art education and cultural background. In fact, everyone can work on one’s creativity. The freedom of art-making exists among the anonymous public as well as professional artists. It is just because the Western art history narrative has been constructed by academies, museums, and governmental exhibition institutions since Renaissance, the artworks outside this system are all removed from it. Until Modernism prevailed in the whole world in the late 19th Century, artists started to pay attention to these artworks. Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985), who advocated “L’art brut” instead of “the art in the museum,” was one of the examples. According to his definition, “L’art brut” signifies that:
Various products (such as drawing, painting, knitting, kneading, or sculpture) represent spontaneity and extraordinary creativity,
which have nothing to do with artistic conventions or cultural cliché and are created by people outside the art society.
Concepts similar to “L’art brut” questions the essence of art: should we define art as a formal product as well as a final result of the practice of certain medium such as painting or sculpture, or should we define it as an attitude of self-reference one adopts when facing the world? Should we consider an artwork a complete aesthetic project or an experimental object with representational function?
Vincent Willem van Gogh (1853-1890), the artist whom Kuei Hua admires the most, did not officially have any academic training either. Record shows that he registered in the Académie royale des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles and had studied there for three months. Later, he studied in a painting studio owned by Anton Rudolf Mauve (1838-1888), an artist from The Hague for a short time. The preparation process of his artistic career was totally dependent on his self-taught experiences and the influences from other artists. When he was 27 years old, he was fully determined to devote his life to painting. The strong passion for art-making inspired him to create 840 oil paintings, more than 1000 drawings, and numerous prints and watercolor paintings within merely ten years (1880-1890). Meanwhile, he had written hundreds of letters to his friends and family members to talk about his ideas about art and art-making, sharing his valuable thoughts. Without the burden collectively shared by the academically trained artist, van Gogh’s artworks are full of primitive energy expressed by his unique strokes. The dynamic visualizion directly hits us, touching the depth of our hearts.
For a person like Kuei Hua who is irrevocably determined to devote herself to art, one should have the same passion. Kuei Hua has once mentioned that her love for art is so deep that she feels pleased even when merely looking at an easel at the corner. Therefore, the first time she saw an easel advertisement in the magazine American Artist, she spent no time to hesitate and purchased one in her living room to look at it everyday. This episode in her life was eleborated into “a series of explorations of easels, paints, paper, brushes, palette knives, solvents and etc., while the process indeed brought her happiness and fulfillment!” Kuei Hua is deeply attracted to materials. Like an alchemist, she carefully examines the color paints, and manipulates the material changes of the medium she uses. She makes the best use of the materials and the tools to observe the existing objects, to express the reality, and to pursue the slimation of one’s own soul. Her watercolor paintings feature layers of wash, blank spaces, wipe-wash, and overlapping. She even bottles the mixed paints and uses needle tube to pump, to mix colors, to inject, and to splash on her paintings. The techniques created by herself function between the rational arrangement and the sensitive improvisation, or one can say, between the meticulous thinking and the intuitive impulse. Apart from the traditional oil paintings, she is also fond of non-traditional materials such as house paints or acrylic paints, with which she combines the delicate slow-painting and the fast needle-tube-splash, a technique invented by herself. Her pastel paintings, on the other hands, are eleborate and exquisite. She particularly likes using short and rapid strokes to render with the flow of the contours. Take Fruits for example, the strokes are spread over the whole image, creating a dominating network intertwined with fine and delicate lines. Light Surrounds Orchid is another example, in which the expressive strokes remind us of van Gogh’s late stage during his stay in Saint Rémy. All these mentioned above prove Kuei Hua’s significant affection toward Matière (material).
In an 18th-Century painting dictionary, Claude-Henri Watelet (1718-1786) has mentioned that “once the strokes are slightly excessive, they will become a symbol instead of an exact imitation.” Therefore, when painting removes itself from the function of imitation, the strokes coming from the reality become the “purpose” of painting. The 17th-century artist Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606-1669) was one of the pioneers to emphasize strokes, followed by Jean Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), the impressionnisme, and the matiéristes in the 1950s, who mixed different objects with color paints to create pâte with more thickness as a response to the issues of time, space, visuality, and tactility. Meanwhile, they also emphasized the material properties of painting as well as the man-made manipulation. According to the representative artist Jean Dubuffet, “the birth of art comes from materials and tools, so the trace of how art has been struggling with tools and materials should be reserved.” When materials are sufficiently manifested as the symbolic signs in the reality, they are empowered to evoke emotions and feelings, transforming the materiality of painting into the spirituality. When Existentialism prevailed over the post-war world, Jean Dubuffet considered art a creative process. Through the “traces” left by artists, viewers were allowed to reconstruct the creative process and to create a resonance with the existence of artists. When the art critic Harold Rosenberg (1906-1978) saw Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) painting – spreading the large canvas on the floor, walking around it or stepping onto the canvas, holding the brushes or sticks to freely splash the aluminum paint, creating breathtaking and suffocating twines of lines with traces marked by artist’s physical movements –, Harold Rosenberg could not help but gasping in admiration that “what’s on the canvas is an event rather than an image!” The meaning of painting shows how artists play their roles, for that they “devote all their emotions and wisdom to it.” The final painting thus embodies the existence of the artist.
Kuei Hua might not be a matiériste. What she has lived through is also different from the post-war artists. However, her passion for art and addiction to materials encourage her to explore a unique way playing with strokes, lines, or traces. The emotions visualized in her painting weight more than the calm and sober nature of academic art. Her art shows no purpose but the proof of the artist’s existence.
iMeet
Although Kuei Hua has lots of fun when experimenting with materials, she never intends to give up the imitative nature of painting to jump into the venture of abstract art. She is always fond of simple subjects, while most of them capture the daily scenes touching her heart, including the gift bascket sent by a friend, potted flowers, scenes from the studio window, and the magically created nature. She names her studio “iMeet Studio”, emphasizing the importance of visuality in her works.
However, artists’ work is not as easy as painting whatever they see. According to phenomenology, Nature might be a material existence which occupies certain space-time, while it is only revealed to people through human consciousness. Artists always have a unique perspective to see the world. As how Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) puts it, the “intention” of artists constructs the images and makes up what the awareness lacks of. Even when artists are working with their “intuition,” their consciousness is not completely black-out. All the knowledge they own will be immediately poured down onto the image at one second. The different between an artist and an ordinary person is that an artist materializes one’s consciousness into a work of art once one realizes the world through the consciousness. During this process, artists’ physical bodies play a very important role, especially their eyes. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) has once explained that “Artists’ visuality is not merely an external gaze, a simple physical relationship between the eyes and the world – world is not revealed in front of an artist through representation” for that “the spirit and the thought will be seen and read from the gaze.” He believes that our eyes see everything, including the real and the imagined: “eyes fulfill those non-spiritual things which open up the spirituality.
Therefore, when painters are painting, their bodies serve as the bridge between the spirit of the painters and Nature. They open up themselves to the world. Painters’ action is not determined by the spirit alone. Instead, “it is the natural extension and maturation of visuality.” In other words, painters need to work on the thoughts and the emotions evoked by Nature rather than painting on the basis of nothing. Spirituality is not what you paint with. It is necessary to experience the process from the eyes, to the heart, and finally to the hand. It proves that painting is nothing like an exact representation of the reality while it cannot be separate from the reality either. Painting is the mixture of objects and spirits, as how Maurice Merleau-Ponty puts it “no matter whether it is realistic or not, lines are neither the imitation of objects nor the objects themselves.”
In his old age, Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) had lived a secluded life in Aix en Provence from 1885 till 1906, the year he passed away. During that period of time, he had repeated the same subject to paint at least 80 Mont Sainte-Victoire. In a letter to his son before his death, he wrote: “on the riverbank where I paint, I keep elaborating the subject. If we observe the same object from various perspectives, we will be able to demonstrate an even more powerful image. The variations are so rich that I guess I can stay here to paint for several months without changing my position.” Why was Cézanne so addicted to Mont Sainte-Victoire that he could even paint a thousand paintings about it without changing the place to paint? Obviously, when Cézanne was painting, what he intended to capture was not a visual representation of Mont Sainte-Victoire, or he would get bored easily. His explanation to a young fellow Joachim Gasquet (1879-1821) has indeed enlightened us:
These magnificent classic sceneries, our Provence, the land of Greece and Italy in our dreams, the landscape with the spiritualized light of brightness, the places where landscape becomes a smile of the clever wisdom… look at Mont Sainte-Victoire. It is so unrestrained, with such a strong and outrageous eagerness for the sunlight. When it gets to the night time, all the burdens are released, creating a sense of sadness…these rocks are made of fire, and there is still fire inside. Both the shadow and the sunlight seem to be afraid of them, so they step back, shivering. When the thick and heavy cloud comes, the shadow fallen on the rocks is shivering too as it were burned and vaporized by the fire… for a long while, I have not known how to paint Mont Sainte-Victoire.
The story helps us to understand that Mont Sainte-Victoire was more than a mountain to Cézanne. It was the spiritualized landscape. When the painter again and again returned to Mont Sainte-Victoire alone, with the attempt to surmount the “previous” Mont Sainte-Victoire and to visualize the greatness of the mountain in his perception in an even more perfect way, he thus meditated in silence alone in front of the mountain. He “listened with his eyes,” as how the poet Paul Claudel (1868-1955) describes it. Both his spirit and mind were slowly immersed in the landscape which seemed always the same but made him fail to turn his gaze away. They exchanged spirits, and that was the moment when Cézanne finished one painting after another. In a letter to Emile Bernard (1868-1941) in 1905, Cézanne finally claimed that “time and thinking gradually change the way we see, and now it is the age of comprehension.”
Kuei Hua also mentions a lot how she feels in front of Nature. It is this feeling which has driven her to reeperience it through painting and to solve the mystery of the heart. When she came to Chicago to visit her daughter who studied at Northwestern University, she used to take a walk to the lakeside. One day at dawn, she saw “that the Sun rose up above Lake Michigan and the cloud was so low that it almost touched the lake surface above the vast, ocean-like lake. The dawn light and the fresh air mingled with each other, deeply touching my
heart. I suddenly felt a strong impulse to capture this moment on my way home.” Therefore, she bought the painting materials right away, finishing the painting Michigan Lakeside on the floor of her daughter’s living room in two days. Her Sunset at North Cape and Glacier are
twosimilar works. Another habit of Lin is “to sit beside the window to observe the scenery.” Therefore, she is particularly interested in painting potted flowers in backlight and the elongated shadow. She can keep painting the same subjects without feeling bored. Orchids are one of her favorite subjects, while six paintings of orchids will be shown in this exhibition. Among them, the two pastel paintings Glimmer of Light and Orchids at Noon share almost the same composition with slight difference in light-and-shadow. She also paints a large oil painting Orchids on the Glass Table with the same composition too, but she never bores us with tedium repetition. Such a repetitive depiction with persistence perfectly demonstrates the harmonization of the world and the self. For Kuei Hua, painting indeed is the combination of the world and the spirituality.
As a female artist
In the end, I would like to talk about Kuei Hua as a “female artist” – the identity one cannot ignore and how it is related to her passion for art.
Growing up in a big family with more than one hundred family members, Kuei Hua recalls that “as long as you don’t cry and stay quiet, no one will pay any attention to you, and no one will think of you. It’s better for you to stay at the corner without getting others’ way.” Therefore, she soon got used to “forgetting her own existence.” Moreover, her family lived on her father’s slender earnings, so she had learned “to avoid unnecessary expenses and to spend as little money as possible until graduating from college.” After college, she had been teaching for two years but still resigned from her teaching job to fulfill her dream – studying abroad. Soon, she quit school because of her financial concerns and started to make a living in the business world. It was during this time that she got married. The primary concern in her life became her husband’s dream and her children. Even when she was ill, she still “forgot her own existence.”
We might all be familiar with such a story. The contemporary feminists believe that the oppression of women comes from a patriarchal society, where all men as a whole are empowered with authority over women. As for Marxists, they tend blame it on capitalism, accusing it for the capitalization of labor. Some even mix the two theories, arguing that the oppression of women results from the collision between the patriarchal society and capitalism. No matter what it is, it is for sure that women are the disadvantaged minority in most of the society. They need to search for spiritual freedom, an exit to let go what they have been through, in the harsh reality. Art, which offers an illusion opposite to the reality, thus plays an indispensable role in the reality, particularly to women. In Ien Ang’s research, she writes about women’s pleasure and desire:
Illusion and fiction will not replace the dimension of life (including social practice, morality, political concept, and etc.) but live with it. It… is the resource of sensation for that it highlights the “reality.” In the world of illusion and fiction, the real-life anxiety and the intertwined oppression become plain and straight-forward. It is how “text” constructs an imaginative solution to the realistic social conflict.
Growing up in a traditional patriarchal society in early Taiwan, Kuei Hua seldom questioned her own destiny. Like other women at that time, she always accepted everything happening to her, quietly playing her role and submissively surrendering to the reality. It was not an ignorant sacrifice. She did not need those feminists to analyze by whom she was oppressed. I sincerely believe that it was her virtue urging her to take the responsibility for her parents, for her family, for the society, and for herself. Indeed, even though it was Kuei Hua’s choice to consider responsibility her primary concern, it did not mean that she had to be trapped by the reality. Art has offered her a path of escape – the Utopia for her self-fulfillment and to reconstruct her own identification. Therefore, painting was particularly important to Kuei Hua. She captures the beautiful flowers, magnificent landscape, tranquil woods, and the rustic countryside with colors and lines. She creates a spiritual Utopia, a safe house for herself, where she has found pleasure and satisfaction. Stepping out of the world of “forgetting her own existence, ” she finally fulfills her existence.
Right before Kuei Hua’s first solo exhibition, I am writing this article for this unusual friend, a passionate artist who has always pursued the harmony between the world and herself, and a women in search of her self-fulfillment. Kuei Hua should know better than anyone else that it is just a beginning. I sincerely wish that she will go on with unceasing passion to climb her Mont Sainte-Victoire.
