CHEN CHENG-PO (CHEN CHENBO, 1895-1947) Alishan in Spring signed in Chinese; dated '1935' (lower left) oil on canvas 80 x 128.5 cm. (31 1/2 x 50 5/8 in.) Painted in 1935
Taiwan, The 9th Taiwan Art Exhibition, 1935 (honorable invitation of "examination free"). Taipei, Taiwan, Taipei Fine Arts Museum & China Times, Chen Cheng-Po Centennial Memorial Exhibition, 6 August-31 October, 1994.
Literature
Taiwan, The 9th Taiwan Art Exhibition, exh. cat., 1935 (illustrated, plate 17). Hsiung-Shih Art Magazine (Issue 106), December, 1979, Taipei, Taiwan (illustrated in black and white, p. 57). Hsiung-Shih Art Book, Taiwanese Artists 2: Chen Cheng-Po, Taipei, Taiwan, 1979 (illustrated in black and white, p. 83). Artist Publishing Co., Taiwan Fine Arts Series 1: Chen Cheng Po, Taipei, Taiwan, 1992 (illustrated in black and white, p. 221). Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Chen Cheng-Po Centennial Memorial Exhibition, Taipei, Taiwan, 1994 (illustrated in black and white, p. 97). Hsiung-Shih Art Book, The Home-Museum: Collected Paintings of the Older Generation of Artists: The Enthusiasm of Chen Cheng Po, Taipei, Taiwan, 2000 (illustrated in black and white, p. 121). Tzen Tsae International Art Co. Ltd., Art Treasures Collection 4: Chen Cheng-Po, Taipei, Taiwan, 2005 (illustrated in black and white, p. 70; illustrated in color, p. 71).
Provenance
Christie's Hong Kong, 27 October, 2002 Lot 128 Acquired from the above sale by the present owner
Notes
Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our emotions. It follows that each period of culture produces an art of its own which can never be repeated. Efforts to revive the art-principles of the past will at best produce an art that is stillborn. - from Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, "Introduction"
The 19th and 20th centuries brought tremendous cultural and artistic change throughout the world. The West was modernizing and its social and governmental systems evolving, and in step with these changes, artistic concepts were also undergoing fundamental transformations, as seen in the media, techniques, and concepts artists employed. Meanwhile, a tide of Western influence was also sweeping through the East: Asian countries were impacted by ideas of modernization and began an involved process of exploring and absorbing those ideas. In the midst of the competing artistic currents of the early 20th century, Taiwanese artist Chen Cheng-Po likewise developed and advocated new theories of his own. He did not believe Western art forms could be directly transplanted into China, but instead, from his overview of developing trends and competing systems, he sought a more elevated ground where Eastern and Western influences could meet and coexist. Chen had a thorough grounding in the modern art of in China, Japan, and the West, but at the same time, he was intent on portraying the human specifics of his own surroundings and exploring his own, unique path. Chen's art thus reflected the transformations of his era and, in microcosm, represented the advances in Asian art as a whole.
Nature as my Studio
Chen returned to Taiwan from Shanghai in 1933, beginning a period in which landscape became the chief subject of his work. He traveled and painted throughout Taiwan and declared with enthusiasm that "nature is my studio". Following the personal enrichment and artistic growth of his earlier periods in Tokyo and Shanghai, Chen developed a personal view toward the union of Eastern and Western styles, while his landscapes had now become artistically mature reflections of the unique folkways of the localities to which he traveled. Chen's 1934 Spring in the West Lake and his 1935 Sunset at Danshui provide very different views of this artist's personal style. Spring in the West Lake suggests a serene Eastern feel, while in Sunset at Danshui the sun falls on a landscape with the deep colors of red-tiled roofs. As Chen once said, "If you take the time to first study the scene, to project a sense of the era into it, then you've got the prerequisites for a good painting. To the extent that there is any formula for painting well, it starts from this." The Alishan in Spring ("Spring at Mt. Ali") (Lot 1013) offered at this season's evening sale depicts Alishan, near the artist's Taiwan home of Chiayi. The Japanese occupying government was then promoting the establishment of a national park system, and Alishan became important for local natives as an area emphasizing their own local heritage as well as a site for potential tourist development, and today remains famous for one of the world's few remaining high-altitude rail lines.
Alishan: The Picturesque Landscape of Taiwan
Alishan is the collective name for a spur range that extends through 18 peaks on the western side of Yushan ("Jade Mountain"), including the peaks Tashan, Zhushan, Dulishan, and Dui Gao Yue. Early in the 20th century, the Japanese government surveyed Taiwan's mountain forests and built the Alishan Forest Railway to extract its timber resources. Because of the beautiful natural vistas of sacred trees, deep forests, cherry blossoms and beautiful sunrises over a seas of clouds, in 1927 (year two of the Showa era) it was voted one of Taiwan's eight great natural scenic treasures in an activity sponsored by the New Taiwan Daily News to choose "The Eight New Scenic Treasures of Taiwan". Thus the theme of the "eight scenes", or places most favored by scholar-poets ever since the Sung dynasty for enjoying the sights and sounds of nature, were now a matter of public discourse. The "eight scenes" would no longer be venues personally named and valued by those artists or scholars, but scenic sights for the leisure and recreational enjoyment of the public at large. It was chosen as the subject of many artists landscape paintings and also appeared in tourist guides, postcards, postage stamps and official publications.
As noted in 1935 in The New Taiwan People's Newspaper, Chen Cheng-Po was chosen by people of Chiayi to portray its outstanding scenery. In order to capture its secluded mystery and beauty, Chen chose the Tashan region as his subject, where the natural rock cleavage of its cliffs creates layers as distinct as the ascending levels of ancient pagodas (giving it the name "Tashan," or "pagoda mountain"). Because it is wreathed in mists year round, Taiwan's aboriginal Tsou tribe named it "the place of the sky gods". In Alishan in Spring, Chen combines sharply contrasting reds and greens to gorgeous effect, to convey the area's vitality, including its lofty peak, juniper trees, dense clouds, and cherry blossoms. As the region was then undergoing transformation from a rather mysterious and secluded high mountain region to a place considered a public destination for its picturesque beauty, his painting is not just a landscape depiction with a particular local flavor, but is additionally historically significant of the shift into a new era for the region. In 1930 Alishan became one of the three national parks designated by the Japanese occupation government, the Shintaka Arisan National Park ("New High Alishan Park"), symbolic of the modernizations taking place in Taiwan. The new park was now not just accessible for viewing by hiking; one could also stay and tour there for an extended period of time, which encouraged a new popular and cultural identification with its unique beauty. Alishan in Spring, beyond portraying the unusual scenic vistas of the area, conveys the human side of the region and a feeling of the artist's own hopes and feelings, with regard to both the specific scene as well as toward life as a whole.
Chen Cheng-Po articulates the natural features of the region through painting outdoors in his realist style, which was based in western realist oil painting styles. Chen brought his powers of close observation and highly developed visual discrimination to bear on his task, yet when painting Alishan in Spring, he was punctilious about a complete and accurate portrayal to the extent that he asked the local forestry authority to assess for him the age of its oldest trees, and began work only after learning that the answer was "more than 600 years old". The story reflects Chen's tenacity as well as his realist insistence on capturing the original truth of his subjects. Chen Cheng-Po once stated that "there's nothing interesting about a purely rational, descriptive presentation of things, because even when painted well, it will lack the power to move and arouse the viewer. The feeling is so much better when you produce a great piece by letting pure feeling take hold of your brush." This observation reveals that Chen's approach to landscape painting on the traditional Chinese concept of "painting from life". That concept does not emphasize exact portrayal of each item in a scene, its light, shadow or three-dimensional forms, but instead emphasizes the artist's continual observation and expression of scenic forms along with the artist's response to his inner feeling and spirit. If the more lyrical, "impressionistic" style of Chinese painting only deals with impressions and does indeed part from actual outer appearances, then "painting from life" involves the artist's observation and understanding, transforming visual experience into memory, knowledge, and feeling. In Alishan in Spring, we can see compositional effects borrowed from Chinese landscape painting. Foreground, middle distance and background are shown in three distinct layers, while the artist foregoes atmospheric effects of distance and depth. The result is a cheerful depiction of the kind described by painter Kuo Hsi in his "Lin Quan Gao Zhi" ("Forests and Streams in the Lofty Manner"): "Mountains in the spring are like a woman, lightly made-up, seeming to smile," and the entire work is enlivened by a sense of Chen Cheng-Po's personal mood and outlook. A detailed look at Alishan in Spring shows Chen using specific techniques from classical Chinese landscape painting in the taidian ("moss dot") strokes on the mountaintops and the more flowing lines of the trees, while the bright and profusely blooming cherry blossoms suggest van Gogh's The Mulberry Tree with the use of freely flowing strokes that fully convey the artist's subjective perceptions (Fig. 2). Chen Cheng-Po also uses curving lines that arc through the painting and pull its various parts together through their pleasing, rhythmic movement; all in all, the canvas is a successful fusion of the formal elements of both Eastern and Western art. The artist does not directly place scenic elements within the picture space in their natural relative proportions, the work's appeal instead rests on communicating the artist's personal feeling and character of the. The realism of Alishan in Spring does not end with accurate portrayal of visual sensations, but is highly colored by the artist's spirit, in a distant echo of the point of view of ancient Chinese landscape painters.
In his novel The Unknown Masterpiece, French author Honoré de Balzac wrote, "The mission of art is not to copy Nature, but to give expression to it! You are not a base copyist, but a poet!" While the subject of Alishan in Spring is a scenic spot, the artist refuses to be bound by the real physical space of his subject, but focuses on his own mental impressions of the space as a whole and injects them into the painting. In a time of intense change and interaction between East and West, Chen Cheng-Po created a unique artistic vocabulary out of his personal, East Asian experience and background, which spanned Taiwan, China and Japan. The artist's love for his homeland has made Alishan in Spring, a picturesque natural scene painted from life, a work that captures Taiwan's unique historical circumstances and natural scenic spaces in the 1930s, and demonstrates how much of the artist's own feeling was invested in his lifelong artistic ideals and his hopes and expectations for his homeland.
