Merging Eastern poetics with Western abstraction, Chen Ting-Shih was at the forefront of modern art in Taiwan, working across painting, print and readymade sculpture.
Read MoreBorn in 1913 into a prestigious family in Fuzhou (his great-grandfather, Shen Baozhen, served as governor of Taiwan during the Qing Dynasty), Chen took up calligraphy and Chinese classics from the age of four. Chinese painting and oil painting followed. Chen lost his hearing when he was eight, following a fall.
Chen attended the Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts in 1937, a year before the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War. During the war, he contributed illustrations to an anti-enemy comic under the pseudonym, 'Ears'.
Chen's work draws from nature, life, and the universe, and is abundant with natural and cosmological motifs—symbols that were also employed to attest to the tumultuous changes across industrial and post-war Taiwan.
Alongside his art practice, Chen continued to work in publishing in the 1940s, first in China, then —following the Retrocession of Taiwan to China from Japanese rule in October 1945—in Taiwan, as art editor at Peace Daily (和平日報), where he published satirical political comics.
Peace Daily was banned in 1947. While many artists fled Taipei during the period of political oppression in the decade that followed, Chen remained, taking up a post at the Taiwan Provincial Taipei Library (now National Taiwan Library) from 1948. At the same time, he continued to pursue his practice, studying Western works and movements alongside traditional Chinese techniques.
In 1957, Chen resigned from his library post to focus on his art. He exhibited with the Fifth Moon Group and Ton Fan Group and co-founded the Modern Print Association in 1958.
Woodblock printing became core to Chen's practice, attesting to both his formal education and desire to innovate. Made from the residual fibres of sugarcane and recognisable from their cracked surfaces, Chen's woodblocks commonly reference nature or spirituality, as represented through abstract geometric or calligraphic shapes.
The Mystery of Creation 4 (1966) features two elongated shapes facing one another, as if confronting the pellicular nature of their existence. Mirroring nature's unpredictable mutations, Chen abstains from symmetry and hard-edges, positioning them rather at one end of the sheet.
Colour is gradually incorporated in Chen's later prints, from the small blue moon representing the phenomenon of the title in Dreaming in The Glacier 8 (1974), to the monumental red moon of Day and Night 61 (1981), which is intercepted by a line of golden suns.
The Modern Print Association was founded with an intention to subvert traditional ink painting. Chen began experimenting with incorporating Western approaches and abstraction into his interest in nature and the universe.
Vastly more colourful than his woodblock works, acrylic on paper works such as The Peach Blossom Spring (1970) show hard-edged splatters of cobalt dotting one corner of a fading, rose pink ground. The reference to scenery is retained in the title and gradient alone.
Chen turned to sculpture in the late 1960s. Inspired by Picasso's Bull's Head (1942), he used found objects—sometimes going to shipbreaking yards in Kaohsiung to seek out scrap metal—to create new artworks, often from a combination of copper, iron and wood.
Harp (1980–1990) shows the mystical instrument pointing toward the sky to connect nature, culture and the afterlife. In Quartet (1995), a line of moulded egg cakes held between iron pliers draws attention to everyday Taiwanese life, reflecting the artist's influence and use of his environment across his practice.
Chen's work has been shown at major institutions and biennials worldwide, including Liang Gallery, Taipei (2014); Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2002); Lido, Venice (2000); Taipei Biennale (1996); Asia Foundation, San Francisco (1976); Hong Kong Museum of Art (1973); Luz Gallery, Manila (1968); and National Taiwan Museum of Art, Taipei (1960).
His works are in the collections of public institutions, including the Rockefeller Foundation, Cincinnati Art Museum, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts.
The artist is represented by Each Modern, Taipei; and Liang Gallery, Taipei.
Elaine YJ Zheng | Ocula | 2024
