"Through the renovation of Tsushih Temple, I developed a deeper affection for my hometown and the villagers. My unique style is to fill my canvases with their sincerity and good nature, which I so dearly love."

Li Mei-shu, in his autobiography

Every weekend, Tsushih Temple in the little town of Sanhsia in Taipei County swarms with local people and tourists. Filled with the noise of the crowd and the smoke of burning incense sticks, this ancient Taoist temple is best known for its outstanding traditional Chinese carvings. Whenever they speak of this "Palace of Eastern Art," the villagers give two thumbs up to the designing artist, Li Mei-shu, who devoted nearly half of his lifetime to the renovation of the temple.

Li Mei-shu (1902-1983) was one of the forerunners of modern Taiwanese art. He graduated from the Tokyo Fine Art School with a concentration in oil painting. In his early days, he won wide recognition by constantly winning prizes in major government-sponsored art exhibitions both in Taiwan and Japan, and he produced exceptional Western-style paintings on huge canvases. At the apex of his career, he turned his eyes to Taiwanese folk art and to portraits of Taiwanese women. His style of realism became disagreeable to many academic artists and students, who thought it was a big downfall for such a great artist. Like a tragic hero, the formerly popular artist became withdrawn and lonely.

A Born Artist

Li, a Sanhsia native, was born into a rich family. His father, a respected gentleman in the town, owned a rice store. His brother, who was seventeen years older than he, was a renowned doctor. The family was fond of paintings and music. When young, Li was a leader among his playmates. He often treated them to snacks and proudly said, "My brother will pay for us later." The plaza in front of the temple was their playground. Instead of playing after school, Li would sneak into the temple and stare wide-eyed at the sculptures that craftsmen were working on. He kept asking about the images from folk stories carved on the wall. Born with a passion for art, he sketched the carvings on pieces of paper (such as in the corner above). Yet, even he himself could not predict that he would someday turn his imagination into reality and rebuild the temple himself.

During the Japanese occupation of Taiwan (1895-1945), there was no art school and it was common for students to go to Japan to receive a standard art education. In 1918, Li entered Taipei Normal School and taught himself oil painting by copying the paintings in Japanese magazines. After graduation, he intended to apply for the Tokyo Fine Art School, but his father objected to this, hoping that he would take over the family business. In 1923, the senior man arranged a marriage with a well-bred lady for his son to prevent him from leaving for Japan. Li taught in public schools near his hometown. During that time, he continued to paint and took art lessons from a Japanese teacher, Ishikawa Kinichiro, who first introduced modern art to Taiwan.

In 1924, Li's father passed away. In the following years, Li frequently participated in the Taiten Art Exhibition, and his oil paintings won a number of prizes. Having proved his talent and showed his determination, he finally won his family's approval and at the end of 1928, he stepped on the boat to Japan. At that time, he was already twenty-six years old.

The Oldest Student

The entrance exam for the Tokyo Fine Art School consisted of a single charcoal drawing. Never having drawn with charcoal, Li absorbed himself in sketching. He had classes in three places from eight o'clock in the morning to ten o'clock at night, and he made himself finish at least three sketches every day. In 1929, he passed the exam and became the oldest student among his classmates. Traditional and conservative, he acquired the nickname of Confucius. In his second academic year, his brother died of illness. Li dropped out of school for one term and went back to Taiwan for the funeral. Although he realized his responsibility to his family, now that his father and brother were both dead, he still insisted on going back to Japan to finish his studies. In a letter to his brother-in-law, he wrote, "I'm not going to be a stuck-up business tycoon in the village. The most important thing to me now is to work hard to create a bright future for myself."

Li had actually been admitted to several top art schools at the recommendation of his teacher in Taiwan, but he wanted to enter the Tokyo Fine Art School in order to study under Sabruosuke Okada, a highly regarded artist. He was famous for his portraits of traditional Japanese women and his use of light effects. Li was attracted to Okada's classical, realistic style, which suited his own personality. Many of Li's paintings showed a strong influence from his favorite teacher, especially his later creations which focused mostly on portraits of local Taiwanese women. When he was eighty, Li recalled, "Perhaps because of my natural disposition, I have always stuck to what I believed. I never thought of changing my ideal artistic style even during the time when Fauvism was all the rage."

After six years of study in Japan, Li returned to Taiwan in 1934. Much to his contemporaries' surprise, Li accepted an offer from the Japanese government to serve as Sanhsia village leader. The villagers believed that the well-educated man, a member of one of the town's most prominent families, would lead their lives to prosperity. Civic-minded and concerned for people and the public welfare, Li won their trust and support. To many artists, politics and art are mutually exclusive, but Li certainly did not think so. In 1950, he was elected a Taipei County commissioner, and he served in this office for three terms in a row. In addition to serving the public, he used his power to encourage the development of art education. He founded the Tay-Yang society, which is still the largest and oldest private art organization in Taiwan.

In his autobiography, which he wrote at the age of eighty-one, Li said, "I devoted my whole life to art, though I chose politics as my career, because my brother expected that of me. Now I have done my best without any regret towards him." His brother, a renowned doctor, had paid Li's art school tuition in Japan and had encouraged him to enter politics.

While Li succeeded in a series of election campaigns, it was the height of his art career as well. His Girl Taking A Rest (1935), painted just after he returned from Japan, first proved his exceptional ability by winning the first prize in the ninth Taiten Art Exhibition. Ambitiously intending to win an entry at the Tokyo Art Exhibition, he sailed back to Japan in 1939 and rented a studio where he could concentrate on painting for a couple of months. He was very happy that within the first year, his exceptional work, Red Cloth (1939), was selected to be shown. The next year, he again returned to Japan, and his Woman and Flowers (1940) was especially chosen for the exhibition celebrating Japan's 2,600th national anniversary. Li intended to compete for the honor for the third time in a row (after which his paintings would have been automatically shown at the exhibition without needing the approval of the judges), but his plans were broken off with the eruption of World War II.

Renovator of the Temple

In 1947, Li was selected by the Tsushih Temple committee to direct the renovation of the Temple, which had already been rebuilt twice and was now almost decayed. [See the story of the temple in the Spring 1998 edition of the Tzu Chi Quarterly.] Li hesitated to take on the job at first, but then he read a divination poem that had fallen from a wall. The poem indicated that a man with the name of a flower would be the one to fulfill the request of the god, Tsushih. Li--whose given name, Mei-shu, literally means "plum tree"-realized that he was destined to carry out the duty of rebuilding the temple.

Although he had specialized in Western art, Li had a unique discernment of Chinese sculptures. He thought color paintings would eventually fade and he insisted that all works be carved to endure for generations to come. That is, they had to be perfect. The basic structure of the temple was wood at the top and stone at the bottom. One of the characteristics of the temple was that its ceilings were made of wooden boards fitted in octagonal patterns. The web-like ceilings were dovetailed together layer upon layer, with no nails or screws. Li had craftsmen skilled in traditional sculpture carve great paintings by contemporary artists on the walls. He himself painted more than sixty paintings. The most magnificent design was one hundred birds of different species in various poses sculptured into a pair of stone columns in the main hall. Each column took a craftsman 1,000 working days to finish. In the temple, there were a total of 122 stone columns carved completely by hand with stories from Chinese mythology, history, literature and folklore.

Li expected perfection in art, so he expected the same for sculpture. Whenever there was even a tiny flaw, he would demand that the sculptor redo it. Some craftsmen could not tolerate his perfectionism and short temper, so they left. But they would come back eventually, because they realized that what he demanded would be a great contribution to future generations.

The temple contained most of Li's good memories of childhood. In his mind, it was more a sanctuary for people to appreciate works of art and purify their spirit than a place to worship. As to the town's economy, a unique temple could bring in tourists and make the small town blossom. He not only wanted to rebuild it, but he wanted it to be a valuable and durable "Palace of Oriental Art."

For thirty-six years, he completely devoted his efforts and time to all various aspects of the temple, including land and financial support. His children remembered that he always stayed up until midnight and would not stop working on the draft of a painting until he was quite happy with it. When a craftsman's son was hospitalized, he paid the bill himself without letting anyone know. He often treated the workers to snacks, which in the poor, agricultural society of that time was a rare luxury that only the rich could usually afford.

Aware that the expense of the renovation was paid for from public donations, he often reminded his children, "No member of our family shall ever receive a penny from the temple." Li himself worked as a volunteer from the beginning and used his influence to collect donations.

In his seventies, he trained a group of housewives to chant sutras for religious ceremonies. Good at music, he accompanied them on a Chinese instrument. He was as tough and demanding towards the housewives as he was towards his craftsmen. They were both frightened and in awe of him. Still, they admiringly called him "Master Mei-shu."

All for the Temple

Li Mei-shu was a loyal artist, a scrupulous leader, a generous neighbor and a concerned professor, but to his family he was a rigid, austere father and husband. Having grown up in Japanese society, he had been taught to be a male chauvinist. While he concentrated on art and his political career, his devoted wife took care of their eight children and all the domestic affairs. She always knew what he needed and supported him in his work. She raised the children herself and she took care of her mother-in-law, who was bedridden because of a stroke. Without passion or romance, the old couple were always faithful and grateful to each other.

When young, Li's children dreaded him. It was not until he suffered a bout of illness in his seventies that an intimate relationship grew between father and children. Li told his children and grandchildren at his eightieth birthday party, "In life, it's easy come and easy go; one should seize the time to do something meaningful for other people and future generations." During his later years of life, Li was still occupied by the renovation of the temple, which had been under construction his whole life and was still not yet finished. When he moved to a neighboring village to live with his second son, he still occasionally stopped by the temple. Looking at the exquisite carvings, he sighed, "If the temple isn't done now, the skills of traditional sculpture will be lost in the future."

After Li passed away, most of the craftsmen were laid off by the board of the temple, who intended to speed up the restoration by sending the work to mainland China. When the news came out, many art lovers and curious visitors came for a tour of the Chinese masterpieces. Tsushih Temple indeed became the major attraction in Sanhsia. Li Ching-wen, Li's third son, admitted that he used to be irritated that his father was not more concerned with the family. Having interpreted the temple to visitors for four years, he said fervently, "The deeper I am involved with the temple, the more I understand my father's inner feelings toward it." Li's mission was to pass on the heritage of traditional sculpture and Taiwanese culture.

Returning to His True Self

After Taiwan was returned to China in 1945, Li started to produce huge oil paintings, adopting the styles of famous French naturalistic artists such as Jules Breton, Jean Francois Millet and Gustave Courbet. During the postwar period, Western art symbolized an atmosphere of wonderland, and Li's Western-style impressionistic paintings were highly commended by academic artists and the public. Among them, Sunday (1946), Dusk (1948), and Picnic (1948) were the most highly esteemed. In particular, Sunday was bought by the Taiwanese provincial government as a gift for President Chiang Kai-shek.

Perhaps because of his many years as a public servant, Li had a broader and deeper insight into people's lives. During the fifties and sixties, he turned his attention to portraits of local women and to landscapes. Busy with the temple renovation and political affairs, he found it convenient to use people he was familiar with as models: his daughters, daughters-in-law, even the sutra-chanting ladies. He also liked to portray the place that most greatly touched him: his hometown, Sanhsia.

For years, Li had followed the current rules of Western art, but finally the beauty and humanity of his hometown called out to him from the depths of his heart. Art should be based on life and culture, he thought, and it should be a spiritual resource for people's lives. This was a major turning point for Li. He ignored the force of Fauvism and rejected the shadow of impressionism. With a sure hand, he openly spread all his inner passion on his canvases. There were no longer elegant decorations or exotic fantasies in his paintings, but only the ordinary, everyday lives of the villagers. His new creations of almost photographic realism astonished many art scholars and rocked their ideas of contemporary Western art.

In 1962, after he retired from the Taipei County Council, Li started a new career in art education as the director of the art department of National Taiwan Art College. He held the first island-wide exhibition for graduating students. In order to raise money for the tour, he reluctantly sold his paintings, which he would not have done under any other circumstances.

As a teacher, Li was a strict disciplinarian. He insisted that students must start with basic training before moving on to creating more imaginative works. "An artist should know what moves him and what he wants to say," he commented. "There is no rush to be in fashion." At a time when surrealism was popular, few students agreed with him. They mostly thought his works were old-fashioned and of poor quality. They often complained that they were offended by the way in which he revised their paintings without considering their feelings. Thus although his paintings were widely popular among the public, many of his students felt that he was no longer a great master.

Li once said, "It is a glorious promise for the future when contemporary artists create works of art that contain answers that their generation can look for." In 1983, the celebrated, determined artist died at the age of eighty-two. At that time, the real value of his later paintings and his contributions to folk art still waited to be discovered. It was not until recent years, when people had become more aware of the importance of native culture, that they reexamined his work.

Ni Tsai-chin, the president of the Taiwan Museum of Art, recalled that he first paid close attention to Li's paintings when he attended Li's posthumous art exhibition at the end of 1983. "His paintings totally destroyed my previous aesthetic prejudices towards Taiwanese modern art. There were people like me, there was my homeland." Ni had previously considered those of Li's paintings that he had seen to be unstylish and ordinary, but now he was baffled. "They were so distant and yet so familiar to me, but how could such plain works be so enthralling?" Teaching art history for years after that, he gradually came to reject the absolute idolatry of Western art, because he found the roots of local art and culture which the senior modern artists in Taiwan had worked so hard to nourish for their homeland. Among these artists, Ni said, Li Mei-shu was the best.

Li's paintings were also a colossal awakening for Hsieh Li-fa, one of Li's students, who lived in Paris for twenty-five years. "One afternoon I was awakened by Taiwanese folk songs from downstairs," he recalled, "and for no reason I burst into tears. Suddenly Professor Li's paintings flooded into my mind: there were Taiwan's mountains, sky, clouds and streams..." Having immersed himself in Western art all his life, Hsieh finally realized at that moment what he had been looking for. He concluded that Western art was simply the medium to lead Taiwanese artists to where they should have been in the first place.