| dc.description.abstract | During the Japanese colonial period, Taiwanese oil painters Liu Chin-Tang（1894-1937） and Chen Cheng-Po（1895-1947） went to China as art teachers in the 1920s-1930s. Born and raised during Japanese colonization of Taiwan, they lived in a world of Chinese culture in parallel with that of Japanese-language culture. When they studies in Tokyo School of Fine Arts in order to gain access to the most advanced cultures, they witnessed the respect esteemed Japanese artists paid to Chinese painting. After graduation, they both went to China, not only for the longing for Chinese culture, but also for their artistic pursuit.
While Liu and Chen worked in China, they showed complexity of identities in the relations between Taiwan, China and Japan. Liu was a foster son of a Chinese politician, he participated in China politics and involved in anti-Japanese activity. During his stay in China for 17 years, he only visited Taiwan once as a Chinese politician. Chen used Fujian province as a place of origin, during his stay in Shanghai for 4 years, he was active in artistic events in China, Japan and Taiwan. Their identities shifted in the China and Japan political relationship, both of them visited to Japan on behalf of Chinese government in 1920s, serving as a bridge for the cultural exchanges between China and Japan. However, when violence broke out between China and Japan during the 1930s, they felt China’’s hostility against Japanese and Taiwanese. Chen returned to Taiwan as a Japanese citizen, and Liu stayed in China, used painting to ask China to treat Taiwanese as Chinese, not Japanese.
During their stay in China, Liu and Chen both worked hard to fit in the circle of local artists, and they participated in artistic events such as National Art Exhibition. Like other Eastern oil painters, they tried to fuse the East and West painting and find similarities between concepts in Western Post-Impressionism and Chinese painting. They emphasized the expression of lines, shifting toward expressing images with lines rather than color patches. Both of them devoted to discovering a contemporary style from traditional roots, fusing traditional Chinese paintings techniques and themes with Western form.
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