Guo Xuehu's Prize-winning Essay
In the essay, Guo Xuehu describes the development of his professional career as a painter and the difficulties he encountered in achieving the two credentials necessary to become a professional artist: 1) acquiring art education, and 2) receiving social recognition. His successful if unexpected acceptance to the first Taiwan Fine Arts Exhibition launched his career in 1927 at the very young age of nineteen. Yet, a one-time success was not enough to secure a lasting social recognition. He needed to prove himself as an artist of true ability by securing admission of his works to the salon in the following years. In this pivotal moment, he turned to the Government-General Library for art education.
The essay highlights the importance of looking at art as part of artistic training. First, Guo Xuehu explains how he became a scroll mounter to "come in touch with great paintings." Second, he details how he was able to look at many artworks in reproduction at the library, including those in special collections (tokubetsusho):
While the essay does not reveal in detail the names of artists whose works he was looking at so carefully, scholars have suggested (perhaps based on later interviews with the artist) that he had studied acclaimed works of artists in Japan active during the Meiji and Taishō periods, as well as masterpieces of Chinese painting from the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties (ADD REF: Ex. cat. 1989 p. 17). Access to paintings, whether in original or in reproduction, facilitated copying and acquiring the knowledge of painting techniques. The practice was not new. Yet, the advent of public exhibitions and an increase in the quality of reproductions expanded access to art to a larger number of aspiring artists, who lacked affiliation to established ateliers or art schools.... I looked mostly at books featuring new Eastern Painting (atarashii tōyōga), read about painting theory, copied old masterpieces, and studied new painting techniques.
Guo Xuehu's essay won the second prize in the contest and was published alongside the first prize winning essay in the major Japanese-language newspaper in Taiwan, Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, in January 1932. The first prize went to an entrepreneur Xie Yonghe. Both winners were Taiwanese-Chinese men in their twenties with modest family backgrounds, who attributed their professional success to their persistent library use and expressed themselves fluently in Japanese. Their respective essays paint a very positive image of the library, and by extension of the colonial government. Both essays suggest that the users discovered the library in a seemingly serendipitous manner and that the library transformed their lives by providing them with instruction and access to information, which they were otherwise unable to obtain.
Xie Yonghe credited the library with his own success at establishing a lacquer-importing business and studying for a license exam. In addition, he described how he had encouraged his artistically inclined younger brother to also study art at the library. As a result, his nineteen year old brother, a self-taught artist, had his painting accepted to the tōyōga division at the fourth Taiwan Fine Arts Exhibition (1930). Based on the information in Xie's essay, we can assume that his younger brother was Xie Yonghua, whose painting "Miyanoshita Area" (Miyanoshita fukin), depicting the vicinity of the Taiwan Grand Shrine was on display that year. (He is said to have studied with Guo Xuehu and had in total five works accepted to the official salon in Taiwan (Taiten 4, 6, 7, 10, Futen 2). You can find reproductions of his works and all other works reproduced in the exhibition catalogues in this database.
Guo Xuehu is an unusual case of an artist who achieved prominence and a longstanding professional success without attending an art school or affiliating with an established artist. His insistence on the importance of looking at art and striving towards professional recognition at the official salon suggest emergence of shared practices and assumptions about artistic professionalization Japan and Taiwan. Moreover, Guo's interest in older Chinese art overlapped with those of many Japanese artists, who mined the artistic pasts of East Asia for a mode of expression suitable to the modern times (ADD ref to Aida Yuan Wong).