Prize-winning Landscapes
INTEGRATE The official salon and the library brought Guo Xuehu into the orbit of Japan's imperial art world. His relationship with colonial institutions would only expand in the subsequent years, as many government offices would purchase his paintings at the salon.
Guo Xuehu's hours spent studying at the library and sketching around Taipei paid off. His painting titled Maruyama fukin (Near Yuanshan) (see below) received the special award at the second Taiwan Fine Arts Exhibition, silencing the critics. Moreover, the Government-General purchased the work at a very high price of 500/600 yen. His career took off.
In 1929, he began studying with Gōhara Kotō (1887-1965), a well respected Japanese settler-artist in Taipei. Guo Xuehu also joined the Sendansha (Sandalwood Society, 1930-36), an exhibition group founded by Gōhara Kotō and another nihonga established settler-artist, Kinoshita Seigai (1887-1988). His paintings were accepted to all annual salons in Taiwan. Moreover, he received special award in 1928, 1929, 1931, 1932; the Taiten Prize in 1930 in 1931; the Tainichi Prize in 1932, and the Asahi Prize in 1935. Institutions like the Government-General, Culture and Education Bureau, Tainan Public Hall, and Navy Officer's Department purchased his salon paintings.
Except for one figure painting, all of his salon paintings were landscapes, sites in nature or around the city. What was the appeal of these works to his contemporaries?
His works demonstrate his technical mastery of complex compositions and great attention to detail. The artist explored different techniques and styles: he produced works in lush greens and drip-in technique reminiscent of Rimpa painting ("Near Yuanshan" 1928; "New Clearing" 1931), applied perspective and vivid colors to capture a bustling urban scene ("Prosperity of South Street" 1930 ADD IMAGE), and carried out an unconventional experiment with ink and paper to convey a mysterious evening mood ("Silence" 1933 ADD IMAGE). He grappled with finding the right balance between naturalism (sketching-based, attention to detail, elements of one-point perspective) and an overall decorative quality of the painting surface (distribution of color, composition, use of outlines or lack thereof etc) in a way that spoke to Japanese jurors and audiences familiar with nihonga (Compare Yen on "Near Yuanshan" YEN p. 103).
The appeal went beyond technique and painting style, however. His works depicted Taiwan's scenery, a topic of growing interest to both Japanese and Taiwanese-Chinese viewers. Taiwan was changing. With every year, Japanese presence on the island left a more visible mark. As a landscape artist, he captured that moment.
"Near Yuanshan" (1928) depicts a site in Taipei well familiar to its citizens. The viewer's eyesight takes in the maize, sunflowers, and fields in the lower part of the painting, then travels through the hilly park, finally to discover an iron Truss bridge and street lamps towards the left. A small flock of birds draws the viewer's attention to the landscape on the other site of the bridge, not represented in the painting - the grounds of the Taiwan Shrine (Taiwan jinja). The whole area of the park and the shrine was developed in the early years of colonial rule. Even the maize and sunflowers are not local plants but possibly crops introduced by the Japanese. The white boundary tablet in the lower side of the painting indicates that the land has been measured and defined by ownership. (New visions 29-30). The lush greens evoke the natural beauty of the landscape, yet it is a clearly man-made site, imbued with historical and political significance.
Similarly, the double prize-winning "New Clearing" (1931) depicts a site of great historical import in Taiwan's colonial history, the Zhishan Cliff (Shibayama in Japanese), where, in 1896, six pioneer Japanese teachers were assassinated. In other words, the flourishing garden and park rest atop a site of sacrifice for the imperial cause and of anti-colonial resistance. A pathway through the carefully cultivated fields leads the eyesight into an elevated area of the park, with two distinct rooftops visible amidst foliage: that of a memorial shrine established to commemorate their deaths, and a local temple. The juxtaposition suggests a peaceful integration of Japanese and Taiwanese elements (Compare: YEN p. 103).
Guo Xuehu's works were on view in the tōyōga division at the Taiwan Fine Arts Exhibition. However, they shared their artistic concerns and even subject matter with nihonga, as many Japanese artists traveled to Taiwan in search of a distinct subject matter for their figure and landscape paintings.
