Lu's artistic practice has been profoundly shaped by the socio-political transformations of Taiwan. Across decades, Lu's art has consistently centered on the human condition, whether through urban structures, symbolic objects, or natural imagery. His stylistic trajectory has progressed from fierce critique to a balance of reason and emotion, incorporating diverse techniques and cross-media experiments. Through his practice, Lu engages with the pulse of society, portraying the evolving cultural identity of Taiwan.
Lu’s tree is no longer a certain object on which one projects emotions, nor is it a representation of “the tree.” Like other urban elements converted into graphic symbols, it can also be arranged by the artist to compose an urban melody for a certain period, place and people.
Text / CHEN Kuang-Yi (Director, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts; Professor, Department of Fine Arts, National Taiwan University of Arts)
Trees are not a special painting subject, and Lu Hsien-Ming is not known as a painter specialized in painting trees.
Although trees have been repeatedly featured in the history of painting and their identity as well as meaning tend to vary in different works, they have captured the unique eyes of artists throughout generations and are represented in different ways, be it symbolic, aesthetic, romantic, naturalistic, etc.
Although Lu does not specialize in painting trees, there are often a few trees depicted in his paintings of urban jungles constructed by concrete pillars, standing like some feeble figures attempting to hold back the mighty force of urban infrastructure construction. Therefore, even if the artist only paints trees, content-wise and in terms of form, they are still part of the urban imagery that Lu has been fascinated with; we can say that these trees are indeed urban trees.
Today’s city dwellers have almost forgotten about mankind’s dependence on trees, which were used in nearly every way, from defense construction to everyday cooking. Trees were even viewed as sacred most of the time, and were associated with life itself in a symbolic way. However, it was not long before the ancient functions of trees were replaced by industrial products. As a result, ever since the 19th century, the role of trees has evolved to the point of becoming a crucial factor in urban planning, an aspect that is called “(urban) afforestation.” It becomes an important source of ecosystem services and a major factor in maintaining biodiversity. Trees in the city become public goods and play a socially, politically, economically and ethically crucial role while being intimately linked to leisure, playing games, education, environment, health, living quality, art and nature. Nonetheless, as environmental scientists are positively comparing trees to the lungs of cities, French singer Maxime Le Forestier has been singing the laments of trees with a sentiment of helplessness, “Like a tree in town / Between the concrete and tar / I struggle to shove / But my branches fly low / So close to the cars that smoke / Between the concrete and tar.” Moreover, there have been many urban trees felled, or “butchered,” if you will, in the name of urban renewal or building new roads. One is thus reminded of the well-known words in Wang Ding-Jun’s The Tree, “thousands of broken roots buried and suffocated under layers of pebbles, tar and asphalt.
It was also in the 19th century that painters started to make trees their subject matter with unprecedented enthusiasm, as they could no longer simply view trees as part of a symbolic background but individual subjects that demanded dedicated treatment. As if they were looking for ways to escape pressure from the city, Jean-François Millet and Henri Rousseau chose to live in seclusion on the urban outskirts and at the entrances of forests to create portraits for centuries-old oak trees in the woods. Their works, all of a sudden, captured the attention of young painters and photographers, who decided to follow their practice. Contrarily, impressionists that were one generation later than the two masters would begin delineating splendid natural landscape on the one hand, and serve as artists commissioned by the government of “le Paris d’Haussmann.” Furthermore, they seemed to deliberately overlook the scars of the city: the noisy constructions sites, the eviction and migration resulting from urban expansion, the class opposition and the environmental pollution brought on by industrialization. Exceptions, however, can be found in Jules Adler’s depiction of the grotesque factories with fuming chimneys and angry demonstrating laborers, and in Gustave Caillebotte’s portrayal of the straight and stiff-looking Parisian streets with indifferent pedestrians and the vertigo-inducing perspective in his paintings.
As a matter of fact, painters do not “unveil” an existing landscape, but “create” a scene through their eyes. Each scene is cultural, and at the same time, political, for the very reason that it always involves a certain perspective in its formation. Lu’s career began in Taiwan in the 80s. Along with his peers and comrades from Taipei Art Group and Hantoo Art Group emerged as active artists in Taiwan’s art scene in the 90s. During that period, which was characterized by volatile political and economic changes, this group of artists found themselves unable to ignore the drastically evolving external environment, and thus, have respectively employed their individual ways and ideas to express their thoughts and responses. However, amidst the bustling, flourishing art scene, Lu’s urban imagery – a mélange of visually heavy, oppressive highways, tall buildings, scaffoldings, bulldozers and trucks – is indeed represented in a quieter way that is devoid of complicated narratives and metaphors while displaying a certain type of urban landscape.
However, urban landscape comprising of construction sites, thoroughfares, building clusters and parks might be poetic to some people and unsightly to others, and the symbol of progress to some and the ruins of regrets for others. Lu’s urban imagery oscillates between piercing coldness and majestic grandeur; its color scheme moves between vibrant brightness and dark gloom; his brushstroke also alternates between that of the strong and the subtle. Therefore, one finds it very challenging to determine whether the artist paints a celebration of the city or simply its eulogy. Landscape represents an everlasting game of finding the balance, a standoff between two forces: it beckons both at the things we gaze at and the way we gaze at things. Yet, due to the fact that the things we gaze at as well as our gaze at these things are constantly and unavoidably changing in contemporary cities, the seemingly still landscape is always subject to changes. Perhaps it is because of this very reason, Lu’s strategic approach in art-making has been to gaze at the city by employing a long take from a distance that subsequently zooms in at a slow pace, first focusing on urbanites, and then, urban trees.
Lu’s paintings of trees are given literary titles, such as Records of the East of the City, Unending Remembrance, Endless, The Gathering, etc., which are incorporated with a low degree of narrative and a strong implication of personifying the trees. Interestingly, the artist has also been unhesitant in naming his figure paintings with titles like Spring Tree and Autumn Frost, reinforcing the inseverable connection between people and trees. Through “synesthesia,” emotions are shared between the trees and the figures, and visualize the artist’s affective and poetic gaze; yet, when one turns the eyes to his paintings, one is surprised by the fact that most of his paintings only depict segments of tree trunks.
It reminds us of John Constable’s small painting, Study of the Trunk of an Elm Tree (1821), which has been in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and caught the world’s attention due to its exhibition at Paris’s Grand Palais in 2002. The painting indeed only features the trunk, which is minutely delineated, be it the bark splits, the moss on the roots, or the low-hanging branches. The extremely realistic, exquisite representation and skills intrigued the renowned artist-curator Lucian Freud who later followed his predecessor’s example and made an attempt to paint a tree. However, he found himself unable to achieve the goal and returned empty-handed. Art critic Laurent Wolf tried to explain how difficult it could be to just paint the trunk: “Painting a tree, simply just one tree, and above all, only its trunk, has introduced a complex technical issue that greatly surpasses the geometric structure of the simple object…. Without narrative, allegorical meaning, figures and even any sublime perspective, the artist has nothing to work with except the reality of the tree, its own materiality and formal logic. This means the artist must adopt a new approach, which is to attempt to paint according to his unique perspective – what and how he sees – and portray his feelings about the visible world as closely as possible.”
With delicate techniques and thin application of paint, Lu represents the trunk of an old Marabutan tree with twisted, gnarled roots. The artist creates the texture of tree bark using drybrush, and meticulously delineates the gnarls and splits on the trunk, the crawling aerial roots and fresh shoots and leaves. Generally speaking, his depiction of trunks is based on the mastery of sketch, and the sense of volume is portrayed with a carefully controlled color palette. Only the alternating light and dark sides in the painting reveals the subtle contrasting colors. Should such precise and elaborate observation and representation be categorized as photographic naturalism and denote a certain tree that exists? In fact, the artist himself has told me that the subject of the paintings is an old Marabutan tree from the streets of Taipei, which he is very familiar with; however, he has projected a unique gaze and emotions onto the tree.
Conversely, in terms of the formal structure of the trunk, one is still strongly reminded of Mondrian’s Wood with Beech (1899) with its focused portrayal of vertical tree trunks. Ever since the emergence of Cubism, his depiction of trees eventually became a studied subject of structure, rhythm and balance, and finally evolved into those vertical and horizontal lines that the artist has been so significantly known for. It is obvious that one cannot deny the prominent structural property in Lu’s work, which brings us to reasonably believe that his interest in highways, scaffoldings and fences, like the tree trunks and freestanding figures in his painting, originates from the fact that these elements allow the artist to arbitrarily place in the image repeated vertical and horizontal lines that are transformed into diagonal lines through a dramatic arrangement of perspective. As though painting a tree trunk is not enough, the artist even adds several white vertical lines on the vertical trunk in his 2017 masterpiece, Endless.
Nevertheless, different from the trees painted by modern painters, Lu’s 2018 paintings series featuring trees adopts a pure white background. Spectators might be misled into thinking that the white background is the canvas’s original color; in reality, it is a blank, white background painted on a scarlet base. Consequently, the object painted is separated from its background, as if it exists in a vacuum. This approach is indeed the “object-directedness” that pop artists have emphasized. As a matter of fact, the approach represents how the artists view the world: they separate the ubiquitous media images from their individual historical background and see them as symbols essentially independent from any specific context to gain the freedom to reconstruct these symbols at will. Consequently, Lu’s tree is no longer a certain object on which one projects emotions, nor is it a representation of “the tree.” Like other urban elements converted into graphic symbols, it can also be arranged by the artist to compose an urban melody for a certain period, place and people.
As a result, a simple tree gradually becomes complicated as it inherits and continues Lu’s mapping of the city, a unique urban cartography posited between sense and sensibility, the subjective and the objective, the concrete and the abstract as well as the physical and the psychological. In the end, this artist who has been deeply mesmerized by his city still remembers to provide spectators different perspectives to observe the city even when he is portraying the urban trees. To validate this point, one only needs to juxtapose the powerful Awakening from a Summer Dream and the light-toned Records of the East of the City or to look at the realistic yet illusory Unending Remembrance together with that silver, flat yet substantial stainless tree glimmering in between the work.
Urban Trees — Lu Hsien-Ming’s Mapping of the City
Trees are not a special painting subject, and Lu Hsien-Ming is not known as a painter specialized in painting trees.
Although trees have been repeatedly featured in the history of painting and their identity as well as meaning tend to vary in different works, they have captured the unique eyes of artists throughout generations and are represented in different ways, be it symbolic, aesthetic, romantic, naturalistic, etc.
Although Lu does not specialize in painting trees, there are often a few trees depicted in his paintings of urban jungles constructed by concrete pillars, standing like some feeble figures attempting to hold back the mighty force of urban infrastructure construction. Therefore, even if the artist only paints trees, content-wise and in terms of form, they are still part of the urban imagery that Lu has been fascinated with; we can say that these trees are indeed urban trees.
Today’s city dwellers have almost forgotten about mankind’s dependence on trees, which were used in nearly every way, from defense construction to everyday cooking. Trees were even viewed as sacred most of the time, and were associated with life itself in a symbolic way. However, it was not long before the ancient functions of trees were replaced by industrial products. As a result, ever since the 19th century, the role of trees has evolved to the point of becoming a crucial factor in urban planning, an aspect that is called “(urban) afforestation.” It becomes an important source of ecosystem services and a major factor in maintaining biodiversity. Trees in the city become public goods and play a socially, politically, economically and ethically crucial role while being intimately linked to leisure, playing games, education, environment, health, living quality, art and nature. Nonetheless, as environmental scientists are positively comparing trees to the lungs of cities, French singer Maxime Le Forestier has been singing the laments of trees with a sentiment of helplessness, “Like a tree in town / Between the concrete and tar / I struggle to shove / But my branches fly low / So close to the cars that smoke / Between the concrete and tar.” Moreover, there have been many urban trees felled, or “butchered,” if you will, in the name of urban renewal or building new roads. One is thus reminded of the well-known words in Wang Ding-Jun’s The Tree, “thousands of broken roots buried and suffocated under layers of pebbles, tar and asphalt.
It was also in the 19th century that painters started to make trees their subject matter with unprecedented enthusiasm, as they could no longer simply view trees as part of a symbolic background but individual subjects that demanded dedicated treatment. As if they were looking for ways to escape pressure from the city, Jean-François Millet and Henri Rousseau chose to live in seclusion on the urban outskirts and at the entrances of forests to create portraits for centuries-old oak trees in the woods. Their works, all of a sudden, captured the attention of young painters and photographers, who decided to follow their practice. Contrarily, impressionists that were one generation later than the two masters would begin delineating splendid natural landscape on the one hand, and serve as artists commissioned by the government of “le Paris d’Haussmann.” Furthermore, they seemed to deliberately overlook the scars of the city: the noisy constructions sites, the eviction and migration resulting from urban expansion, the class opposition and the environmental pollution brought on by industrialization. Exceptions, however, can be found in Jules Adler’s depiction of the grotesque factories with fuming chimneys and angry demonstrating laborers, and in Gustave Caillebotte’s portrayal of the straight and stiff-looking Parisian streets with indifferent pedestrians and the vertigo-inducing perspective in his paintings.
As a matter of fact, painters do not “unveil” an existing landscape, but “create” a scene through their eyes. Each scene is cultural, and at the same time, political, for the very reason that it always involves a certain perspective in its formation. Lu’s career began in Taiwan in the 80s. Along with his peers and comrades from Taipei Art Group and Hantoo Art Group emerged as active artists in Taiwan’s art scene in the 90s. During that period, which was characterized by volatile political and economic changes, this group of artists found themselves unable to ignore the drastically evolving external environment, and thus, have respectively employed their individual ways and ideas to express their thoughts and responses. However, amidst the bustling, flourishing art scene, Lu’s urban imagery – a mélange of visually heavy, oppressive highways, tall buildings, scaffoldings, bulldozers and trucks – is indeed represented in a quieter way that is devoid of complicated narratives and metaphors while displaying a certain type of urban landscape.
However, urban landscape comprising of construction sites, thoroughfares, building clusters and parks might be poetic to some people and unsightly to others, and the symbol of progress to some and the ruins of regrets for others. Lu’s urban imagery oscillates between piercing coldness and majestic grandeur; its color scheme moves between vibrant brightness and dark gloom; his brushstroke also alternates between that of the strong and the subtle. Therefore, one finds it very challenging to determine whether the artist paints a celebration of the city or simply its eulogy. Landscape represents an everlasting game of finding the balance, a standoff between two forces: it beckons both at the things we gaze at and the way we gaze at things. Yet, due to the fact that the things we gaze at as well as our gaze at these things are constantly and unavoidably changing in contemporary cities, the seemingly still landscape is always subject to changes. Perhaps it is because of this very reason, Lu’s strategic approach in art-making has been to gaze at the city by employing a long take from a distance that subsequently zooms in at a slow pace, first focusing on urbanites, and then, urban trees.
Lu’s paintings of trees are given literary titles, such as Records of the East of the City, Unending Remembrance, Endless, The Gathering, etc., which are incorporated with a low degree of narrative and a strong implication of personifying the trees. Interestingly, the artist has also been unhesitant in naming his figure paintings with titles like Spring Tree and Autumn Frost, reinforcing the inseverable connection between people and trees. Through “synesthesia,” emotions are shared between the trees and the figures, and visualize the artist’s affective and poetic gaze; yet, when one turns the eyes to his paintings, one is surprised by the fact that most of his paintings only depict segments of tree trunks.
It reminds us of John Constable’s small painting, Study of the Trunk of an Elm Tree (1821), which has been in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and caught the world’s attention due to its exhibition at Paris’s Grand Palais in 2002. The painting indeed only features the trunk, which is minutely delineated, be it the bark splits, the moss on the roots, or the low-hanging branches. The extremely realistic, exquisite representation and skills intrigued the renowned artist-curator Lucian Freud who later followed his predecessor’s example and made an attempt to paint a tree. However, he found himself unable to achieve the goal and returned empty-handed. Art critic Laurent Wolf tried to explain how difficult it could be to just paint the trunk: “Painting a tree, simply just one tree, and above all, only its trunk, has introduced a complex technical issue that greatly surpasses the geometric structure of the simple object…. Without narrative, allegorical meaning, figures and even any sublime perspective, the artist has nothing to work with except the reality of the tree, its own materiality and formal logic. This means the artist must adopt a new approach, which is to attempt to paint according to his unique perspective – what and how he sees – and portray his feelings about the visible world as closely as possible.”
With delicate techniques and thin application of paint, Lu represents the trunk of an old Marabutan tree with twisted, gnarled roots. The artist creates the texture of tree bark using drybrush, and meticulously delineates the gnarls and splits on the trunk, the crawling aerial roots and fresh shoots and leaves. Generally speaking, his depiction of trunks is based on the mastery of sketch, and the sense of volume is portrayed with a carefully controlled color palette. Only the alternating light and dark sides in the painting reveals the subtle contrasting colors. Should such precise and elaborate observation and representation be categorized as photographic naturalism and denote a certain tree that exists? In fact, the artist himself has told me that the subject of the paintings is an old Marabutan tree from the streets of Taipei, which he is very familiar with; however, he has projected a unique gaze and emotions onto the tree.
Conversely, in terms of the formal structure of the trunk, one is still strongly reminded of Mondrian’s Wood with Beech (1899) with its focused portrayal of vertical tree trunks. Ever since the emergence of Cubism, his depiction of trees eventually became a studied subject of structure, rhythm and balance, and finally evolved into those vertical and horizontal lines that the artist has been so significantly known for. It is obvious that one cannot deny the prominent structural property in Lu’s work, which brings us to reasonably believe that his interest in highways, scaffoldings and fences, like the tree trunks and freestanding figures in his painting, originates from the fact that these elements allow the artist to arbitrarily place in the image repeated vertical and horizontal lines that are transformed into diagonal lines through a dramatic arrangement of perspective. As though painting a tree trunk is not enough, the artist even adds several white vertical lines on the vertical trunk in his 2017 masterpiece, Endless.
Nevertheless, different from the trees painted by modern painters, Lu’s 2018 paintings series featuring trees adopts a pure white background. Spectators might be misled into thinking that the white background is the canvas’s original color; in reality, it is a blank, white background painted on a scarlet base. Consequently, the object painted is separated from its background, as if it exists in a vacuum. This approach is indeed the “object-directedness” that pop artists have emphasized. As a matter of fact, the approach represents how the artists view the world: they separate the ubiquitous media images from their individual historical background and see them as symbols essentially independent from any specific context to gain the freedom to reconstruct these symbols at will. Consequently, Lu’s tree is no longer a certain object on which one projects emotions, nor is it a representation of “the tree.” Like other urban elements converted into graphic symbols, it can also be arranged by the artist to compose an urban melody for a certain period, place and people.
As a result, a simple tree gradually becomes complicated as it inherits and continues Lu’s mapping of the city, a unique urban cartography posited between sense and sensibility, the subjective and the objective, the concrete and the abstract as well as the physical and the psychological. In the end, this artist who has been deeply mesmerized by his city still remembers to provide spectators different perspectives to observe the city even when he is portraying the urban trees. To validate this point, one only needs to juxtapose the powerful Awakening from a Summer Dream and the light-toned Records of the East of the City or to look at the realistic yet illusory Unending Remembrance together with that silver, flat yet substantial stainless tree glimmering in between the work.