Li Yihong was born in 1941 during World War II, a time when Taiwan was still ruled by Japan. He grew up in a stage when the Kuomingtang was moving its government to Taiwan. During this period of the Republic of China, the gentry class who had been poring over painting and calligraphy had walked into history. The renowned old scholars of the past dynasty who were still alive were considered as the few living models of elegance. Consequently, the form and aesthetics of literati painting could only be learned and comprehended through works that were handed down from ancient times.

　　The traditional Chinese painting had taken its dominance in the art circle of Taiwan as well as art education since the 1950’s and along with it came the ideology of traditionalism and conservationism. When Li Yihong entered his school in the early 1960’s, Chinese painting was considered quintessential national culture. In addition to the orthodox Chinese ideology, the learning patterns of painting were limited to imitating and modeling after ancient works of art.

　　It was also a time when the “May Painting Society” and “Oriental Painting Society” outshone the rest of the art circle. While discussing the modernity of Asian art, John Clark mentioned a phenomenon: in local culture, young artists tend to criticize older or more traditional forms of art and its artists by using European and American styles as a means of discourse. In a similar approach, the founding members and successors of the two most important painting societies introduced the Western latest artistic trend, - abstractionism and abstract expressionism in particular, - challenged nowadays isolated, rigid and conservative tradition, system and environment and atmosphere of art. After 1961, Liu Guosong and several new members who were representatives of the May Painting Society, started praising abstractionism highly and appealing to modern abstract ink art.

　　During school, Li Yihong was also attracted to modern and abstract artistic vocabulary. Because of this, it was interesting that he became a student of Jiang Zhaoshen, who served as a research assistant in the Department of Painting and Calligraphy at the National Palace Museum, and started learning traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy in 1969. Born in a family of many generations of scholars, Jiang moved to Taiwan with the Kuomingtang government in his youth and learned to write poems and paint from Pu Ru, a cousin to Puyi, the final ruler of the Qing dynasty and the last Emperor of China. During the 1960’s to 1970’s, with his study of Wu school painting and calligraphy in the Ming dynasty, Jiang received a lot of attention in the circle of Chinese art history at home and abroad. Particularly, he delved into works of the two literati painters, Tang Ying and Wen Zhengming. Meanwhile, having served as a research assistant at the National Palace Museum for a long period of time, Jiang was able to prompt his students to take a close look at original, authentic paintings and calligraphy. The enlightenment and influence had been profound for Li Yihong in receiving a better understanding of Chinese paintings -- not only literati painting -- but also traditional brushwork and techniques.

　　Moreover, Li has benefited greatly from Jiang Zhaoshen in forms and techniques. In the mid 1980’s, the artist seemed to consciously introduce more natural and humanistic settings of the real world in his ink landscape paintings. Yet, Jiang had a very unique style of managing landscape, trees and rocks and small figures, animals, and other small details added to enliven a painting. His textured strokes, in particular, have been the legacy that Jiang’s followers have had a difficult time breaking away from. Creating his personal style under the traditional landscape painting methods or transforming the structures of reality and nature to showcase the heritage of traditions has been a task that Li Yihong has faced for years and needed to work on after he became a student of Jiang. It seems that Jiang sought to approach the essence and context of traditional Chinese literati painting, and he introduced the composition and structure that is associated with Wu school landscape painting from time to time. Li Yihong, nevertheless, seems to self consciously learn from the nature of the real world and he even applies the same principal to man-made landscapes, clearly presenting the contingency of real scenes and humanity as fun.

　　It is worth noting that Li published a book titled “ Nature and Painting Conception” in 1984, which discusses the methods and techniques of creating ink painting. In the book, Li used a great number of partial or close-up pictures of masterpieces in the Chinese painting history, accompanied by photos of scenery he took all around Taiwan, to analyze and explain the relations of form between techniques and real scenery. Here we can see the dual nature of the artist’s concept of creating landscape painting. On the one hand, he verifies that the form of traditional Chinese landscape painting is visible through the structures of the sceneries of mountains and fields in Taiwan; on the other hand, he clearly demonstrates that the forms and structures of landscape that are readable in Chinese painting history can be obtained by carefully studying and analyzing the sceneries of Taiwan itself. Therefore, the following task will be how to create paintings by observing Taiwan’s local landscape.

　　Li has had a greater sense of establishing his personal style of painting after 1996. Breaking away from the basic rule of the Jiang school that succeeds with the texture strokes like calligraphy, Li manipulates ink and its texture and layers with the flowing movement of water. Calligraphy-like design, outline and structure has good control in using brushes, but how can we incorporate this into color-gradation techniques of ink that have stronger automatic natures to create new possibilities? Even though he was striving to create his own unique style at the time, Li was still under the structure of traditional landscape painting. Additionally, he had been fond of photography for years, which not only helps him record natural sceneries but also becomes an important and helpful tool in creating paintings in recent years.

　　Whether or not natural landscapes captured by a mechanical or electronic eye are really able to improve and enhance the creation of ink paintings has been a very controversial question. Generally, it is believed that traditional Chinese painting has realistic style, but this does not mean that it depicts everything as it is; it emphasizes more on how a painting is able to display the true quality of nature and the inner feelings of an artist. Even with the help of photography, Li still focuses on creating paintings with ink and brushes with skills that he has accumulated for a long time. He takes charge of subjective and representative transformations between imitation and creating images and real scenes in his own personal style. As far as the process is concerned, the artist seeks to create paintings by using light. In the real world, light shines on every object. Li takes pictures of objects through the lens of his cameras, adding the conversion of photology or calculating data by using computers to develop photos to be used as a reference for his paintings. In his latest works, the scenery, with the dramatic contrast formed by light, often fascinates him.

　　Even though he continues to keep relations with traditional landscape painting, Li has been developing various dynamic abstract and transformative innovations under the theme and premise of light, which is fully demonstrated in his many recent landscape paintings, particularly in the series of water and rocks. Some of the paintings he creates even displays diffused patterns of clusters of crystals, or what is seen in a kaleidoscope -- irregular changing patterns that are composed of many pieces of colored glass. In spite of his eye disease, Li becomes more firm as he grows older, and he pioneers a number of creative innovations of traditional ink art through the visual effect of photology and digital image.

　　By Chia Chi Jason Wang

作者：Chia,Chi,Jason,Wang