Chen Cheng-po

Biography

On the morning of 25 March 1947 four prisoners were tied with wire and driven on a military truck from the police station in Chiayi to the railway station. One of them was the painter Chen Cheng-po. He was shot last, beside the station square.

He was born on 2 February 1895 in Chiayi (Kagi under the Japanese), a few months before the start of the Japanese colonial period. His father, who had passed the imperial examinations, worked as a private tutor. The boy was raised by his grandmother. He attended a private Chinese school, then a school taught in Japanese. In 1913 he entered the Taiwan Governor-General’s National Language School in Taipei. There Kinichiro Ishikawa taught him watercolour, and for the future painter these were the first lessons in drawing from nature. His diaries show that he had wanted to paint since childhood.

From 1917 he worked for seven years as a primary-school teacher in Chiayi and the surrounding area, taking pupils out of town to paint sketches. His family had no money for study in Japan, and he had to save up himself. In 1924, almost thirty, he entered the painting division of the teacher-training course at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (today the Tokyo University of the Arts). He studied under the oil painter Itaru Tanabe and in the private studio of Saburosuke Okada. Above all, by his own account as it has come down to us, he admired Van Gogh: he covered two books about him, including his letters, with red pencil marks.

In 1926 his painting “Street of Chiayi” was accepted for the seventh Teiten, the Imperial Art Exhibition, and he became the first Taiwanese whose oil painting was admitted. Others followed: his pictures were shown at the Teiten, at the Taiwan exhibitions Taiten and Futen, and at shows of Japanese groups such as Kaijusha and Kofukai. In 1926 he took part in founding the Taiwanese society Chi-Hsing. After graduating in 1927 he stayed on in the postgraduate course, finished it in 1929, and at the same time studied in Okada’s studio.

After that he lived for several years in Shanghai, teaching at the Xinhua and Changming art schools. In Shanghai he became interested in the painting of Ni Zan and Bada Shanren, and his manner began to take shape from a fusion of the lyricism of Chinese landscape with European technique. He worked in oil, in glue colours and in pencil, most often on landscapes and portraits drawn from everyday life. The painter Hsieh Li-fa found his style clumsy, while his biographer Ko Tsung-min considered the clumsiness deliberate and compared his work with Van Gogh and with Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”. It seems to me that the dispute shows how hard it is to find words for painting that learned from the academy and then left it behind.

In 1933 he returned to Chiayi.

His main subject became his native region: plein-air studies in Tamsui, Chiayi and Tainan. In 1934, together with Yang Sanlang and Liao Chi-chun, he founded the Tai-Yang Art Society, and in 1940 he helped young artists in Chiayi to set up the Qingchen Fine Art Association.

After 1945, when Taiwan passed under the administration of the Republic of China, he joined the committee in Chiayi to welcome the national government, as someone who spoke Mandarin. In 1946 he joined the Kuomintang and was elected to the city council. He served on the jury of the first provincial art exhibition of Taiwan.

After the events of 28 February 1947 (the February 28 Incident, an uprising in Taiwan suppressed by the Kuomintang), clashes began in Chiayi between townspeople and Kuomintang troops, and the soldiers took refuge at the airport. Chen joined the committee set up to settle the conflict and, with five others, went to negotiate as a representative of peace. The military detained four of them, the painter among them, and released the other two. On 25 March they were led through the streets to the station and shot. For three days the bodies could not be collected. Then his wife, Chang Chieh, took his remains home.

His widow preserved the paintings and documents. In 1979, after the regime eased, the first exhibition of his surviving works was held. Only after martial law was lifted in 1987 could he be spoken of openly. In 1995 a monument by his grandson Pu Hao-ming was unveiled in Chiayi. Since 2012 the city has marked 2 February as Chen Cheng-po Day.