Throughout the 1920s and ’30s, Tan Teng-pho (alternatively Chen Cheng-Po or Chen Chengbo) was the Taiwanese artistic community’s local boy done good, painting many scenes of the island over three productive decades.
Now he is little remembered outside his birthplace of Taiwan, but the oil paintings he produced while living and working in Shanghai in the early ’30s were his most admired works, and his best-known today.
Tan’s was a life of movement, interacting with the avant garde art worlds of ’20s and ’30s Tokyo and Shanghai while managing to retain a deep involvement with Taiwanese art movements – influencing them as his reputation grew.
He eventually returned home in the mid-30s and met his death in 1947, aged 52, caught up in the anti-government rioting in Taipei that would lead to the island’s independence movement.
Tan then slipped from the art world’s consciousness on both sides of the Taiwan Strait until, in the 1990s and early 2000s, his work began to sell for high prices whenever it came up for auction.
In 2006, at the peak of his revival, Taiwanese art collector and businessman Pierre Chen Tai-ming paid US$4.5 million for Tan’s oil painting Tamsui (1935) – a scene of the Tamsui (Danshui) river and waterfront near Taipei – at the time a world record for an oil painting by an ethnically Chinese artist.
Tan Teng-pho was born into a relatively poor Hokkien family in Chiayi City (formerly Kagi) in 1895, the first year of Japan’s colonial administration of Taiwan.
The city had never been much of a cultural centre, and Tan’s family could not afford to nurture the boy’s early artistic leanings. After some further education at a Japanese-run college in Taipei, Tan returned to Chiayi in 1917 to teach at a local school.
His stint as a tutor, which he had hoped would be brief, lasted for seven years.
Though he had to wait until he was nearly 30 years old, Tan managed to save enough to pay his way to the prestigious Tokyo Fine Arts School, or Geidai (now the Tokyo University of the Arts). He opted to study Western-style oil painting, a form he had already taught himself, producing local landscapes and scenes around Chiayi.
On excursions to Tokyo he captured popular landmarks including the Nijubashi Bridge, near the Imperial Palace, and the greenery of Ueno Park. As would soon become typical of his work, normally crowded locations were uncluttered by people, and all the calmer for it.
In 1926, one of Tan’s paintings was selected for the seventh Imperial Art Exhibition of Japan, organised by the Imperial Academy of Arts.
The exhibition featured Tan’s oil painting Street of Chiayi, a charming, though perhaps somewhat overly idyllic representation of an un-tarmacadamed road, traditional houses and wooden fences in his hometown.
It was the first time that a Taiwanese artist’s work – as well as the first painting in a Western style by a Chinese artist – was displayed at the exhibition. He graduated from Geidai in 1929 and immediately travelled to the International Settlement of Shanghai.
Tan would spend just four years in Shanghai, but they were very productive ones. He had obtained employment with the private Xinhua Academy of Fine Arts, the second-largest art school in Shanghai after the better-known Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts, run by the noted painter Liu Haisu.
Still, the Xinhua school was outward looking, deeply imbued with the ideologies and hopes of the progressive intellectual May Fourth Movement, and open to influences from both Western art techniques and traditional Chinese painting.
Tan also briefly taught at the short-lived Changming Art Academy, a private college founded by the Wuxing-born banker and painter Wang Yiting (Wang Zhen) and which specialised in guohua.
Tan had never formally studied traditional Chinese painting before, but would incorporate its elements – particularly the strong colours – into his work, giving his Shanghai-period paintings a unique and clearly recognisable haipai or Shanghai style, blending Western impressionism with more lyrical Chinese aesthetic elements.
Where we would normally think of Shanghai as busy – congested intersections, crowded trolleybuses, Sikh policemen directing traffic and rickshaw pullers – Tan’s paintings of the city offer a strangely depopulated, traffic-free, urban calm.
He seems to purposefully overlook the advertising hoardings and neon signs the city’s arch-modernists invariably accentuated. The accoutrements of the modern metropolis slip from view, receding in the face of greenery and foliage.
Perhaps Tan was wistfully remembering his Taiwanese background, his hometown of Chiayi.
Shanghai was not entirely devoid of nature – the long lines of London plane trees that were (and still are) so common in the city’s French Concession, the numerous landscaped public parks with arboretums, flower beds, and rock gardens also attracted him.
But still, the lushness that seems to burst from Tan’s paintings of the city – for instance, his portrait of French Park (now Fuxing Park) – appear distinctly more tropical, more fecund, more Taiwanese than Shanghai’s reality.
He went even further in “tropicalising” eastern China’s landscape during his excursions of Shanghai. In two paintings made in Hangzhou – Zhongshan Park at West Lake (1929) and Spring at West Lake (1934) – the environment appears almost more southern Taiwan or Southeast Asia than the temperate Zhejiang province.
Tan’s portraits of 1930s Shanghai may be best understood as an artistic equivalent to the locally popular modernist literary movement known as the New Sensationists.
Though this group was mostly composed of Shanghainese writers such as Mu Shiying and Shi Zhecun, as well as the Taiwan-born, Japanese-educated Liu Na’ou, its ethos of being more concerned with the unconscious and with aesthetics than with politics or social problems appealed to Tan.
The New Sensationists stood in contrast to Lu Xun’s League of Left-Wing Writers, who were committed to social realism and a more overt leftist political stance.
Tan’s urban images of Shanghai – landscapes such as Footbridge in Shanghai, his rendering of the iconic waterfront, Bund, and the highly industrial Shanghai Wharf and Shanghai Shipyard (all painted between 1930 and 1933) – are rendered as ever almost devoid of people, with the trees (even if stripped bare for winter) prominent, while the colour palate is invariably heavy with autumnal browns and rusts.
Even his most obviously colourful and French Impressionist-inspired painting from this period – Bridge Shadow in Shanghai (1930) – depicting the Sichuan Road Bridge across the Suzhou Creek between Hongkou and the city’s central district – shows only a solitary sampan oarsman.
Perhaps, if times had been calmer, Tan would have stayed in Shanghai and eastern China longer. But his sojourn coincided with the January 28 incident of 1932, where Japan engineered an attack on the city in supposed response to demonstrations against Tokyo’s occupation and annexation of Manchuria the year before.
The only sign of this chaos in Tan’s works is in his Commercial Press Building paintings, showing war damage to the edifice in Zhabei district.
In early 1932, the publisher’s warehouse took a direct hit from Japanese artillery and then the attached Oriental Library, with priceless – and in many cases irreplaceable – manuscripts and ancient scrolls, caught fire.
All were destroyed, leaving the city’s intelligentsia distraught.
War and political strife were likely the reasons Tan decided to return to Taiwan, where he quickly established links with other artists, co-founding the Tai-Yang Art Society with fellow Taiwanese painter and sculptor Liao Chi-chun.
Perhaps free from the violence and political strife of China, he seemed to become more optimistic: his use of colour expanded, away from the cloudy, often grey skies of eastern China, his more overtly azure blue skies reappeared from his earlier, Chiayi paintings, as can be seen in Taiwan Farmhouse (1932) and In Front of the Temple (1936).
Tan continued to paint up until his death and held exhibitions in Taipei, Chiayi and across Taiwan. Snow on Yushan (1947) is one of his last works, a glorious landscape of the countryside stretching towards the island’s highest mountain. As ever, the scene is bare of humans.
Tan lived through to the end of the half-century of Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan, then witnessed the initial influx of the Kuomintang (KMT) armies from mainland China. With civil war raging across the Strait, it was a chaotic time.
The sudden arrival of so many troops, the breakdown in discipline, rampant corruption, economic mismanagement and the exclusion of the general public from political decision-making saw many civilians gather in Taipei on February 28, 1947 to protest.
Perhaps the bloody events of the “228 massacre” – when the anti-government uprising was violently suppressed – are part of the reason that Tan has not been as well remembered in the wider Chinese art world as he deserves, let alone internationally.
Suppression of the demonstrations by the KMT-led Nationalist government was rapid and brutal, the number of deaths estimated to be between 18,000 and 28,000. A hastily formed civilian-led “February 28 Incident Committee”, comprising Tan and five others, approached the military, seeking peace.
The KMT’s response was swift. Tan and three other committee members were arrested, tied up with wire and forced to march from Taipei’s police station to the railway station, where three of them were publicly executed.
Tan was taken to his hometown of Chiayi, where he was shot in the town square. Under strict army orders, his body was left on view.
Eventually, Tan’s wife, Chang Chieh, along with a photographer who was capturing the horrific scene, was permitted to remove his body for burial.