Mau-cheng Lee

1954 Born in Yunlin County; now lives and works in Keelung

1975 Graduated from Taiwan Provincial Chiayi Normal School (today’s National Chiayi University), Chiayi

1977-1978 Attended the Department of Fine Arts, College of Chinese Culture (today’s Chinese Culture University), Taipei

Lee’s training in calligraphy and painting was largely traditional, his creative thinking brimmed with modernity. From childhood he had grown up in the countryside, and he profoundly identified with the stances and the creative works of native Taiwanese literature. Moreover, he consciously embraced the landscapes of Taiwan’s mountains and seacoasts as the subject of his paintings. Perhaps because he felt a special affinity toward the Northern Song landscape style, his paintings feel as if they are details extracted and magnified from the panoramic compositions of the Northern Song dynasty with their lofty mountains and long, flowing waterfalls. Nearly all his paintings of the 1980s and 1990s seemed to be formed of abstract brushstrokes rendered with wrinkled texturing. The tips of his brushes pressed into the interior of the paper, and his points extended into lines. His lines intersected and overlapped, expanding into pictures that imitated physical landscapes. Lee has noted his interest in the ox-hair texturing of the late Yuan, early Ming painter Wang Meng (1308-1385) and the rich, lyrical brush style of the modern painter Huang Pin-Hung (1865-1955). While he has emerged from the tradition of Chinese painting and calligraphy, he nonetheless brings a personal expression to fruition, centered on a sense of his own contemporaneity, breaking free from the forms and barriers of tradition. While drawing from the deep source of tradition, the landscapes that Lee manifests are actually closer to the reality of present-day Taiwan.