The Hwa Kang Museum is up Yangmingshan, Taipei, in a corner of the Chinese Culture University campus. Established in 1971 by the university's founder Zhang Qi-yun (
This four-floor building has approximately 549m2 of
exhibition space.
PHOTO: Courtesy of the Hwa Kang Museum
The first floor gallery is open for exhibitions to both campus artists and members of the public. The third floor is set to display pieces from the museum's
permanent collections of folk arts and Chinese ceramics. The fourth floor exhibition area is designated for large-scale, semester-long thematic presentations of fine arts. The museum's permanent
collection of modern and
contemporary Chinese paintings and calligraphy contains more than 4,000 masterpieces by Chinese artists. Big-name artists include Wang Yang-ming (
In its Chinese ceramics
collection, porcelain and pottery objects are covered through the ages, from the Neolithic Yang-shao culture to the Ming and Qing dynasties.
The folk art and woodblock print collections range from aged furniture, to embroidery, woodblock prints, temple and
monastery art and Aboriginal
cultural artifacts. All these remarkable collections require at least a half-day trip for serious art lovers.
Currently on the fourth floor, curator Margaret Chen (
The late Zhang Shu-qi never set foot in Taiwan in his lifetime and is thus unknown to the general public. Yet, his outstanding skill at drawing pigeons has been lauded by the late Xu Bei-hong (
Born in 1900, Zhang painted the 3m x 3m Hundred Doves in 1941, when China was being attacked by the Japanese. Applying olive trees and azalea flowers as a background, the painting vividly depicts 100 or more doves, each with different expressions. The painting suggests the artist's desire for peace at a time when the clouds of war were gathering.
The painting was subsequently presented to former US president Franklin D. Roosevelt as a gift in commemoration of his third
presidential inauguration. It was displayed in the White House and later became part of the permanent collection of the former president's library.
Zhang was a talented landscape and birds-and-flower painter. One daring approach that Zhang adopted was to use colored Chinese painting papers, instead of normal white ones, for many of his works done in the US.
"He developed a preference for using powdered lead white and red pigment on colored paper. His colors thus became extremely eye-catching," Margaret Chen said. Fang Yi-min
(方亦民), widow of Zhang Shu-qi, donated 40 of her late husband's works to the university in 1969, after Zhang passed away in 1957.
Zhang Shu-qi expresses his desire for peace through painting doves.
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Some people will never forget their first meeting with Hans Breuer, because it occurred late at night on a remote mountain road, when they noticed — to quote one of them — a large German man, “down in a concrete ditch, kicking up leaves and glancing around with a curious intensity.” This writer’s first contact with the Dusseldorf native was entirely conventional, yet it led to a friendly correspondence that lasted until Breuer’s death in Taipei on Dec. 10. I’d been told he’d be an excellent person to talk to for an article I was putting together, so I telephoned him,
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