Art: Chinese Mist in Yosemite

The intense, square-jawed Chinese artist stared fixedly at the rice paper taped to the wall, his wolf-and-goat-hair brush poised in his hand like a dart. Suddenly he reached to the top of the paper, in four bold downward strokes brushed in four broad segments of a bamboo stalk. He quickly dipped the brush again in the porcelain bowl of mixed water and ink, drew a long soaring line in one continuous, caressing gesture to form the narrow bamboo shoot, then rapidly brushed in the broad leaves. In two minutes, 40 seconds the painting was completed. As Huang Chun-pi turned smiling to face the crowded room, the audience burst into applause. Thus Formosa’s leading landscape artist and teacher last week demonstrated his technique in the lecture room of Manhattan’s China House, crowded to overflowing with curious Manhattan artists and Huang’s old pupils. The occasion: Professor Huang’s first exhibition in the U.S., some 40 landscape paintings.

Professor Huang, now 59, got part of his early training from his family’s picture-mounter, Su Chang, whose “Studio of Pines and Snow” was a collector’s hangout famous throughout China. A recognized painter by the time he was 20, Huang spent the Nationalist government’s long wartime exile in Chungking teaching and making sketching trips along the wild and misty mountain gorges of the Kialing River. He went to Formosa in 1948 as a member of a good-will mission just before Communists seized control of Nanking’s National Central University, where he was teaching, refused to return to the mainland, is now chairman of the art department of Taipei’s Provincial Teachers College.

Five years ago Huang began teaching a distinguished pupil, Mme. Chiang Kaishek. For her, Huang prescribed the classical program, began with trees, then rocks. After two years she had mastered the basic strokes and was ready for color, now specializes in painting bamboo and pines. “She has made great progress.” beams Huang. “Her strokes are very forceful, even stronger than a man’s.”

To celebrate his first trip to the U.S., Huang insisted on being driven directly from Los Angeles to Yosemite National Park. Once there, he leaped from the car and began a watercolor on the spot (see cut). How does the scenery compare with his beloved Kialing River? Replies Huang: “The landscape is not too different. But American trees are too uniform; Chinese trees are more interesting. What I missed most was the mist.” For Huang this presented no insuperable problem. He simply left blank areas of rice paper to indicate the mist, in one view added two Chinese fishermen in the bed of Yosemite’s Merced River, for good measure.