Draft:Fanglan Art Association

As an alumni association and an art exchange group for the members of the former “Fanglan Painting Club,” the Fanglan Art Association was founded in 1974 in Taiwan by eight alumni (e.g. painters Zheng Shi-Fan and Li Shih-Chao) of Taihoku Second Normal School under Japanese rule (now National Taipei University of Education) in memory of their Japanese mentors Ishikawa Kinichiro and Ohara Hitoshi. In the beginning, the association was named “Ichiiori-kai” after Ishikawa’s alias.

History

Origin

The predecessor of the Fanglan Painting Club was the “Student Sketch Study Group of Taihoku Normal School” founded by Chen Zhi-Qi in 1924, and the members included Lan Yin-Ding, Ni Jiang-Huai and others. In 1927, Taihoku Second Normal School, which accepted Taiwanese students, was established, and Ishikawa Kinichiro served as a part-time art teacher who spent his spare time directing the painting club until he returned to Japan in 1932 and was succeeded by Ohara Hitoshi. The name “Fanglan” came from the Fanglan Hills adjacent to the “Fanglan Campus” of Taihoku Second Normal School. The club staged joint exhibitions of students’ and teachers’ works annually before the Second World War, with the aims of learning from one another and promoting Taiwanese fine arts. After 1945, it evolved into an alumni association and an exchange platform for art aficionados. In the early stage of the association, the initiator sent membership invitations according to the list of names of the former painting club of Taihoku Second Normal School. The association operated by mounting an exhibition once a year with Zheng Shi-Fan as the person in charge.

Development

The association’s first exhibition was hosted by the Go Art Gallery in Taipei from 1 to 6 April 1975. A total of 36 artists from Taiwan and Japan presented their works in this exhibition, such as Yeh Huo-Cheng, Li Shih-Chiao, Chen Sui-Cheng, Wang Xin-Ying, Lee Yen-Fang, Su Qiu-Dong, Wu Dong-Cai, Ishikawa Kinichiro, Ishikawa Shihiko, Ohara Hitoshi, Ohara Yukio, Otabe Mihira, Kitahara Masayoshi, Yoshino Masaaki, and Fukuyama Susumu. Afterwards, many of the members have resided overseas, resulting in two overseas exhibitions in Los Angeles in 1983 and 1984. The 15th edition of the association’s exhibition was held at the International Art Center in Taipei on 4 April 1997.

Style

The overall creative style of the Fanglan Art Association was similar to Pleinairism, the mainstream style of the government-run Taiwan Provincial Art Exhibition. It followed the spirit of realism of the Japanese colonial period by revolving around sketching from landscape, which differed from the orientations of the other more influential art groups in the postwar modern painting movement, such as the Eastern Painting Group and the Modern Printmaking Society whose members were mostly alumni of Taihoku Normal School. Of all the postwar art groups that followed this context (e.g. Taiyang Art Association, Qingyun Painting Society, Era Art Association, Contemporary Painting Society, and Pure Art Association), the Fanglan Art Association was one of the few art groups comprising Taiwanese and Japanese painters. There were no Japanese painters involved in the abovementioned exemplar art groups with the exception of the Era Art Association that had Kuwata Kikou as its member.

Members

The key members of the Fanglan Art Association included famous Taiwanese artists Li Shih-Chiao, Lin You-De, Lin Tien-You, Zheng-Shi-Fan, Jiang Jing-Quan, Dai Wen-Zhong, Su Qiu-Dong, Yeh Huo-Cheng, Hong Sui-Tu, Chen Jin-Zhong, Zhang Rui-Teng, and Chen Zai-Nan, as well as Japanese artists Kitahara Masayoshi, Ohara Yukio, Yoshino Masaaki, Nishimura Masatsugu, and Kusano Katsumi. Since the fifth edition of the association’s exhibition, alumni such as Huang Ying-Kui, Yang Qi-Dong, Lin Jin-Hong, Li Mei-Shu, Huang Yi-Bin, Li Ze-Fan, as well as non-alumnus Lan Yin-Ding, had been invited to participate in the exhibition. The 11th edition was a posthumous exhibition held to highlight the artistic achievement of Chen Zhi-Qi, an alumnus expelled from school for “violating school rules.”</ref>