Search China Travel News:

A-sun Wu is from the countryside around Ilan in Taiwan, an adventurer whose travels have taken him to more than 90 countries and he happens to be an artist as well.

Wu's Chinese name is Wu Hsuan-sun. The 62-year artist is holding his first exhibition on the mainland, although he has already been widely exhibited in Taiwan, Japan and Europe.

His collection "Sunshine, Jungle and Desert" includes paintings, sculptures and installations from his past 40 years of art experience. It is a retrospective on his artistic life.

Wu's devotion to painting started as something of a coincidence. It took him five years to finish junior high school because of poor grades. "I chose to draw, just because I was poor at writing and calculation," he said with smile. It was Chen Ching-hui, his high school teacher, was first noticed his sensational talent in painting and provided him with free drawing paper and pigments. Thus began his life of artistic exploration.

Surprise, surprise

None of Wu's junior high school classmates believed that he could paint, because Wu used to ask them to do his painting assignments for him. To everyone's surprise, he not only became a student in the Department of Fine Arts at Taiwan Normal University, he even gained a full scholarship to Spain to further his art studies.

"Though I returned from Spain with honors, having earned a respectable and peaceful life, I was always obsessed with the sunshine of my childhood years - warm, bright and pure.

He chose to take a trip to Africa where he believed his dreams led him. He sold his properties and set off to the distant foreign land.

"Africa, the origin of life, abounds with endless red deserts and intolerably hot storms." The artist's first contact with Africa was filled with strangeness and horror.

Wu took several years to travel through more than 30 countries on the mysterious continent, including three journeys in the Sahara. Twice infected by malaria, four times on the edge of death, but nothing was able to deter him.

He has never forgotten the time he boated down the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea. When night fell, he saw numerous pairs of red eyes glowing in the darkness. Those weird eyes belonged to crocodiles! He admitted that he was challenging another limit - the limit of his ability to withstand his fear. With crocodiles staring threateningly at him, with rain falling so hard that he could not see what was ahead of him, and with the propeller of his boat tangled in water hyacinths, the world seemed to have come to an end.

Once he found himself followed by an aboriginal during a visit to a faraway tribe in Southwest Africa. Then more people emerged, until he found himself in the center of a threatening circle.

He became very nervous when the chief came up to him and said: "You can't continue here. You are the symbol of evil."

He was scared and didn't know what he was being accused of. Then someone in the group explained to him that he bore a birthmark on his arm, which the tribe believed was evil. "Children with such birthmark would be killed by their own mothers," he was told.

A small gift was enough to free him from the tense and dangerous situation. He took off his sunglasses and gave them to the chief, to express his friendliness.

"The aboriginal wouldn't accept gifts brought out of a visitor's bag," Wu said. "Having been colonized for centuries, they thought whatever the masters gave them was no good, while what the masters used themselves was valuable."

"We say that the aboriginals are dirty, and they say we are evil," Wu said. "Their land is pure, without the viruses and diseases of the modernized world. These aboriginals couldn't resist the onslaught of such diseases, unlike people from modern societies. That is why many tribes refuse strange visitors. "One visitor with athlete's foot could spread the disease to the whole village."

Paradise regained

Wu found his paradise regained in such a virgin land. "The sun was golden: so pure and glaring. It was exactly what I was looking for." Some depict A-sun as a man gripped by wanderlust, but there, in Africa, he found his real home, just as a migratory bird flies thousands miles to find the dwelling place it scarcely conceives.

"I was greatly inspired by what I saw there," he said. He was touched by how simple and yet talented the local people were. Their artistic creations could be seen everywhere - even on chairs and doors.

"They created because they had something to say, not because they had been invited to give an exhibition." Just because their intentions were pure, their works were able to touch people all the more.

Leaving behind any consideration of fame or money, Wu found the essence of freedom in a life of artistic creation.

"I paint whatever I like, and it is up to you whether you want to buy my paintings or not. Sometimes I even urge someone not to buy one of my paintings because it seems unsuitable for their surroundings."

After touring Africa, he headed to South America. He traveled up the Amazon, finally arriving in Peru, the center of ancient Inca Culture.

Into Africa

Wu has been to Africa three times. In 1985-1989, his third visit to his dreamland, he decided to live with the Assmann, the oddest tribe in the toughest part of the Sahara. He has also traveled among the islands of the South Pacific. He says he has gained endless inspiration from the trips he takes around the world. Every trip stimulates his creativity. He records what he sees in his diaries and then uses these jottings to refresh his creative wellsprings.

His diaries are like a collection of written anthropological records. The Quechua people in South America wear woolen hats and travel across mountain trails on vicunas. A Dani woman in Irian Jaya, New Guinea, chopped off seven of her fingers because she believed she had caused the death of her family members. When their parents, children or siblings die, Dani people always put the blame on themselves because they feel they have failed to take good care of them. They have to chop off their fingers to express their grief.

On first impression, Wu's artwork seems similar to that of Picasso, with cubist figures and fantasy colours. But they also seem utterly different, Wu's artwork connotes a kind of introspection despite the tension of its appearance. Picasso discovered cubism after seeing African masks, so the two artists share the same source of inspiration. To ensure he didn't accidentally copy Picasso, Wu set up his studio facing the Picasso museum and carefully studied the work there.

Wu has returned to the culture of his motherland, China. In his latest series on Africa a serene tone discloses this inclination. "Now I believe in Buddhism. There is an ultimate peace, a nirvana, and the most brilliant sunshine."

Taiwan artist A-sun Wu has his first solo exhibition in Shanghai, displaying his paintings and sculptures after studying folk culture in Africa, the South Pacific islands and even the Arctic.

Till April 29

Mingyuan Art & Culture Centre

1199 Fuxing Zhonglu

Tel: 6472-5597