Chang Chih-kun

Chang Chih-kun (1923 – 8 August 2017), also known as Jo-ku and “Master Han-hsu,” was an ink wash painter, calligraphist, and educator in the fields of painting and calligraphy who lived for many years in Taitung and became an iconic ink wash painter of Eastern Taiwan. He excelled at landscapes and bird-and-flower paintings of eastern Taiwan.
==Life==
===Early life=== 
Chang Chih-kun, born in Yuechi County, Sichuan, began studying at the Sichuan Provincial Art College (四川省立藝術專科學校; today’s Sichuan Fine Arts Institute) in 1943, receiving guidance from instructors Li Keran, Lin Fengmian, and Pan Tianshou. During his time as a student in 1944, due to setbacks for the Chinese during Operation Ichi-Go (known in Chinese as the Battle of Henan-Hunan-Guangxi) during the Second Sino-Japanese War, he joined the Chinese Youth Expedition Army and did not return to his studies until 1946, after the war. He graduated the following year. 
He joined the military again during the Chinese Civil War and came to Taiwan with the Kuomintang army in 1949, where he began officer training at the Republic of China Military Academy. During his duty, he lived in Jinmen and Penghu. In 1958, he became implicated in the Sun Li-jen conspiracy (孫立人兵變案) and was consequently forced out of the military, after which he moved to Taitung.
===Midlife===
During his early years in Taitung, Chang managed a farm, worked in advertising, and was employed as a newspaper editor. He held his first solo exhibition in 1959 at the Taiwan Provincial Social Education Center in Taitung, which garnered much attention in the local art education circle. In 1964, he began teaching art at Luye Junior High School (鹿野國民中學) and then at Hsin Hseng Junior High School (新生國民中學).
In 1983, he established the Han-hsu Studio and began focusing on ink wash painting and teaching calligraphy and painting. The following year, he took classes at National Taiwan Normal University, where his calligraphy improved greatly under the tutelage of calligraphist Wang Chung.He later accepted invitations to show his work in exhibitions in Nanjing, Suzhou, and Hong Kong.
===Late life=== 
After Chang retired from Hsin Hseng Junior High in 1988, he focused on art creation and art education, his students ranging from schoolchildren to retirees. He also taught inmates at the Dongcheng Skill Training Institute (東成技能訓練所). For his many calligraphy and painting students, he became known as the biggest promoter of art education in Taitung. In 2002, the Taitung County Government named him the first “Accomplished Veteran Artist of Taitung” (an annually given honor).
He was still quite healthy in his later years, keeping physically and mentally fit through painting and calligraphy. In 2012, he held the exhibition Ink Impressions of Chang Chi-kun at 90, which received quite a response from the art circle and other sectors of society.
He passed away on August 8, 2018, at the age of 95.
==Style==
Chang was one of the few modernist artists educated during the time the Republic of China (1912–1949)|Republic of China government ruled in China who moved to Taiwan after World War II. His style was strongly influenced by Western art. His ink wash paintings are mainly landscapes and bird-and-flower paintings, and he was also a calligraphist.
Most of his landscapes are of the mountain scenery of Taitung, such as Mt. Dulan (都蘭山) and the Baiyu Waterfall (白玉瀑布), nostalgically integrating the coiling mist and clouds of his birth land, Sichuan. His bird-and-flower paintings are mainly of lotuses, chickens, and goldfish and express his state of mind and observations of life.
His landscape style may be divided into early and late periods. In his early period, he incorporated Western watercolor techniques in his ink wash paintings, using a variety of hues and rendering techniques to create work filled with color. In his late period, he abandoned his simpler rendering technique for a traditional multi-step Chinese landscape painting methodology: outlining, depicting texture and shading with lines, adding light shading in between these lines, creating more shading with light gray washes, and finally adding point-like strokes to represent vegetation. The different degrees of intensity of his ink create a look of both substance and vagueness in his paintings, breaking past the barriers in his artistic expression of his early period.
His early bird-and-flower paintings were mostly realistic and detailed. By midlife, his brushstrokes became simplified to augment the beauty of the subject’s form and express his own state of mind.
==Acclaim==
*Taiwanese landscape painter Chang Kuang-pin (張光賓) hailed Chang’s style as “simple strokes that yield profound meaning.”
*National Taitung University Department of Art Industry professor and College of Humanities Dean Lin Yung-fa (林永發) said Chang’s style “stresses simplicity,” “reveres nature,” and “expresses personality.”
==Family==
Chang had three sons, the second of whom, Chang Chung-pai (張中白), is a reputed Taiwanese geologist.
Category:1923 births
Category:2017 deaths
Category:Taiwanese people