Always garbed in a floor-length robe, wearing a long, flowing beard, and carrying a walking stick wherever he went, Chang Dai-chien looked like one of the ancient scholars in his own paintings. "An ancient figure in a modern time," he epitomized his biggest achievement in his career as a professional artist is remarkable amalgamation of the old and the new, the bringing of fresh, innovative elements into traditional Chinese painting. His invention of the splashed-ink-and-color painting technique breathed new life into Chinese painting and took it to a realm which transcended what any ancient master had done before.

Chang was born into one of the most turbulent eras in Chinese history. In the eighty-four years of his life (1899-1983), he was to witness the downfall of the Ching dynasty (the last imperial government in Chinese history), the battles between the fledgling Nationalist government and the warlords who unofficially controlled a large part of China, the Sino-Japanese war, and then finally the fall of mainland China to the Communist forces led by Mao Zedong. Chang's works, however, remained largely untouched by the historical and social events around him. Though he lived through an age during which Western artistic currents gradually infiltrated Chinese art, he stuck strictly to the conventional Chinese brush-and-ink painting method. We can say that he made a point of innovating within tradition, never diverging from his beloved Chinese heritage.

Chang's artistic talent was recognized when he was still a small child. As he could do very refined paintings and calligraphy at an early age, he was considered to be a child prodigy. The cultivation of his natural endowments, however, had to do with the influence of his family is mother, sister and brothers were all very skilled in either painting or calligraphy. Under their guidance, he set out easily on the path to artistic perfection.

Chang himself professed that he benefited a lot from the tutelage of his sister, Chiung-chih, whose ability in artistic appreciation is well manifested in the following anecdote. One day an artist gave to Chang's family a painting in which he had depicted a hundred chrysanthemums. The entire family praised profusely how well the hundred chrysanthemumsach with a different, dainty look had been drawn. Chiung-chih, who was still very young at that time, pointed out with aesthetic acumen that although the chrysanthemums were presented differently, the leaves all looked the same, as if they had come out of the same mold. Therefore the painting could not be taken as a work of superior quality. Her exceptional view affords us a glimpse into the enriching, informative environment in which Chang grew up.

In his younger years, Chang studied art under the tutelage of his own family and laid a very good foundation for his fine-line kungpi painting technique, a style akin to Western realism with meticulous brushwork and close attention to detail. In order to render precise, vivid representations of the subjects in his works, he not only had to master painting skills, but he also had to study the anatomy of flowers, birds and other small creatures in the natural world. His sister Chiung-chih once spelled out the structure of a flower to him, petal by petal.

When he had finished his formal high school education, the seventeen-year-old Chang followed his family's wishes and went with his brother, Shan-tzu, to Japan to learn commercial weaving and textile dyeing. The techniques Chang acquired during his stay in Japan enabled him to age and darken paper and silk, skills which he would find greatly helpful later in his life when he began to make copies of ancient paintings.

Although Chang was very good at weaving and dyeing, he found it much more after his heart to become a painter. Realizing the close connection between painting and calligraphy in form and technique, he returned from Japan after two years and studied the art of calligraphy under Tseng Hsi and Li Jui-ching in Shanghai. There, he quickly absorbed the teachings of his masters, and soon perfected all the styles and types of ancient and modern calligraphy. He eventually developed his own style of calligraphy, which possessed a dynamic rhythm most befitting his painting. His teachers, Tseng Hsi and Li Jui-ching, were learned scholars and painters as well as good calligraphers. They greatly admired Chang's painting skills and did all they could to help him develop his talent. Absorbing their profound knowledge of Chinese history, literature and art, he grew into a highly refined painter. During that time he also greatly enhanced his ability to compose poetry. Unlike most painters who merely dabbled in poetry and wrote little more than simple verses, Chang competently composed good verses. In his works, we never fail to find a perfect harmony of the painting and the poem inscribed on it.

Owing to the influence of his teachers, Chang studied and imitated paintings by the Four Monks of the late Ming dynasty, by Shih Tao, Pa Ta, and by Chien Chang, mastering their loose-brush hsiehyi painting style, a style close to Western Impressionism with free brushwork and little attention to form and detail. Chang, like most traditional Chinese painters, considered copying ancient art a must, because it provided him a direct access to not only the skills, but also the vision and the temperament of the great masters. Yet instead of allowing himself to be shackled by the styles of the ancient masters, he turned them into a stimulus, an inspiring power to open up new possibilities for his own artistic development. Following the advice of his teachers and the examples set by the ancient masters, Chang also traveled to mountains and rivers throughout China, hoping to achieve a spiritual consonance with nature and capture its essence in his paintings. Later, after he left China, he often painted these scenes from memory.

In the early part of his career, in addition to the literati loose-brush style, Chang also studied works painted in the Tang dynasty "blue-and-green" landscape tradition, which was characterized by its use of lyrical, effulgent blue and green colors. Moreover, he helped revive the mogu or "boneless" painting method created by a painter of the Five Dynasties, in which forms were built with colors alone without ink contours. From the above styles and techniques, Chang learned and polished his skill as a colorist. He showed his indebtedness to these styles and techniques in the exquisite application of color in his works Clear Autumn in Wu Gorge and Wen Shu Yuan in Yellow Mountain. Actually, his use of bright colors in his paintings marked a distinction from conventional Chinese paintings, in which colors usually held a subordinate place. His mastery of colors often made his paintings radiate with aesthetic appeal.

After his teachers died, Chang went to Beijing to develop his career. He soon made his reputation as a

prominent painter in both Beijing and Shanghai, the two most important artistic centers in China. His remarkable artistic skills won him substantial recognition. However, his rise in fame also had to do with his teachers and his brother, Shan-tzu. They introduced him to quite a number of artists, which undoubtedly helped promote his fame. Through the exchange of aesthetic views and ideas with these artists, he also greatly expanded his expertise as a painter.

In 1940, when the whole world was deep in the turmoil of World War II, one of the most important events in Chang's artistic career happened. Against all the hardship and difficulties engendered by the war, he set out to see the Tang dynasty Buddhist wall paintings in the caves at Tunhuang, Gansu Province. Later, his name was often associated with the art of Tunhuang due to the contributions he made towards resurrecting that long-neglected art from near oblivion. With the help of Tibetan monks and the entourage he brought along with him, he studied the religious murals in 309 caves and made copies of many of them. The Buddhist images and figures presented in the murals, with their controlled, disciplined outlines and bright, ornamental colors, mesmerized and deeply attracted him. They later exerted a strong influence on Chang's paintings, as seen in his colorful, decorative approach and his fluent, precise control of the brush lines. Examples include Afternoon Rest and Red Leaves and White Crow, among many others. In 1944, the copies he had made of the murals at Tunhuang went on exhibit in the cities of Chengtu and Chungking. They gained nationwide attention and created quite a sensation at that time.

Chang left mainland China in 1949, when it was taken over by the Communists. His love of individual freedom was apparently the main cause for his self-expatriation. He was well aware that an artist's talents and skills would inevitably atrophy if they could not be nurtured in a free environment and given space to expand. Since the ideals and concepts espoused by the Communist regime were obviously at odds with his aspirations, he chose to leave his beloved home country and move to Hong Kong.

In the following year, Chang and his wife, Hsu Wen-po, visited the caves near the village of Ajanta in Maharashtra State, India. He studied the religious wall paintings there and compared them with those at Tunhuang. He found that although the murals at Tunhuang had been influenced by those at Ajanta, the former had nevertheless developed a Chinese character of their own. The wall paintings at Ajanta did not leave the indelible mark on his works that the art of Tunhuang did.

Chang and his family moved to South America in 1953. After one year in Argentina, they settled down in Brazil. There he bought a big farm and named it Pa-teh (Eight Virtues) Garden. Treating it as a canvas, he created a Chinese-style residence with hills, ponds and small mountains. Chang lived there for sixteen years before he moved to California, USA, and often modeled his paintings on the scenery at his Brazilian retreat.

In 1956, Chang was invited to an art exhibition in Paris, where his paintings won him a great deal of attention and praise. He also paid a visit to Cannes, where he met with the Western art master Pablo Picasso. To most people their meeting might have meant nothing more than a newsworthy event; yet looking deeper, Picasso's vitality and ever-innovative spirit, which kept driving him to imbue new life into his works, must have impressed Chang.

One interesting episode happened during their visit. An art dealer brought five paintings attributed to Picasso and asked the master to pick out the fake ones. Picasso, in turn, assigned the job to Chang. Unfamiliar with the works of Picasso and Western art in general, Chang amazed all those present by pointing out the forgeries at once. Despite the differences between Western and Chinese painting in form, style and expression, Chang man-aged to cross the barrier by means of his artistic ingenuity and showed himself to be a surprisingly astute connoisseur. The episode also showed that his extensive training as a painter allowed him to surpass the constraint of form and directly appreciate the intrinsic beauty in art presented in whatever form.

In the ten years following his exhibition in Paris, innumerable exhibitions featuring Chang's paintings were held in major cities in Europe, America and Asia. His fame gradually accumulated and he became one of the first Chinese painters to enjoy global acclaim.

When Chang was fifty-eight years old, he accidentally hurt his eyes while moving a big stone in Pa-teh Garden. People attributed the reduction in the number of his fine-line kungpi works after 1957 to his failing eyesight, and they even connected with that his invention of the splashed-ink-and-color technique, which does not demand such meticulous brushwork. Chang himself confirmed that all this was true, yet of course there were far more complex factors behind his invention. It was after he had spent some time in the West that he started to splash ink and pigments onto his works to form semi-abstract compositions. Exposed to such trends as abstract expressionism and automatic painting, which were in vogue in the West during the fifties and sixties, Chang, a sensitive and perceptive artist, was not likely to remain unaffected. Yet different from the paintings of abstract expressionism, which often presented a subliminal, abstruse world and whose abstraction manifested the Western artists' desire to overthrow their artistic tradition of realistic representation, he brilliantly brought the abstract images built up by the spattered ink and colors back from the threshold of abstraction by adding a few concrete details, such as a small hut or a sailboat, with a traditional Chinese brush. So, instead of breaking completely free from his cultural heritage, as the Western artists were trying to do, Chang emphasized his attachment to Chinese tradition by fitting new elements within it.

In addition to the direct impact from Western culture, Chang may also have derived his splashed-ink-and-color method from Wang Cha, a painter of the Tang dynasty, who was said to have created his work by spattering ink onto the painting surface. In any event, Chang's splashed-ink-and-color painting was a natural development from his many years of hard studies and his rich artistic and life experiences. It would have been impossible for him to have made such an achievement without first mastering all the styles and techniques of the ancient masters, or without living so long and seeing so much of the world. He applied his genius and creativity to what he had absorbed and finally created a personal style which won him acclaim as the greatest Chinese artist of the past half millennium.

After seven years in California, Chang moved to Taiwan in 1977 and there he spent the few remaining years of his life. Having attained the peak of his career, he was enthusiastically welcomed home by both the government and the local people. There was, however, one drawback to living in Taiwan: because his paintings were so sought after, he had to do a lot of them to meet the innumerable requests from friends, admirers or celebrities. With his outgoing personality, he did not like to say no and he did his best to please all, although, as can be imagined, few of these paintings sprang from his heart. This social obligation put a colossal burden on Chang, who was already very advanced in age, and it drained much of his energy and time.

Three years before he died, however, he managed to create a monumental work that made people gape in awe at his verve and courage. Panorama of Mount Lu was a grand, ambitious landscape, two meters high and ten meters long [6.6 x 33 ft], and it incorporated a comprehensive range of styles which Chang had mastered in his life. Some areas of the painting were rendered in the splashed-ink-and-color method  which  blues and greens in swirling patterns suffuse the painting surface, making up the images of mountains and forests while other areas were touched by delicate brushwork and soft washes of ink. Standing in front of the painting, one cannot help but be amazed by the grandeur and the technical skill that the artist displayed. The fascinating natural world draws the viewer deeply in and gives him the feeling that he is actually in it. "Though the painting was never completed about one-fifth of it was left undone after the venerable artist passed away at still ranks among the finest and most representative of Chang's works," remarked Pa Tung, a distinguished art researcher in Taiwan who has extensively studied Chang's works.

Chang died at the age of eighty-four. The prolific artist painted an incredible lifetime total of thirty thousand paintings. Many were lost, especially during the Cultural Revolution, but an enormous collection of more than five thousand works remains. The motifs range from figures, birds and flowers to landscapes; the styles extend from fine-line and loose-brush to the innovative splashed-ink-and-color. "No genre which has ever made its appearance in Chinese painting history evaded Chang's grasp," said Pa Tung. "He had a gift of making them shine with his outstanding skills."