Spaces of Mediation: Christian Art and Visual Culture in Taiwan) [24, 1 ed.] 337405756X, 9783374057566

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Su-Chi Lin Spaces of Mediation

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Explorations in Intercultural Theology edited by Prof. Dr. Volker Küster (Johannes Gutenberg-Universiät Mainz) Volume 24

Editorial Advisory Board: Prof. Dr. Philip Wickeri, GTU, Berkeley, CA and HKSKH, Hong Kong, Prof. Dr. Jin-Kwan Kwon (em.), Sungkonghoe University, Seoul, Republic of Korea and PD Dr. Dorothea Erbele-Küster, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz

Su-Chi Lin

Spaces of Mediation Christian Art and Visual Culture in Taiwan

EVANGELISCHE VERLAGS ANSTALT Leipzig

The cover design makes use of art works by Solomon Raj, Hendarto, Nyoman Darsane, André Kambaluesa, Hong Song-Dam, an unknown Ethopian Ikon painter and Lee Chul-Soo (in clockwise order and on backcover; by courtesy of the artists; photos by Volker Küster). This publication is sponsored by Stichting Leerlingen tussen de Volken te Zuidland.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbiographie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

© 2020 by Evangelische Verlagsanstalt GmbH · Leipzig Printed in Germany This work, including all of its parts, is protected by copyright. Any use beyond the strict limits of copyright law without the permisson of the publishing house is strictly prohibited and punishable by law. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage or processing of the entire content or parts thereof in electronic systems. This book is printed on ageing resistant paper. Cover: Kai-Michael Gustmann, Leipzig Copy editing: Volker Küster, Mainz Typesetting: Susanne Patock, Mainz Printing and Binding: Esser printSolutions, Bretten ISBN Print 978-3-374-05756-6 ISBN E-Book (PDF) 978-3-374-05757-3 www.eva-leipzig.de

Contents List of Illustrations

7

Acknowledgments

9

Introduction

11

Chapter One Asian Christian Art

23

1. Dialogue between Old and New 2. Process of Reception 3. Ethical Concerns

24 28 31

Chapter Two Correlating Art with Christian Mission

37

1. Mutually Critical Correlation 2. Heart of Enlightenment 3. Transforming to A New Person

39 41 46

Chapter Three Asian Faces of Christ

53

1. Sadao Watanabe’s Good Shepherd 2. Solomon Raj’s Water of Life 3. He Qi’s Christ before Pilate

54 58 62

Chapter Four Symbol and Myth

71

1. Missiological Background 2. Etan Pavavalung’s Verdant Cross 3. Cheng Chien-Chang’s Creation Myth

72 76 84

6 Chapter Five Feasting at the Lord’s Table

Contents 91

1. Wang Jen-Wen’s Body Metaphor 2. Chris Chou’s Dots and Circles 3. Contemplating God in Everyday Realities

92 97 101

Chapter Six Portrait of the Soul

105

1. Stanley Fung’s Dust Icons 2. Nature’s Caretaker 3. Time and Memory

106 112 117

Conclusion

123

Epilogue

127

Bibliography

135

Color Plates

145

List of Illustrations 1 Cover page from Juan Cobo’s Apología de la Verdadera Religion, woodcut print, Philippines, 1593. 2 & 2.1 Illustration of Heart of Enlightenment (Beng-Sim-To), woodcut print, plate 3-7, PCT, early 20th century. 3 Unknown Artist, Transforming to A New Person (A New Robe), Poster illustrating Ephesians 4: 22-24, published by Religious Tract Society, ca 1933. 4 Sadao Watanabe, The Good Shepherd, stencil print, 1975. 5 Sadao Watanabe, Christ Carrying the Cross, stencil print, 1968. 6 Solomon Raj, Water of Life, print, 2007. 7 He Qi, Christ Before Pilate, paint on paper, China, 1998. 8 Etan Pavavalung, Rooted in this Land, trace, woodprint, print pigment, acrylic paint, 2014. 9 Detail of Etan Pavavalung, Rooted in this Land, 2014. 10 Etan Pavavalung, Hopeful Sign, trace, woodprint, print pigment, acrylic paint, 2013. 11 Etan Pavavalung, Sign of Hope, trace, woodprint, print pigment, acrylic paint, 2016. 12 Cheng Chien-Chang, Genesis 1, oil on canvas, 2010. 13 Cheng Chien-Chang, Land, Signification, Attractiveness, oil on canvas, 2008. 14 Wang Jen-wen, Christ the Bread of Life, watercolor, 2013. 15 Wang Jen-wen, The Wound is a Fern Leaf, watercolor, 2013. 16 Chris Chou, Six Jars, oil on canvas, 2006. 17 Chris Chou, 153 Fishes, oil on canvas, 2006. 18 Stanley Fung, The Virgin in Preparing, photography, 2011. 19 Stanley Fung, Mary, photography, 2011. 20 Stanley Fung, Collar of Nature, photography, 2014. 21 Stanley Fung, Shem, Son of Noah, photography, 2014.

8

List of Illustrations

Color Plates (beginning page 145)  Etan Pavavalung, Rooted in this Land, trace, woodprint, print pigment, acrylic paint, 2014.  Etan Pavavalung, Hopeful Sign, trace, woodprint, print pigment, acrylic paint, 2013.  Etan Pavavalung, Sign of Hope, trace, woodprint, print pigment, acrylic paint, 2016.  Cheng Chien-Chang, Genesis 1, oil on canvas, 2010.  Cheng Chien-Chang, Land, Signification, Attractiveness, oil on canvas, 2008.  Wang Jen-wen, Christ, the Bread of Life, watercolor, 2013.  Wang Jen-wen, The Wound is a Fern Leaf, watercolor, 2013.  Chris Chou, Six Jars, oil on canvas, 2006.  Chris Chou, 153 Fishes, oil on canvas, 2006.  Unknown Artist, Transforming to A New Person (A New Robe), Poster illustrating Ephesians 4: 22-24.  Sadao Watanabe, Christ Carrying the Cross, stencil print, 1968.  Solomon Raj, Water of Life, print, 2007.  He Qi, Christ Before Pilate, paint on paper, China, 1998.

Acknowledgments The research for this book would not have been possible without all those who have supported me during this journey of writing about Christian art from my own context. The project began back in 2012 when I took a course on “Art and Inculturation” with Prof. Dr. Eduardo C. Fernández, SJ and Dr. Mia M. Mochizuki at Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley. It was an eye-opening experience for me, and in many ways, planted the precious seeds of this volume. Throughout my masters and doctoral work, Prof. Fernández gave me his constant guidance and encouragement, supporting my decision to embark on a research path that exists between contextual theology and the arts. I am also grateful that Dr. Mochizuki helped me to discover the joy of research in art history by showing me the thrill of looking at images with a genuinely open mind. Further, I am deeply thankful for the other two members of my doctoral committee: Dr. Kathryn Barush advised me on the material culture of Christianity and Dr. Fumitaka Matsuoka became my patient interlocutor on Asian theology. I remain sincerely grateful for their insightful feedback and guidance. For the primary sources of this book, I am indebted to the five Taiwanese artists Etan Pavavalung, Cheng Chien-Chung, Wang Jen-Wen, Chris Chou, and Stanley Fung as well as the archivists at Presbyterian Church in Taiwan who generously offer me their artworks to be discussed in this study. I thank the artists for the generosity of their time in giving me the one-on-one interviews. They have taught me that good art comes from provocative ideas and hard work. Their willingness of sharing their stories sincerely has inspired me in many ways on my own art journey. Without their support, this book would be impossible to be completed. I am also fortunate to have received thoughtful comments on this material from Prof. Dr. Volker Küster at Johannes Gutenberg University, Germany from the very beginning when I presented a selective

10

Acknowledgments

portion of this work at the section of Bible and Visual Art, Society of Biblical Literature 2016. Dr. Küster has encouraged me to publish this book and has been supportive throughout the process, including insightful feedback and funding assistance. For the latter, I have to thank Huub Lems at Stichting Leerlingen tussen de Volken te Zuidland. I would also like to thank Dr. Anh Q. Tran at the Jesuit School of Theology for the intellectual conversations we have shared during my writing process since 2016, for the excitement that comes from the knowledge exchange, and, of course, for reminding me to not give up writing and researching. Without their encouragement, it would have been impossible to publish this volume. My most heartfelt thanks go to the many friends and generous mentors who supported my study in various ways: my spiritual director Sister Susan Donohue, FCJ, Dr. Robert Albers, Dr. Cheng Yang-un, Dr. Mary E. McGann, Dr. Wong Pui-Fong, Dr. Mary Yuan, Dr. Mary W. Cheng, Dr. Stephen Hsieh, and Mrs. Valerie Chu. Finally, none of the research and writing for this book could have happened without the love and unconditional support of my parents and siblings. Last but not the least, I am grateful to God, the Ultimate Mystery, who has guided and empowered me on this spiritual journey.

Introduction In 2009, I volunteered to design an Easter banner on the theme of resurrection for the Tai-shen chapel ( 台 神禮 拜堂 ) at Taiwan Graduate School of Theology in Taipei. I looked for signs and symbols that would be acceptable for a Protestant faith community in Taiwan. My idea was to adopt Christian symbols of Easter, such as a dove or a lily, in order to capture the spirit of hope. On the wall behind the altar, I hung two long banners made from colorful felt alongside the empty cross. On the right banner, a giant dove carried a leaf of hope flying toward a church building on the left banner. Moving away from the cross, two additional short banners on the side wall were also decorated with thematic symbols of the passion and resurrection. The short banner on the right depicts lilies and the shape of Christ’s thorny head, and the one on the left shows a circle of small figures, hand-in-hand, representing the faith community. The colors of these banners are primarily green and white, and its abstract design shows a measured aesthetics of simple piety. I tried to contextualize the Easter message by incorporating the chapel’s Chinese roof in a contemporary setting that my peers already recognized. This liturgical project permitted me to add a new expression to the feast, by using traditional Christian symbols in a contemporary setting. Moving from one cultural soil to another, the making of Christian signs and symbols must be expressed afresh in new ways. However, across churches in East Asia, either in the Protestant or Catholic tradition, the Western forms of “Christian art” have been more acceptable than indigenous art forms made by native artists.1 Due to the image debate in the 1

It is difficult to define Christian art. According to Francis Schaeffer, the term Christian art is defined under two categories: (1.) content, and (2.) how well the artist has suited the vehicle to the message. Cf. Francis August Schaeffer, Art and the Bible. Two Essays, Downers Grove 1973, 64; As a consultant of the Asian Christian Art Association (ACAA) Ron O’Grady defines Christian art in Asia focusing on three elements: the artist, the theme of the work, and the quality

12

Introduction

early church and the event of iconoclastic controversy that resulted from it, traditional Christian iconographies are still deeply rooted in the self-identity of the churches evangelized by missionaries of the past.2 Theologians, particularly those in Protestant circles, worry that certain Christian images may distract the viewer in worship. Art becomes binary: either image leads us closer to the truth of God or away from it. For John Calvin, the artist is free to practice his or her talents but needs to avoid any attempt to represent the divinity itself. Only the worship of the invisible God in the abstract form was permitted and any visual depiction of the divinity regarded as dangers of idolatry was rejected.3 The situation remains true among many churches in Protestant circles today. The experience of making this liturgical project was a significant turning point in my reflections on art and contextualization, which in Catholic missiology has been referred to as the process of inculturation – “the on-going dialogue between faith and culture or cultures. More fully, it is the creative and dynamic relationship between the Christian message and a culture or cultures.”4 Different concepts about the relationship of faith and culture have been well discussed in the mission field. A traditional approach would be accommodation or indigenization which describes a one-way relationship between gospel and culture. That is to say, the gospel message is simply translated or transposed into the new setting by using elements from the local culture in order to communicate meaning. It is an attempt to adapt the gospel message from an old (Western) to the new (Asian) culture, or from the past (clasof its deep profundity. O’Grady asserts that the term of Christian art refers variously to art produced or commissioned by Christians, or art with Christian themes. The quality of deep profundity about how the art work speaks to the viewer the Christian values of goodness, truth, and beauty can be incorporated into what is understood as Christian art. Cf. Megumi Yoshika, The Power of Imaging. Art as Love and Struggle as Beauty, in: Asia Journal of Theology 30, 2006, 275-287. However, according to Alan Chong, Christian art in Asia “is especially remarkable because it was produced by people of many faiths.” The objects were not actually made by Christians, but rather by local artists who might have been Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim and so forth. Alan Chong (ed.), Christian Art in Asia. Sacred Art and Visual Splendour, Singapore 2016, 9-13. 2 Iconoclasm has resulted in the excessive acts of artistic patronage that aimed at the glorification of the individual rather than that of God. Cf. Michelle P. Brown, The Lion Companion to Christian Art, Oxford 2008, 11. 3 For example, any manufacturing of crucifixes was forbidden in Geneva. cf. Herman Selderhuis (ed.), The Calvin Handbook, Cambridge 2009, 420. 4 Aylward Shorter, Toward a Theology of Inculturation, Maryknoll, NY 1989, 11.

Spaces of Mediation

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sic) to the present (contemporary) setting. In the 1970s, Taiwanese theologian Shoki Coe has raised the question toward such past-oriented concept of culture and later coined the term contextualization to replace indigenization.5 The accommodation model assumes a static concept of culture: “In the transition from one culture to another, the given, unchangeable gospel gets stripped of its old cultural cloth and dressed with a new one. The new culture is also considered as a constant which, in a way, is supposed to be baptized by the gospel.”6 The gospel message should not be compromised while transmitting to the new cultural context. In contrast, inculturation is never the passive reception of the gospel, but rather the active construction and reinterpretation of the message. Inculturation is an integral part of communicating the gospel if the gospel is to be truly communicated in a particular context.7 Inculturation acknowledges the high influence of human experience on the reception of the gospel. Every culture has to reflect on faith through its own lens to interpret scriptures, doctrinal formation, ethical concerns, and liturgical customs. The experience of people’s lives and beliefs should not be ignored while one reflects on Christian faith through scripture and tradition. As I reflect on my Easter quilt, several questions surface in my mind: To what extent is the visual representation of the Christian message an example of inculturation? How far can one utilize the contextualized representation of Christian signs and symbols to appropriately and effectively reveal a genius inculturation? How much adaptation in liturgical art should one take in order to speak to the local congregation and enhance creative worship? The chosen image can evoke one’s theological imagination in the worship space. However, cultural creation formed by the viewer’s context either grows or hinders one’s faith. Making this set of liturgical banners for me was a way to sort out the problem of visual representation in the process of inculturation. By this

5

Cf. Shoki Coe, Contextualizing Theology in: Mission Trends 3. Third World Theologies, Gerald H. Anderson et al. (eds.), Grand Rapids, Michigan 1976, 19-24; 陳南州 Nan-jou Chen (ed.), Introduction to Taiwan Hsiang Tu Shen Hsueh. Wang Hsien Chih Mu Shih Wen Chi (A Testament to Taiwan Homeland Theology. The Essential Writings of Wang Hsien-Chih) 台灣鄉土神學 -王憲治牧師文集, Taipei 2011, ix. 6 Volker Küster, A Protestant Theology of Passion. Korean Minjung Theology Revisited, Leiden 2010, 1-18. 7 Cf. Stephen Bevans and Roger Schroeder, Prophetic Dialogue. Reflections on Christian Mission Today, Maryknoll, NY 2011, 69.

14

Introduction

I mean, either the making or viewing of the art plays a prominent role in achieving inculturation. The viewer’s perception of the image, no doubt, contributes to an on-going dialogue between faith and culture. The viewer’s thinking, feeling, and perceiving toward the arts invite a creative reinterpretation of the message. These insights later become one of this study’s main concerns that art can be a strategy to unfold the Christian mystery not only for the pastoral purpose but also in academic settings. While engaging in the making of and writing about Christian art in Asia, I began to appreciate the process of dialogue with different social-historical contexts, either old and new. Here is how my banner worked. Culturally contextualized expressions enhance the devotion in the congregational worship and has potential to be the product of inculturation theology. The banners reflect the uniqueness of my context of an Asian church in light of God’s mission of the twenty-first century. In this way, art could be an alternative source for theology. This art-making experience also made me wonder how Christian artists of Asia can be grounded in their own cultural experiences and social realities. When I arrived at Berkeley to study art and theology in 2012, I had a very clear aim in mind: to immerse myself in the rich tradition of Christian art as well as in my own cultural roots and heritage, so that I may be able to articulate how Asian Christians see the complex nature of their relationships to the universal Christian churches by being Asians. Scholars of religions have described the shift of the center of gravity in Christianity to the Global South,8 and thus, Asian Christian artists have the capacity to be intercultural partners to the global Christianity.9 The discussion about Asian Christian art in this study thereby reflects the tension in an intercultural dialogue between cultures. If one assumes that Asian artists creatively borrow art and symbol from their contexts to express Christian faith, this study Spaces of Mediation. Christian Art and Visual Culture in Taiwan tells a story of how artists engage aggressively or passively with the East Asian cultures of the present day in which I feel bound.

8

Cf. Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom. The Rise of Global Christianity, 3rd ed., New York, NY 2002. 9 Under the discussion of intercultural theology, Küster proposes three dimensions in the field: Encountering with other religions, other theologies, and other churches. Cf. Volker Küster, Intercultural Theology is a Must, in: International Bulletin of Missionary Research 38, 2014, 171176.

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Art and Inculturation In the growing literature on the Christian art in the third world, scholars have scrutinized different aspects of mission and visual culture. From a dialogical approach, they share a number of goals. They are committed to investigating images as sites for cultural interaction and exchange. Pioneers such as American missiologist Daniel Johnson Fleming (18771969), German scholar Arno Lehmann (1901-1984), and Japanese theologian Masao Takenaka (1925-2006) have published the first overviews of Christian art in the mission territories of Asia.10 Social justice and national/cultural identity from the side of receiving cultures are important factors for considerations. Takenaka understands the correlation between national independence and cultural renaissance as a trend in Post-World War II Asia. According to Takenaka, in many ways Asian artists confront the challenges of achieving visual sovereignty rather than imitating Western tradition; therefore, Asian Christian art manifests people’s awareness of the recovery of self, cultural, and national identity.11 Takenaka examines the sign and symbol shared by both Japanese culture and Christianity and proves them to be indicators of how intercultural conversation through the arts may be further explored. For example, in God is Rice, Takenaka reflects on the symbol of rice in Japanese culture in light of the life-giving Christianity.12 Takenaka’s insights significantly impact the interpretation of contemporary expression of Asian Christian art. Instead of asking how genius the work is, scholars raised the ethical question: ‘Whose beauty the art speaks for?’, in order to challenge the traditional way of looking at Christian art merely from Western perspective. It is noteworthy that the recognition of cultural identity echoed the New Art historian’s concern on the problems of reception and production. 13 That is, the question of what is the intension of the work within the community replaces the concern of the creative expression of the work. In the past, mission art imported by missionaries for the 10

Cf. Daniel Johnson Fleming, Each with His own Brush. Contemporary Christian Art in Asia and Africa, New York 1938; Arno Lehmann, Die Kunst der Jungen Kirchen, Berlin 1957 and Afroasiatische Christliche Kunst, Berlin 1966. An English edition, Christian Art in Africa and Asia, was published by Saint Louis, Concordia Pub. House in 1969; Masao Takenaka, Christian Art in Asia, Tokyo 1975; Masao Takenaka and Ron O’Grady, The Bible through Asian Eyes, Auckland 1991. 11 Cf. Takenaka, Christian Art in Asia, 17, 19, and 27. 12 Cf. Masao Takenaka, God is Rice. Asian Culture and Christian Faith, Geneva 1986, 5. 13 Eric Fernie (ed.), Introduction. The History of Method, in: Art History and Its Methods. A Critical Anthology, London 1995, 20.

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Introduction

purpose of teaching catechism has dominated the art forms in many areas of Asia. The production of Asian Christian art was likely occupied by the exotic use of foreign elements from a remote place or romantic traditionalism that is often associated with feudalism and conservatism. When the old assumptions were exposed, the postcolonial approach to mission advocated contextual theology; meanwhile, Christian art in Asia could be a significant vehicle for contextual faith expression.14 The missiological terminology is thus correlated to describe and interpret different theologies through the arts. The issue of contextualization is one of the significant debates regarding to Asian Christian art as missiological text. Volker Küster asks, “To what extent can Western conceptions of art be transposed to other cultures?”15 Küster proposes that the missiological models of accommodation and contextualization can serve as categories for examining the Christian art in the Third World.16 His intercultural Christology explores the many images of Christ as examples to address the third world theologies in Asia, such as Minjung, Dalit, and Burakumin theology.17 Looking at Asian Christian art from an intercultural approach, the indigenous creations become the equivalent texts for scholars to study contextual theologies. Both Takenaka and Küster emphasize that the study of Asian Christian art should be done under the framework of mission studies respectively Intercultural Theology in order to bring the Christian tradition into dialogue with art in the current cultural contexts of Asia. By tracing the “religious” turn in art history, historians of art and visual culture, for their part, have entered our discussions of Christian visual forms in Asia.18 Instead of looking at the visual objects of Chris-

14

Cf. Takenaka, Christian Art in Asia, 17. Volker Küster, Christian Art in Asia. Yesterday and Today, in: The Christian Story. Five Asian Artists Today, Patricia C. Pongracz, Volker Küster, and John Wesley Cook (eds.), New York, NY 2007, 38. 16 Cf. Volker Küster, Accommodation or Contextualization? Ketut Laisa and Nyoman Darsane – Two Balinese Christian artists, in: Mission Studies Vol XVI-I, 1999, 157-172. 17 Cf. Volker Küster, The Many Faces of Jesus Christ. Intercultural Christology, Maryknoll, NY 2001. 18 Cf. Sally M. Promey, The “Return” of Religions in the Scholarship of American Art, in: The Art Bulletin 85, 2003, 581-603; in addition, David Morgan has systematically articulated the history of mass-produced religious visual culture in the art of Warner Sallman. Cf. David Morgan, Visual Piety. A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images, Berkeley 1998; id., Protestants and Pictures. Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production, New York 1999. 15

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tian mission merely through the discussions of its style and iconography, David Morgan offers methods to see the role of images at play in different moments throughout the history of mission and colonization. In The Sacred Gaze, Morgan explores the function of the image in the process of cultural encounter.19 Images can be regarded as mediating forms correlating one culture and another, creating new cultural patterns under the context of religious practice. In this regard, mission art is not static, but rather an object that has its life circle in different moments of transmission and circulation in cultural encounters. More recent studies include Mia M. Mochizuki’s research on the Jesuit art of the early modern era within the global context of Renaissance art history. Mochizuki emphasizes not only the iconographical originality but also the transmission, adaptation, and circulation of images between Japan and the Western world.20 By tracing the developing impact of European painting on the production of Japanese Christian art, Mochizuki’s discussions of Japanese religious painting shed light on our investigation of inculturated art.21 Looking at a work of Asian Christian art from this perspective of visual cultural study opens larger horizons on both sides of Christian and Asian world for a better understanding of people’s religious attitudes, ideas, and ways of living in a global context. Scholars from both fields of study of visual culture and mission examine the complex nature of cultural exchange by sharing the common dialogical approach.

19

Cf. David Morgan, The Sacred Gaze. Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice, Berkeley, CA 2005, 147-190. 20 The framework from the model of “transcultural mediation” is applied by the scholars in the field of Dutch art and material culture in Asia. The concept was formulated by Astrid Erll in her essay. Circulating Art and Material Culture. The model of “transcultural mediation” proceeding from communication studies looks at specific objects of local creation and asks about the roles that form and function play in the objects’ history of circulation and transmission. “Mediation” is used to describe the circulation of art and material culture across time and space. According to Erll, the model features five distinct stages: production, transmission, reception, transcultural remediation, and afterlife. Erll summarizes the methods used by scholars on the project of Dutch art and material culture in their essays from this collected volume published in 2014. Cf. Mediating Netherlandish Art and Material Culture in Asia, Thomas DaCosta Kaumann and Michael North (eds.), Amsterdam 2014, 311. 21 Cf. Mia M. Mochizuki, The Movable Center: The Netherlandish Map in Japan, in: Artistic and Cultural Exchanges between Europe and Asia, 1400-1900. Rethinking Markets, Workshops and Collections, Michael North (ed.), Farnham 2010, 109-133; id., The Diaspora of a Jesuit Press. Mimetic Imitation on the World Stage, in: Illustrated Religious Texts in the North of Europe. 1500 -1800, Feike Dietz (ed.), Farnham 2014, 113-134.

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Introduction

Spaces of Mediation Arts as spaces of mediation appear at crucial points in my narrative. Spaces of mediation here could simply refer to images and objects that offer an open expressive space, where artists can bring together ideas and forms from different traditions to enhance new knowledge systems and worldviews. To explore the space of mediation is to examine how art and visual culture emerging from Christianity and Taiwanese culture encounters that create spaces for intercultural dialogue. This communication across cultural boundaries takes place within the process of artists’ making and viewers’ perceiving of images and objects. Intercultural hermeneutics thus builds upon such joint conversation, which is the ability to understand across cultural boundaries and refers to a situation where a common world is not shared by speaker and hearer.22 My intention of this study is to explore not only how Asian Christian artists creatively utilize local imagery, symbol, and metaphor as mediators to make space for conversation, but most importantly, how they commit themselves to reinterpret their Christian identity within the very communities receiving these art forms. On the one hand, there is no doubt that artists aim to practice speaking out the voice of their contexts.23 On the other hand, the perception of Asian Christian art holds great promise to understand Asia’s pluralistic context and its religious sensibilities. Both the making and reception of images open new ways of achieving the process of inculturation. It has been understood that religion such as Christianity cares more about the sense of beyond not the things and matter; however, the viewer’s responses to the art including emotion, feeling, and sensation evoked by the material aspect of its culture should not be excluded from one’s religious experience. 24 In other words, genius inculturation will not be achieved without the viewer’s response and reinterpretation of the images. 22

Cf. Robert Schreiter, The New Catholicity. Theology between the Global and the Local, Maryknoll, NY 1997, 28. 23 According to Stephen Bevans, spirituality of speaking out is “a spirituality born of asceticism that trusts in their culture and experience and results in a courage that gives them the energy, insight, and creativity to articulate how God is present in their lives, their works, and their struggles.” Bevans and Schroeder, Prophetic Dialogue, 96. 24 The Western framework of studying visual and material religion critiques that the Enlightenment project aimed “to protect art form the sensory excesses of material religion, to protect fine art from the day-to-day sensory and material muckiness of religious art and artifact, to abstract and elevate this protected and purified category of object in such a way as to disavow human kinships with the substance of that messiness and to neutralize its threat” (Sally M. Promey (ed.), Sensational Religion. Sensory Cultures in Material Practice, New Haven, CT 2014, 2).

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Studying the issue of visual representation raised in the inculturation process functions as a guiding principle of this short book. Spaces of Mediation mainly analyzes Taiwanese Christian art in its hybrid forms and shows how a liminal space is created by the cultural mediation between Taiwanese cultures and Christianity. This ongoing process of a joint conversation intertwines with the artists’ social-historical commitments, reflecting a transformative dimension of lived Taiwanese Christian faith. Christian artworks form spaces of mediation that create access points for the artist to theologically engage with the process of cultural exchange. By directly or indirectly utilizing both Christian iconography and local symbols that have been reproduced in certain ways, Asian artists aim for a meaningful conversation with their faith communities. Spaces of mediation formed through cultural encounters invite multiple interpretations for the viewer to appreciate people’s different beliefs, values, and attitudes of live. In order to demonstrate the conjunctions between Christianity and cultural traditions in Taiwan, I will examine how spaces of mediation as an analytical tool can enhance a better understanding of new epistemologies, tastes, sensibilities, and faith commitments through the image, and shape a new experience of the global world in which people live. Focusing on the spaces of mediation also provides a multi-directional dialogue between Christian faith and local cultures, avoiding the pitfall of neglecting the history of the arts in their specific contexts. In this volume, I draw upon fine art and ephemeral objects made or modified for pedagogy and devotion, including prints, book illustrations, mass-produced religious posters, oil paintings, watercolors, and photographs. They are mainly Asian artworks dating from the early twentieth century to the present. Located in East Asia, the collective identity of Taiwanese people in a multi-ethnic society is ceaselessly confronted with not only the long-term geopolitical conflicts around the globe but also newly arrived immigrants from neighboring countries of South East Asia. The present study mainly examines Christian art, the blossoming of local creations in contemporary Taiwan, as spaces mediating local cultures and Christian faith. It explores the way in which these images and objects manifest native symbols emerging from the process of interaction and convergence in-between the Asian traditions and Christianity. In order to deepen their experiences of Christian faith, Asian artists freely use symbols of local cultures and religions, which arise from the active interaction between the gospel and religious wisdom of Asia.

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Introduction

The aim of this short book is to demonstrate that Taiwanese Christian art has the potential to contribute to a better understanding of cultural landscapes among different parts of Asia as well as to the current discussions about mission and intercultural theology. My attention is directed towards examining how Christian-oriented images and objects can embody ways of life and of seeing and thinking, religious assumptions, and symbols of individuals and communities in the social conditions of our time. Since the inculturation process varies in different social situations, my focus on Christian art and visual culture in Taiwan furthers a specific community’s awareness of people’s history, meaning, and future in relation to its multicultural settings. Images presented here facilitate an understanding of the issues of the formulation of the self and other, native and foreign, and concept of God permeating in its Christian practices. These struggles for cultural identities manifested in the artworks affirm that diversity is in the very nature of God’s creation. The images and objects assembled in this study help to form an inclusive community and aim to build a bridge to fill the gap of knowledge of how art correlates with the study of Taiwanese Christianity. The selected images are meant to be representative, but make no claims to completeness. I am aware of a rich field to be surveyed. Asian Christian art is not confined to Christian artists alone; it can also be presented by followers of other religions, due to the pluralism of Asian cultural and religious contexts. For the most part, the artists discussed in this study have a Protestant background. The criterion of my selection was those artists who have been active in making art a way for faith expression. My intension is to examine the contextualized representation of Christian faith of Asia, as well as to offer insights for further research within other geographic and historical contexts of intercultural research. By means of image, both Christianity and Taiwanese culture enter into a fertile field of knowledge exchange. An in-depth exploration of art and culture of a people in a given context raises new questions for other research projects and has the capacity to celebrate the vital relationship between art and mission. The book is divided into six chapters. Chapter One deals with the nature and discourse about Asian Christian art. This provides the general context for the thematic approach of the subsequent chapters. Chapter Two narrates the correlation of art with Christian mission by analyzing the early-twentieth-century book illustrations and mission posters from China. Discussing the issue of visual representations raised from the process of inculturation, Chapter Three examines the depictions of

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Christ by three Christian artists from Japan, India, and China, and uncovers the images in some significant ways connecting to the society in which the artworks were produced. Chapter Four examines contemporary artists Etan Pavavalung’s (依誕 巴瓦瓦隆) verdant cross and Cheng Chien-chang’s (鄭建昌) creation myth in light of Asian cultures and tradition. Drawing from aboriginal themes and Taoist visions, symbol and myth as mediators are fruitful examples to convey theological imagination and interfaith dialogue. Examining the feast imagery in the works of two female artists: Wang Jen-wen (王貞文) and Chris Chou (周蘭惠), Chapter Five addresses the sensory response to the arts. The reception process can be seen as a fundamental religious experience and has a prominent position in contributing to an intercultural dialogue. Chapter Six discusses time and timelessness in the biblical icons of Stanley Fung’s (馮君藍) photography, focusing on how Fung uses portrait photography to visually engage creation theology. Readers may be inspired by how Asian Christian art reveals the interface between Christianity and East Asian churches as well as the creative impulses of artists’ theological imaginations. The Epilogue proceeds to reflect on teaching Asian Christian art in the theological classroom. It records my teaching experience of a Newhall Fellowship course entitled Christian Art of Asia at the Jesuit School of Theology in the Fall of 2016, including the topic, content, method, and some learning outcomes. In what follows, I begin with a discussion of what is Asian Christian art.

Chapter One Asian Christian Art An ivory plaque The Christ Child as Navigator, which is housed at the Asian Civilizations Museum in Singapore, represents the missionaries’ involvement with their overseas missions. Carved out of ivory, the image depicts an infant Jesus standing on a ship. His right hand holds an orb and his left hand grabs the mainsail of the ship. Here, the ship is a metaphor for the Christian church that invites the viewer to embark on the voyage of spiritual life. This object of the early Manila galleon trade is considered to be made in Philippines or China, due to the presence of stylized Chinese clouds. It is not clear whether the artisan was a Christian or believer of another faith; yet, the religious ivory images are perhaps one of the most significant contributions Asia made to Christian art. These include the image of the standing Christ child as the Savior of the world, or the good shepherd created in hundreds of ivory objects made in Goa. As Alan Chong observes, “It is a mistake to view Asian Christian art as entirely dependent on European examples as simple copies of European models made for export to Europe […] Our approach has been to resist privileging the supposed source of an image but to understand the intention of the alterations and variations of the new work.”1 The Asian made object as accommodation model of the early modern era demonstrates an example of studying Asian Christian art within the global context of Christian mission. This chapter explores Asian Christian art in three specific aspects: the dialogical approach, the reception process, and the ethical concerns. 2 At the beginning I propose a hypothesis: The nature of a 1 Cf.

Alan Chong, Christian Ivories by Chinese Artists Macau, the Philippines, and Elsewhere, Late 16th and 17th Centuries, in: Christianity in Asia, Chong (ed.), Singapore 2016, 204. 2 Cf. Volker Küster discusses three terminological tools to describe doing intercultural theology today, by using art, culture, and metaphor as examples. Three dimensions. aesthetics, hermeneutics, and ethics are interrelated to each other. Art as a culturally mediated form conveys

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Christian-oriented image is a communicative event between gospel and culture. In order to contribute to a more dynamic relationship between faith and culture, the viewer draws from not only Christian truth, but also one’s experiences, while interpreting a work of art. I will conclude with examining the ethical dimension as one of the major characteristics of Christian art. Asian Christian art provides a rich tradition of artistic engagement with Christian faith, giving great inspiration to readers of the global world. 1. Dialogue between Old and New To understand a work of art as a Christian object is to assert something both old and new, especially in our case of Asian Christian art. With regard to the growth of Christian art in Asia, Masao Takenaka has observed: “Christian art in Asia becomes very vital when it is formulated out of the local context utilizing the local texture. Here the rich traditional art becomes the means for the artist to express the Christian message.”3 This constructive form of art is illustrated by Takenaka in reference to the work of Bagong Kussudiardja (1928-2004) who incorporated traditional Indonesian dances on batik paintings to express Christian themes. For instance, the scene of Christ’s crucifixion were shown in the figures of traditional shadow puppets (Wayang), highlighting the impression of a tragedy.4 Christian art is a cultural product resulting from a dialogue between the Christian message and a particular context. In other words, the local context provides invaluable source for the new creation of Christian iconography. By utilizing various symbols and patterns that are meaningful to their living experiences, artists express their Christian faith in context; at the same time, they integrate the scriptures and traditional motifs from Christian iconography in order to interpret their belief. A work of Christian art merges local expression and Christian iconography; thereby, becoming a fresh combination of the old and the new. What makes Christian art precisely contextual is the accepted validity of its culturally and historically conditioned expression that plays a part in influencing one’s understandings of God and social situations. The meaning during the process of dialogue between cultures, in which the hospitality and mutual respect for the position of the other is indispensable. Cf. Küster, Intercultural Theology is a Must, 171-176. 3 Takenaka, Christian Art in Asia, 27. 4 Cf. Volker Küster, Zwischen Pancasila und Fundamentalismus. Christliche Kunst in Indonesien, Leipzig 2016.

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existence of this specific cultural pattern of Christian art demands the viewer to consider its contextual contingency. As a matter of fact, studying the history of any Eastern or Western Christian art will reveal that every masterpiece has been very much rooted in its particular context. Christian art can seem like the faith itself to be firmly located in history and reflecting the society: pastoral, patriarchal, premodern, and contemporary, in which it emerged.5 A portable shrine Madonna and Child is an example of Japanese Christian art of the late sixteenth century. The painting of Western style is contained in a traditional Japanese black lacquer (urushi) travel shrine. The work can be attributed to a mission art studio The Seminary of Painters of Giovanni Niccolo in Japan.6 Founded in 1583, the center was the diffusion of European and Far Eastern style artworks to supply the Asian missions and the palace of the Japanese nobility. Japanese lacquer has long been used for objects associated with religious ceremony. When the Portuguese arrived in Japan, they commissioned objects for ritual purpose resulting in these Namban lacquers. Most of the works based on Italian or Flemish engravings represent the sentimental piety of Roman sacred art, the pre-Baroque Counter-Reformation style in Roman painting.7 This particular portable shrine is the juxtaposition of European iconography and traditional Japanese art. The native flora design is adorned with gold and silver and inlaid mother of pearl in a style which flourished in the Momoyama Period. The shrine also reflects Islamic art by the extensive use of pearl inlay and features geometric patterns.8 To investigate a work of Christian art and its contextual expression is to understand how artisans use cultural symbols and elements that speak to their social contexts and religious life. The maker’s visual imagination manifests one’s vision of Christian life. While considering the contextualization of Christian art in Asia, we pay attention to how a new art form manifests the national autonomy and cultural well-being of people and society. For instance, Christian art in modern Asia bears reference to local cultural motifs and religious heritages. The factors of nationalism and modernity have a worldwide impact particularly on the new development of Asian Christian art in the Post World War II era. John Butler points out that nationalism is a major factor in the development of Christian art outside the West. In the 5

Rowena Loverance, Christian Art, Harvard, MA 2007, 11. Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 15421773, Toronto 2001, 73. 7 Op. cit., 72. 8 Op. cit., 73. 6 Cf.

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second half of the twentieth century, we can see more examples of indigenous Christian art in Japan, India, Africa, and Latin America.9 In the example from Indonesian art given above, Christian image becomes the visual evidence to analyze the relevance of Asian people’s national and ethnic identity. An awareness of a particular cultural and historical situation of both artists and viewers raises theological questions that have never been asked before, and thereby enriches one’s interpretation of the creation of Christian iconography. To engage Asian Christian art, in this regard, is to acknowledge the cultural and religious identities of a person or a community. Asian societies have experienced social changes in a globalized world of interconnectedness. From the conversion of new believers to conversations with local beliefs, scholars have witnessed this significant cultural flow of globalization that exhibits a need for intensive dialogue on the appropriateness and effectiveness of communicating the message. In terms of the communicative event, Robert Schreiter proposes that the receiver has a preoccupation with maintaining identity in this process of interpretation. Yet, the speaker is concerned with the integrity of the gospel while transmitting the message across cultural boundaries.10 The term that the viewer used signifies one’s context and impacts the interpretation of Christian art. For instance, Protestant circles extensively use the term contextualization rather than inculturation with reference to its theological implications; In terms of the use of the image in the worship, different faith communities also have different concerns based on their visual traditions. It is thus important to recognize that how a person or society constructs one’s understandings of images and visual perspectives can contribute to a deeper appreciation of one’s own cultural identity. Nevertheless, Christian art is traditional in its witness to scripture and tradition. Each new creation of Christian iconography has to fit into the stream of Christian tradition. Oftentimes, artists take culture into account and re-interpret the biblical narratives into relevant themes from and for their own contexts. Still, the gospel message plays an indispensable role in shaping the interpretation of Christian art. We will see that Contemporary Christian artists are the ones who are able to illuminate the present situation from the biblical perspective. Whether or not the form or content could be borrowed from another religious 9

Cf. Takenaka, Christian Art in Asia, 17. In the discussion of intercultural communication, three basic parts of the event of communication are: the interlocutors (speakers and hearers), the context, and the message. Cf. Schreiter, The New Catholicity, 35. 10

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tradition, it is an obvious feature of Christian art to convey the gospel message. Asian Christian art uses the biblical lens to view present context, allowing its image to be validly rooted in scripture and tradition. In this regard, part of the nature of Christian art itself is also old and traditional. What makes Asian Christian art Christian? Takenaka notes that an authentic Christian art contains three elements: artistic competence, genuine Christian commitment, and critical social sensitivity. In formulating his definition of Christian art, Takenaka refers to the work of Tadao Tanaka who is one of the founders of Kodo Art Association in Japan. Tanaka brings the story of the Bible anew into the contemporary Japanese situation and captures the biblical figures in the midst of today’s confusing and struggling society. According to Takenaka, Asian Christian art is part of a living witness to the power of Jesus Christ and can be parallel with “living theology in Asia”.11 Christian art reflects the artist’s social reality but must simultaneously indicate the distance created by the acceptance or rejection of elements from the native tradition. In this regard, Christian art is not merely a passive conflation of biblical narrative and each participant’s contexts, but the active process of interaction and communication between gospel and culture. Resulting from a dynamic dialogue of new and traditional, Asian Christian art has a future as a living tradition. In sum, either with explicit or implicit Christian subject matters, a work of Asian Christian art creates space for mutual conversation between faith and culture. If gospel is to be truly communicated, a genuine inculturated art should be firmly located in the context and history. In the development of contemporary expression of Asian Christian art, it is obvious to see a radical shift from that superficial type of Christian representation to the contextual and confession form of art. Christian art from different geographic areas of Asia manifests nationalism and visual sovereignty, revealing the artists’ concern of cultural identity. The contextualized faith expression in relation to the identity of the local believers is the main concern. Instead of merely imitating traditional Christian iconography, Asian Christian artists and their works have opened up new ways of thinking about what is a more nuanced understanding of Christian art in the non-Christian world. All these aspects of personal and communal experiences, cultural identity and global

11

Takenaka, Christian Art in Asia, 28f.

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change in contexts of the receiving cultures help achieve a delicate balance in the hermeneutic circle between faith and culture in ways that begin to reflect a true process of inculturation. 2. Process of Reception Christian art not only is handed down in a living tradition but also must be felt as a new experience. To look at an object, to sense, describe, analyze, and interpret its meaning is a process of dialogue with the object itself. The artwork indeed invites viewers to respond to the meaning of the object through their senses. The viewer’s perceiving of the arts does not merely focus on analyzing the style and content of the work but incorporates multiple senses to engage the work. The viewer’s senses and feelings, dreams and visions all contribute to interpreting the meaning of the work. This aesthetic approach to the arts allows multiple interpretations. Looking at a work of art, the awareness through the senses can transcend the differences of human perception and evoke a sense of understanding people from another culture. To look at the specific form of a work of Asian Christian art and to confront its contextualized form and aesthetics allow the viewer to experience its transformative power, thus revealing new ways of seeing and thinking. In such process of dialogue, the maker’s production of and the viewer’s perception to that image together create a profound moment of change for both sides. One can be aware of how the inculturation itself is achieved through the process of reception. Images not only come alive to interact with and speak to the viewer, but also look directly to the viewer and demand a reply. Worth noticing is that the viewer’s taste and reception determine an in-depth interpretation of an inculturated art. The qualities of perceiving an object vary across time and cultures. The viewer’s sensory response is adjusted to different cultures and contexts. For example, a Western audience may admire a porcelain of a china-ware from Asia, not simply for its elegance but also for the quality of its otherness that may not be noticed by Asian people. In other words, there are different sensory responses between individuals and cultures. In China, for instance, infant Christ and the shepherd boy are popular motifs; yet, the brutal scene of crucifixion is not the preference. The theological themes of God’s love and protection in these popular subject matters specifically speak to Asian people’s heart. The viewer’s perceiving of the arts makes possible the fruitful reception of Asian Christian art across cultural boundaries.

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In Chinese-inspired Christian art, the artist configures traditional Christian symbols for a contextualized biblical representation in order to communicate with different social situations within the faith community. In the series of fifty-seven woodblock prints that accompany a 1637 Illustrated Explanations of the Incarnation of the Lord of Heaven (Tien chu chiang sheng chu hsiang ching chieh 天主降生出像經解), Giulio Aleni, SJ (1582-1649) illustrated episodes of the life of Christ and adapted Western engravings of the gospel scenes by depicting Jesus in Chinese dress and symbols.12 The work carefully dresses Chinese people in the costume, gesture, and scenery of the local culture; yet, the series is still predominantly European in style due to its Western onepoint perspective and shading. The process is an accommodation that intermingles elements of each culture; meanwhile, integrates novelty into local epistemologies. In order to make sense of the changing world, the maker and viewer of the work engage in local and foreign, old and new, to voice their own perspectives in this mediated form of communication. The engraving not only serves as model for the didactic purpose of spreading the gospel for Chinese audience but also demands the viewer to respond to the work. Perceiving a mission object retrieves insights from its combination of pre-existing Christian visual vocabulary and local cultural language. Historically speaking, Christian-oriented images employed by Western missionaries have been indispensable tools for evangelizing Asian people.13 Through a variety of usage such as church decoration, devotional works, teaching aids, doctrinal illustration or religious propaganda, mass-produced prints played a particular role in transmitting the Christian message. Indeed, religious images have become the significant driving force in the technical and economic development of the European printing process since the fifteenth century. The role of prints is multifaceted in contexts throughout the history of church art. The religious prints of the time helped bind people together in worship just as 12

Cf. Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542-1773, 102. The uses of art in the context of church and evangelization can be further examined regarding four different categories observed by Apostolos-Cappadona: (1.) symbolically, engaging the viewer through a minimal use of forms, such as art found in the catacombs; (2.) didactically, as when an event is visually narrated in a pedagogical context, such as paintings of biblical scenes; (3.) devotionally, leading the viewer into the sacred, such as icons and statues; (4.) decoratively, as when the visual images are pleasing to the viewer’s aesthetic sensibilities, such as medieval manuscripts. Cf. Eduardo C. Fernandez, Education for Inculturation: Reasons Why the Arts Cannot be Ignored, in: Postmodern Worship and the Arts, Doug Adams and Michael Moynahan (eds.), San Jose, CA 2002, 140. 13

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social media does today. The visual translation of gospel into indigenous idioms bear reference to the process of accommodation so that the message can meet the local audience’s need. Another example of early effort of accommodation in Asia could be found in the life and work of the notable Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci (1552-1610). Ricci took on the dress first of a Buddhist monk and later of a Confucian scholar in order to gain acceptance in the local culture, while he simultaneously brought new techniques of art and science to the Chinese society. Western missionaries wearing native clothing help assimilate the Christian message to Chinese traditions, and identify themselves with the people and land in the hosting culture.14 Ricci and his confreres were in favor of engaging their Chinese audience by learning their native languages, cultural symbols, and philosophy. Still, he valued highly the representative reality of European art and ignored the metaphysical nature of Chinese painting. Religious paintings from the West, unfortunately, resulted in limited success in converting the Chinese elite in late Ming China. Ricci’s method of accommodation still inspired later missionaries utilizing cultural symbols to express effectively the Christian faith throughout Asia. The culturally oriented biblical representations are, nevertheless, still met with suspicion of syncretism that may endanger the integrity of the gospel in some Protestant churches today. Following the principles laid down by Protestant reformer John Calvin, conservative Protestant ministers have held this attitude with regard to the use of image. They embrace the use of visual representations for devotion only when the images are faithful to the facts of biblical narratives; this is due to the belief that native influence is problematic if not done under the supervision of missionaries. However, liberal scholars and artists explore ideas about God and the representation of biblical iconography more freely.15 By engaging the contemporary expression of biblical narratives in Asia, the viewer gains new insight into scripture and tradition. Despite that mission art in the church today still raises debates over the appropriateness of using local symbols in the worship, images relating to Christian heritage, such as biblical, historical, iconographic, and legendary materials, were permitted as reflections on the life of Christ in particular social situations.

14 15

Cf. Pongracz, Küster, and Cook, The Christian Story, 37. Cf. John Harvey, The Bible as Visual Culture. When Text Becomes Image, Sheffield 2013, 8.

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To sum up, several important examples demonstrate that human experiences and particular circumstances form the starting point of an intercultural conversation. Socially and culturally constructed Christian images and objects offer opportunities to respond to the community’s needs for a mutual understanding of different cultures and religious traditions. Asian Christian art not only demands the viewer to dialogue with given cultures and situations but also urges the viewer to cultivate many ways of living Christian lives. 3. Ethical Concerns Our previous discussions have shown that the nature of Christian art is socially and historically constructed, and the viewer’s reception of the arts determines how images and pictures have been viewed in particular ways. While looking at Christian art from the non-Christian cultural contexts, worth noticing is that the ethical question of “whose beauty the art speaks for” challenges the universal, artistic canons in Christianity. The location where a work of art is made and the intention of the artist should not be ignored. In today’s Asian churches, a growing voice from the interfaith context demands the artist and theologians to dialogue with other cultures and religions. Furthermore, as the center of gravity of Christianity is shifting southwards, these under-studied faith traditions and cultures in Asia attract the attention of scholars working within the disciplines of mission and the arts. Ancient civilizations such as Chinese, Buddhist, Taoist, animist, and Pacific are indispensable contributors to the dynamic interactions between Christianity and the East Asian context. In addition, the arts in non-Christian worlds with a wide spectrum of cultural and aesthetic expressions are capable of creating spaces for interfaith conversation.16 It is hoped that a view point of the third world to understand the characteristic of Christian art could offer lessons for the whole church worldwide. Both theologians and art/visual cultural historians have witnessed such profound changes in thinking about the link between art and evangelization. From mission art of the past to the non-Christian subject of contemporary production, the development in the visual arts and aesthetics of Asia provides a rich field for understanding the influences of local culture and religion upon the so-called Christian art. Asian Christian art as simply missionary instrument and pedagogical tool is no more the only focal point in the field. Likewise, we should avoid the 16 Cf. Edward Foley, Art, in: Dictionary of Mission. Theology, History, Perspectives, Karl Müller et al. (eds.), Eugene, OR 1997, 36.

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stereotype understanding of Asian Christian art as merely a naïve copy in the traditional manner of European painting since the Renaissance, such as portraying Jesus in an Asian face and costume in a remote distant world. Instead, the creativity and theological reflection from the artists should be emphasized. Without doubt, the themes and symbols rooted in the old cultures of Asia provide invaluable sources for the production of new Christian iconography.17 Asian Christian art is the product of accommodation that is mediating elements of different cultures and religions. Studying Christian art from the contemporary world of Asia helps achieve a better understanding of the multifaceted character of Christian iconography that still speaks to the condition of people today. The term hybridity is significant for addressing the ethical aspect of such cultural encounter shown in Asian Christian art. Hybridity, a term related to the concept of Homi K. Bhabha’s “third space” is widely used in postcolonial theory. Literally, hybridity refers to the characters of plants or animals that are the offspring of individuals belonging to different species.18 Hybridity here refers to the margin where cultural differences come into contact and conflict.19 Asian Christian art as a product resulting from the negotiation process can be seem as the hybrid blend of two or three traditions. Indeed, hybridity is a major factor that needs to be taken into account when considering the definition of Christian art in Asia.20 For instance, most artworks produced in the Jesuit missions made more or less willing participation in indigenous communities can be described as hybrid.21 Comparing, for example, a Western statue of St. Michael and the devil with an eight-century Chinese Buddhist Tomb Guardian tramping on a demon, we see that both demonstrate similar theme of the victory of Good over Evil.22 Since a 17

Cf. Michael Bird (ed.), Art and Interreligious Dialogue. Six Perspectives, Lanham, Maryland 1995, 101-155. 18 Cf. Macey, Dictionary of Critical Theory, 192. 19 Bhabha’s notion of “third space” helps make sense of inter-cultural encounters in contexts where cultures meet and clash with each other, often in the situations of highly asymmetrical relations of power. Cf. Communicating in the Third Space, Karin Ikas and Gerhard Wagner (ed.), New York. NY 2009, 2. Cf. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, New York, NY 1994; this term “third space” has only recently been introduced into the theological debate by Intercultural Theology. 20 Cf. Pedro Moura Carvalho, What Makes Asian Art Christian, in: Christianity in Asia, Alan Chong (ed.), 14. 21 Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542-1773, 5. 22 Art historians primarily in the field of Mexican colonial art have developed more detailed terms to describe intercultural exchange on the level of individual images. Op. cit., 29.

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symbol blending to one culture could produce a change in meaning, scholars have labelled the transformation that inevitably occurs in hybrid art.23 Moreover, from the perspective of globalization, the concept of hybridity has been at the center of scholarly debates, which helps to analyze cultural plural contexts of Asian Christian art.24 Like other civilizations in which Christianity first took root, Asian cultures and ways of life influenced the visual representation of Christian art and demonstrated hybrid forms that developed in the process of cultural exchange, the negotiation of different cultural and religious traditions. While trying to appropriate the Christian message within different contexts, meanwhile, the main concern is that hybrid forms of art are taking into account different people’s situation and their ways of life. Christianity has co-existed alongside other cultures and faiths, so does Christian art that has been reworked and re-contextualized for centuries. We can see a hybrid example of Christian appropriation of the Greco-Roman art form in a marble sculpture which depicts a shepherd carrying a lamb upon his shoulders.25 This masterpiece was an adaptation from an antique Roman pastoral motif that was used to represent the biblical image of Christ in early Christian art of the early fourth century.26 Initially, the image of the shepherd was probably not understood as Christ the pastor but represented a traditional classical image of the rural idyll. Here, a biblical image of the son of God and native legends are blended together to make the image of Christ the good shepherd vivid to the contemporaneous viewers. Another example of Christian art in hybrid form comes from the image of a healing god Asclepius depicted in the Raising of Lazarus in the Christian catacomb paintings in Rome of the fourth century. Separate characters like Daniel, Jonah, Adam, and Christ converge and coalesce in the same catacomb paintings. The similarity between Christ and 23

Op. cit., 28. Jan Nerderveen Pieterse offers a comprehensive and critical treatment of hybridity from the perspective of globalization. In his discussion on East-West hybridities, globalization is described as a process of braiding rather than simply understood as the diffusion from developed to developing countries. Cf. Jan Nerderveen Pieterse, The Anti-Hybridity Backlash and the Riddles of Recognition, in: Globalization and Culture. Global Mélange, Lanham, MD 2009, 108. 25 Jean I’ Heureux (Macarius; 1551-1617) discussed the origins of Christian art in ancient Rome and claimed that Christian art was the product appropriated from earlier forms and symbols whatever best met people’s needs. Cf. Irina Oryshkevich, Cultural History in the Catacombs. Early Christian Art and Macarius’s Hagioglypta, in: Sacred History. Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World, Katherine Elliot Van Liere et al. (eds.), Oxford 2012, 250-266, 257. 26 Cf. Brown, The Lion Companion to Christian Art, 15. 24

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Asclepius the healing god warrants consideration that early Christians were influenced by non-Christian images.27 It is likely but without certainty that the painting represents the figure of Christ. If the ambiguity in the art of the earliest Christianity is deliberate, it might enable devotion without provoking official reprisals during times of persecution.28 From the two examples above, Christian art proves at the outset that its blending of Christianity and neighboring cultures has raised the complex issue of hybridity through the centuries. It should not be neglected that the hybrid form of Asian Christian art involves hierarchical binaries such as center/margin, colonizer/colonized, hegemony/subaltern. The space of mediation in between cultures of natives and outsides is not free of power inequality. An awareness of social structure, violence, and injustice is important when the viewer tries to interpret the process of cultural encounter. As Courtney T. Goto argues: “More particularly, it does not refer simply and solely to the convergence and mixture between or among differing racial, ethnic, cultural, and religious communities and traditions. Rather, the concept of ‘hybridity’ refers to negotiating multiplicity, marginalization, and power in the context of domination.” 29 Hybrid art demands the viewer to turn from self-centered toward other-/marginalized-centered, while trying not to be too fast in giving interpretation before understanding its social-historical background; meanwhile, readers or viewers should be aware of one’s social position and right to understand and interpret the work. Asian Christian art opens up a new way of thinking through one’s positions more deeply, reminding the viewer to be more conscious of the limitation of one’s own perspectives. The concept of hybridity actually erases uniqueness of the lived experiences, especially suffering in contexts of domination, exclusion, and disenfranchisement. Examining the examples of hybrid art has led us to ask what ethical lessons can this phenomenon of cultural encounter offer to theologically engage Asian Christian art. Viewing a work of Asian Christian art takes seriously the principle of incarnation of the Word within its native setting, and thereby enhances a theological understanding of in-between syncretism of different cultures and Christian tradition.30 By blending elements and patterns from multiple sources for 27 Cf.

Lee M. Jefferson, Picturing Theology. A Primer on Early Christian Art, in: Religious Compass 4/7, 2010, 410-425, 414. 28 Cf. Oryshkevich, Cultural History in the Catacombs, 257. 29 Courtney Goto, Hybridity. Retrieving the Real-life Messiness Erased by a Reified Concept,” in: Journal of Asian/North American Theological Educators 2, 2016, 16-31. 30 Cf. Carl Starkloff, A Theology of the In-Between, Milwaukee, WI 2002, 61.

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communication, Asian artists use images as mediated forms to negotiate cultural boundaries, and even to create a new knowledge system. In this regard, the concept of hybridity can move from a geographical experience (center and margin) to a psychological experience. Asian Christian art acknowledges that our life stories and worldviews are somehow connected with others, no matter how different we are. To sum up, it is under this theological framework of inculturation that image as the hermeneutic connection brings a new method to study Christian iconography in a particular context. By tracing the process of reception, we have observed that images – not as fixed iconographies but as products resulting from the dialogue between artworks and the viewer – allow multiple interpretations. The reception of Asian Christian art as primary source offers crucial insights for studying the history of Christian mission in the given culture, highlighting the mutual interaction and communication within the process of cultural contact. In its hybrid form, Christian art becomes the medium in which people form, transmit, and modify their faith expressions. The liminal space across borders remind us not to ignore the culture and religion of the other. Since today’s world is a changing globalized world where is the overlap of culture, religion, and social experience, to examine a hybrid work of Asian Christian art is to weave people’s lives and local textures together. Being hybrid means being composed of many stories, some of which overlap or contrast with others’ stories. The study of Christian art in Asia takes into consideration the particular circumstances in question as concrete evidence that art is culturally contingent. We will see that different Asian resources such as religious beliefs, historical narratives, and social concerns all intertwine together and play significant roles in shaping not only the dynamic formation in Christian art but also the viewer’s creative engagements with scripture and tradition from their respective cultural contexts.

Chapter Two Correlating Art with Christian Mission

Fig. 1, Cover page from Juan Cobo’s Apología de la Verdadera Religion, woodcut print, 1593, in Jose Eugenio Borao Mateo, The Spanish Experience in Taiwan, 1626-1642. The Baroque Ending of a Renaissance Endeavour, Nakao Eki (trans.), Taipei, 2008, 300.

The woodcut print depicts a Dominican monk who is showing to a Chinese scholar a book with sacred text (Fig. 1). In this sixteenth-century illustrated manuscript, two persons cohabitate in the space of the image, which marks a clear difference between the cultural landscapes of two

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worlds, where the meeting of Christianity and Chinese culture comes to life.1 On the one hand, the landscape on the left is filled with graceful lines and shapes of buildings, trees, mountains, and clouds, representing the great civilization of China. On the other hand, the scene on the right contrasts with a majestic building, which may stand for the grandeur of Christianity. Two persons from the two worlds are at the center of the print and at the crossroads of the beliefs that infuse the image. In a scene of dialogue, two different systems of religious ideas have overlapped. The woodcut showcases the mission activities in Formosa/Taiwan as an extension of the Dominican Order’s Philippine mission to Chinese people. This illuminated manuscript is an early example of Chinese Christianity that at the time just started to engage with the visual culture of Europe and Southeast Asia in the middle of the sixteenth century. The image offers evidence for the study of the art inspired by Christian mission, the relationship between gospel and culture. Christianity has always been a faith for conversion. Images find easily a place in the Christian’s act of presenting their religion and faith to potential converts. Art and object perfectly serve as a medium for the purpose of mission in order to aid prayer and evangelism. A visual cultural perspective thus offers an interpretive lens to perceive mission art that emerged from the complex process of cultural contact.2 It is significant to note that Christian-oriented images are not merely illustrated by the local artisan, but offer powerful ways of seeing in which new perspectives happened. As Martin Jay observes, “The study of visual culture is the analysis and interpretation of images and the ways of seeing (or gazes) that configure the agents, practices, conceptualities, and institutions that put images to work.” 3 A visual cultural perspective, therefore, provides a unique framework to interpret art as joint conversation of different cultures in the mission field. This chapter looks at images not as merely static, naïve representations of Christian messages, but as accommodation products that intermingle elements from different cultures and traditions. The negotiation 1

This illustrated manuscript of woodcut print is the cover page of Juan Cobo’s Apología de la Verdadera Religion (Bian Cheng Chiao Chen Ch’uan Shih Lu 辯正教真傳實錄).It was translated from the work of a Dominican priest, Fray Luis de Granada (1504 – 1588), written for Chinese people in Manila, Philippines around 1593, ten years after the first European missionary arrived at Formosa/Taiwan. Op. cit., 300. 2 The term “visual culture” presupposes that all artifacts, events, and phenomena convey ideas and are experienced or intended to be apprehended visually. Cf. Harvey, The Bible as Visual Culture, 4. 3 Martin Jay, Scopic Regimes of Modernity, in: Vision and Visuality, Hal Foster (ed.), Seattle, WA 1988, 3-27.

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process between cultures could be channeled through images and objects to form spaces of mediation. I will address image in the particular mission context of early China and Taiwan, wherein an encounter between Confucian thought and European religious imagery occurred. Mission art served as form of communication by mapping one culture over another, often by creating variations of new iconography. By incorporating the local philosophy to interpret Christian belief, art thus challenges monotheism in the traditional Christian sense for mutual understanding. Two religious prints from early China, Heart of Enlightenment (Beng-Sim-To 明心圖; Fig. 2) and Transforming to A New Person (改造新人; Fig. 2.1) will be examined as examples in the following. 1. Mutually Critical Correlation The chapter begins with the discussion of the concept of mutually critical correlation. In theology, the concept of “mutually critical correlation” between traditions and situations has been developed by David Tracy.4 Tracy emphasizes the aesthetic tradition that exists in the long history of Christianity in order to advocate the holistic approach and balance the doctrine-based theology. A mutually critical correlation will successfully incorporate arts, aesthetics, contemplative and spiritual traditions to ethical-political centered theology. In doing so, both ethics and aesthetics can contribute to the correlation with theology. In “A Correlational Model of Practical Theology Revisited”, Tracy adds the aesthetic aspect to the discussion of practical theology from a Catholic perspective. In addition to other cultural and religious traditions, theologians should add a correlation with art and aesthetics to the ethical-political dimensions that have long been emphasized in our understanding of practical theology. Tracy writes, All these artistic and spiritual fragments from the highly rich and pluralistic Christian tradition as well as other cultural and religious traditions (Zen haiku, Noh theater, African masks, Native American rituals, ancient temples, etc.) may, in fact, burst open as frag events manifesting healing, artistic, religious, meta physical, and mystical visions of the real to correlate with a Christian vision and ways of life.5

4 The concept of correlation stems from historical studies and refers to understanding the relation between different historical eras. Cf. Sigurd Bergmann, In the Beginning is the Icon. A Liberative Theology of Images, Visual Arts and Culture, Anja K. Angelsen (trans.), London 2009, 68. 5 David Tracy, A Correlational Model of Practical Theology Revisited, in: Invitation to Practical Theology. Catholic Voices and Vision, Claire Wolfteich (ed.), Mahwah, NJ 2014, 76.

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Correlating Asian art and visual culture within Christian tradition helps the viewer to see an artistic and inclusive vision of Christian life and belief. In the above example of the illustrated manuscript, we see the encounter of two radically different worldviews. At a time with uncertainty about the efficiency of communicating religious ideas across cultures, the Catholic booklet in the monk’s hand provided common ground on which Europeans and Chinese could engage in dialogue. The local scholar wearing Chinese robe bows down to the guest showing an attitude of respect. Visual communication conveyed by the manual and gesture participates in the key moment of intercultural exchange. Images, narratives, or performances as spaces of mediation, without doubt, open windows for the viewer to interpret the dynamic process of communication between tradition and situation. Mission objects, including prayer aids, educational materials, or biblical icons, offer spaces in which their creators can bring together ideas and forms belonging to different traditions, and turn them into interrelated parts of a new system of knowledge. Christian art and visual culture of both the past and present are culturally mediated forms, and the task for the interpreter is to relate a single object to the richness of Christian tradition. The triadic relation between the artwork, the producer, and the beholder form a circle of communication. Such correlation of art to mission helps investigate the connection between the artwork and the unknown artisans or the viewer who perceives it. The viewer’s perception of the art echoes this chapter’s attempt to understand how visual practices and sacred memory derived from the image and object influence our examination of Christian mission. Images as artistic expression of Christian faith, in this regard, have the capability to be the hermeneutic connections in discussing the aesthetics, mission, and intercultural theology. In sum, correlating art and visual culture with mission studies recognizes that the dialogical approach to the art needs to be taken into account while considering the effective communication between gospel and culture. Mission objects as spaces of mediation, including Christian poster and prints, blend together Christianity and local cultures, taking seriously human experiences and social locations for cultural contact; its hybrid nature enables dialogue between the new and the traditional, the viewer and the artist. By borrowing Asian sources and elements, such as art, symbol, and aesthetic experiences, the missionaries start a conversation with the local context and people through using these art-

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works. Instead of merely concentrating on the written word and doctrine, these artistic forms of faith expression assist the task of evangelization. In doing so, images and objects construct reinterpretations of Christian iconography as well as document the genesis of material Christianity in modern China and Taiwan. Images assembled here offer the opportunity to understand how art and visual culture in the early twentieth century of China and Taiwan correlate with Protestant missions to reveal a vision of Western civilization; at the same time, introduce new knowledge and world view to the society. 2. Heart of Enlightenment Sharing a common theme of heart imagery, the illustrations (Fig. 2) belong to a small booklet, Heart of Enlightenment, which was written by German Protestant missionary and Sinologist Ernst Faber (Hua ChihAn 花之安, 1839-1899). Heart imagery serves for the didactic purpose of memory, despite that Protestants have often regarded the use of image in sacred spaces as suspicious.6 In these evangelical materials, Faber fused Christian and Confucian thoughts in his interpretation of the concept of human heart/mind (hsin 心) for Chinese audiences. The images are visual evidences that witness missionaries’ contribution to teaching and pedagogy in the Protestant context. Most importantly, these Western cultural productions with novel ideas and values introduced by the learned missionaries to the public significantly impacted the spiritual formation of the elites at the time. The emblem of the heart conveys a plain message of salvation, presenting a startling visual conundrum. At first glance, each print is shown with a level of similarity. Located in the center of the work is a Sinicized male figure standing behind the symbol of a heart. This Chinese figure has a shaven head with the hairstyle of the Ch’ing dynasty. Intriguingly, the convergence of Christian iconography and Chinese context permeates each of the works. The Chinese figure is starkly juxtaposed with Christian iconography such as angels and demonic creatures, an eye of mind representing the omnipresent God inside a triangle, a dove representing the light of the Holy Spirit, and typical iconography of the crucifixion with Jesus on the cross (plate 4). Heart imagery reflects here the Protestant emphasis on human sinfulness and God’s grace through depicting the godless man whose sinful soul is waiting to be transformed. 6

Cf. Selderhuis, The Calvin Handbook, 423.

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(Plate 3) (Plate 4)

(Plate 5) (Plate 6)

Fig. 2, Illustration of Heart of Enlightenment (Beng-Sim-To), Plate 3-6, print, 13.5 x 9.5 cm, ca. early twentieth century. PCT Collection, Taiwan. Courtesy of PCT.

These illustrations illuminate the text of Heart of Enlightenment (BengSim-To) that was originally revised by Faber from the Chinese translation of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (Tien Lu Li Cheng Ta Lueh 天 路歷程大略) in 1879. Faber wrote extensively in German and English, including critiques on Confucian classics, in an attempt to integrate Christian thought and Confucian ethics. To reach the local audience,

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the Presbyterian Church of Taiwan (PCT) reprinted a Romaji version of this small booklet in 1924, so that the common faithful can understand the gospel teaching without difficulties.7 The woodcut prints and some zinc printing plates located in the southern part of Taiwan have survived from the original eight plates by the missionaries’ hands, and now belong to Presbyterian Church of Taiwan’s historical collections in the southern part of the island. Faber revised this small booklet through the Chinese translation of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and later published it in 1898.8 As a notable Protestant missionary-scholar with a high regard for Chinese culture, Faber’s effort to synthesize Chinese philosophy and Christianity was clear, as the seventeen-to-eighteenth-century Jesuit missionaries had done. In his interpretation of Christian spirituality, Faber integrated the Confucian concept of moral education by using the human heart/mind as the focal point of visual contemplation. The heart/mind imagery becomes the window for the viewer to examine one’s moral life. Contemplating the heart imagery leads the viewer to enter into different stages of change and transition. By doing so, viewers experience the inward journey within their minds and souls. Faber’s booklet demonstrates that the symbol of heart serves as a key metaphor in Christian pictorial conventions; meanwhile, echoing the Confucian concept of heart/mind. In this regard, the heart imagery was the space of mediation, in which Chinese and Christian views of revelation met and merged. Chinese Christian art emerged at the crossroads of two worlds in a form that was both recognized by the church and Chinese audiences. It becomes a cultural project in which artists correlate ideas and forms belonging to different cultures and religions, contributing to interrelated parts of a new representation of faith expression. Using the heart/mind concept to react to the different stages of spiritual awareness in the Christian journey, Faber may not be the first one to have done so. It is already popular in Catholic spiritual tradition to use images to portray the activities of the human mind, the mental picture of the mind, in the process of spiritual practice and meditation. Indeed, Faber’s visual manual for evangelization can be traced back to the Jesuit emblem books: Cor Jesu amanti sacrum, as one of the most 7 The small booklet was translated to Romaji edition (Peh-oe) from the Chinese edition (Hanbun) and the first edition was published in 1924 by Tai-oan Kau-hoe Kong-po-sia (台灣教會公報 社). Cf. Shen Yi Tuen 沈毅敦 (ed.), Beng-Sim-To, Tainan 1953. 8 Cf. Hu Rui-Qin 胡瑞琴, 晚清傳教士與儒家經典研究 Wan Ch’ing Chuan Chiao Shi Yu Ju Chia Ching Tian Yen Chiu (Missionaries and Research on Confucian Classics of the Late Ch’ing Dynasty), Chi Nan 2011, 98.

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reproduced illustrated texts in this tradition, which was made by the Flemish illustrator Antoine Wierix around 1595.9 Faber’s Heart of Enlightenment provides eight images and brief meditation as direction to the soul, describing the nuances of human transformation, including the depiction of the mind’s activity of each stage. Faber aims to communicate effectively the gospel message, as he correlates Confucian concepts of mind to his Christian pedagogy. The illustrations of Heart of Enlightenment, in this regard, draw on the concept of heart that alludes to the Neo-Confucian scholar Chu Hsi’s (朱熹, 1130-1200) understanding of the human mind. The images obviously demonstrate Faber’s familiarity with Confucian thought and Chinese classics. Derived from the depiction of seven virtues-versus-vices in Catholic iconography of the Medieval period, the style and content of these engravings have nevertheless integrated into an indigenized style. In the third plate of Heart of Enlightenment (Fig. 2), the heart, or soul, at the center of the work is the focus of our attention. We see that the radiant dove entering the center of the heart to expel the vices and Satan himself. However, seven vices symbolized as vipers and small beasts are still waiting to occupy the sinner’s heart. The viewer then can contemplate the vices and virtues from a Confucian perspective of moral examination through the heart imagery that points to a sphere, in which the new presentation of indigenous designs and patterns occurs. Moreover, the repeated composition of the figure’s heart in the center reminds us that images were reoriented for a certain mode of reception. The heart calls viewers to convert to Christianity, revealing the Protestant idea of using image for evangelizing and pedagogy. The sinner should invite the God of light to dwell in one’s interior life and be aware of the return of Satan to the soul. Besides, the figure’s heart seems to be transferred to the armor of God, and reminds the observer to be aware of the spiritual battle with the forces of evil. In plate 7 (Fig. 2.1) is the ending scene of one’s earthly journey. Only the pious man whose soul is sanctified by God to obey the teaching of the gospel will be saved from the hell of fire in the deep valley and be uplifted to connect with God in the heaven. From the main composition of each of the prints, we see that the sinner’s confession and the light of the gospel by Holy Spirit shining through one’s heart remains significant to Protestant Christians. Book illustrations serve the pedagogical purpose of enabling Chinese viewers 9

David Morgan, The Forge of Vision. A Visual History of Modern Christianity, Oakland, CA 2015, 61.

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to remember the scriptures in their new religious practice. In order to articulate the complex Christian doctrines of sin and repentance, the inward journey with allegorical meanings invites the viewer to consider letting God dwell in their hearts. The distance between a sinful heart and an enlightened heart of the image represents the transforming journey in Protestant imagination. In order to communicate the gospel with Chinese viewers who were often self-confident in their Confucian heritage, Protestant missionaries in China and Taiwan utilized and reproduced indigenized Christian iconography that is firmly located in the context of the receiving culture. The heart imagery was the efffective means for missionaries to instruct Chinese converts to the Christian way of life. Through these visual aids, the Christian life is rendered as a soul’s journey to God.

Fig. 2.1, Illustration of Heart of Enlightenment (Beng-Sim-To), Plate 7, print, 13.5 x 9.5 cm, ca. early twentieth century. PCT Collection, Taiwan. Courtesy of PCT.

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We end this section by pointing out that the context in which Christian mission entered serves as a subordinate role in the process of transmitting the gospel. Wherever missionaries were sent to work, they brought the booklet as an aid for evangelization and translated it into indigenous languages. The images were also altered to accommodate to the local situation in order to create a dialogue with Chinese religious culture, and most importantly, to please the aesthetic taste of Chinese audiences. Despite the Chinese context remained subordinate in its role as a vehicle for conversion, the mission strategy of correlating Christian beliefs and Chinese thoughts effectively touched the aesthetic taste of the Chinese readers. Heart imagery thus offers the space of conversion, manifesting the Christian doctrine of sin, and this scriptural teaching cannot be compromised. By examining its signs and symbols as constitutive of social relations, perceiving images becomes a promising way of gathering information that moves beyond the image as a closed and fixed event. 3. Transforming to A New Person Circulated in the mission context of the early twentieth century, Transforming to a New Person (Fig. 3 & color plate) demonstrates another example of cultural accommodation as the unknown artists visually translate the biblical message into their contexts.10 This allegory poster designed for the pedagogical purpose to teach the local audience the gospel message, meanwhile, reveals Chinese people’s ways of living and seeing in that particular context. The poster depicts two men standing under a giant cross: One is dressed neatly in a beautiful Chinese yellow garment, and the other wears torn clothes. Four large Chinese characters in the upper corner read: “Transforming to a New Person.” The biblical verses taken from Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians 4: 22-24 are located on both sides of the cross. Both figures personify the biblical message within the Chinese context.

10

Source from Yale Divinity Library: Spreading the Word. A Selection of Missionary Posters, Games, and Ephemera from the Day Missions Collection, November 2013-May 2014. This poster Transforming to a New Person (Kai Tsao Hsin Jen 改造新人) published by the Religious Tract Society (RTS) of Han-kow in 1933 was most likely used in street preaching and teaching in rural China. The poster was brought back from China in 1947 by Viola Larson, a missionary serving under the Swedish Evangelical Covenant Church in Hu-peh Province. Several copies can be found in Taiwan Baptist Theological Seminary in Taipei, the collection of Yale Divinity Library, and the digital project of Chinese Christian Posters in The Center for Global Christianity and Mission funded by the Henry Luce Foundation in Boston University.

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Fig. 4, Unknown Artist, Transforming to a New Person (A New Robe), poster illustrating Ephesians 4: 22-24 was published by Religious Tract Society, ca 1933, in Yale Divinity Library. Spreading the Word. A Selection of Missionary Posters, Games, and Ephemera from the Day Missions Collection.

Looking closely on the bright yellow robe worn by the figure on the left side of the cross, the Chinese words describing the fruits of the Spirit were printed on the fabric such as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22). In contrast, words such as hatred, gambling, greed, pride, and other sinful habits appear on the torn cloth worn by the man on the right side, serving as stigmas. Made by an anonymous artist, the large-sized poster might have been used in Sunday school as a visual aid to help students memorize the scriptures of Ephesians 4:22-24: “You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your

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minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.” (Ephesians 4: 22-24, NRSV). This poster serves for a particular didactic purpose by its visual rendering of scripture, as the artist uses cultural elements to responding to the context in Protestant churches. For the viewer, reception to the image enables one to see to the values and patterns of culture. Understanding Christian posters as spaces of mediation shapes the ways how images were produced and received in the mission field. While encountering a non-Christian world with its different religious system, the gospel message transmitted by the images brought something that is absolutely new into that particular context. In order to effectively preach the gospel, missionaries used images to cloth the message in idioms and patterns that people in the new context can easily understand. Through the imagery of transformation to the new self, the viewer experiences the shifts form the individual awareness of sin to a new self of holiness. Given how faith and imagination were formed through the correlation with vernacular grammar and vocabulary, Christian posters provide a space of cultural contact, where God was and is present in different contexts. Missionaries translated the gospel message using visual aids in Chinese context and cultural environment that was specifically under a theological tradition that might broadly be called Reformed Protestantism. According to William Dyrness’s observation, Protestant attitudes toward the arts include the cautious use of image, looking within oneself to discover and reflect on the presence of God, and longing to see the world restored to its purity.11 Calvin believes that God should not be represented by a visual appearance, because He himself has forbidden it: “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” (Exodus 20:4 NRSV). Yet, a history painting used for Christian teaching could be the exception.12 Due to certain Protestant groups who prohibited the representation of the invisible image of God, the only images allowed being those that picture visible objects for the purpose of teaching. Christian posters as spaces of mediation encountered by new believers have shown a model of accommodation, or indigenization in the 11 Cf.

William A. Dyrness, Reformed Theology and Visual Culture. The Protestant Imagination from Calvin to Edwards, New York, NY 2004, 301. 12 Calvin discusses the functions and limits of the use of image. Cf. John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, in: Theological Aesthetics, Gesa Elsbeth Thiessen (ed.), London 2004, 136-140.

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Protestant context of early China and Taiwan.13 In our case, the ancient and customary Chinese figures and setting provide the appropriate context for rewrapping the message for the receptor’s situation. Accommodation means “content and cultural form of the gospel are to be clearly separated. Just as the kernel of a nut is brought to light when the shell is removed, so too the gospel can be extracted from its cultural covering.”14 It assumes that the gospel core has been revealed in a new context. To indigenize the gospel message is to strip it of its wrappings, the cultural husk, in order to find the gospel kernel. This naked gospel kernel then can be planted in a new cultural soil. We are aware of the indigenization model, in which the biblical truth can be replanted in the new setting of Chinese soil, the vehicle of the message; in other words, the secondary elements that can be dispensed of in many cases. We cannot, however, ignore that the viewer’s reception of the art actively participates in interpreting the meaning of the image. Negotiation of meaning and boundaries revealed in mission arts becomes the starting point to perceive the dynamic process of cultural encounter. Theologically engaging with mission objects manifests many ways that Asian Christian art has embodied a certain context of indigenization. Journey imagery serves for didactic purpose in the context of Protestantism, in which the image’s role is subordinate to the text. Even though such correlation of Christian beliefs and Chinese culture is appropriate to please the aesthetic taste of Chinese readers and enlighten viewers’ minds, the Chinese context shown in these images remains subordinate in the indigenization of Christian faith. Missionaries translated biblical meanings into cultural contexts in early China and Taiwan, emphasizing the role of scripture for the mission task. From the missionary’s side, Christian faith and culture should be separated like kernel and husk to avoid syncretism that may endanger the integrity of the gospel. In addition to demonstrate missionaries’ accommodation endeavors; however, from the side of the receiving culture, the awareness of multiple dimensions of cultural exchange stimulates a scholarly conversation on inculturation. Examining the spaces of mediation revealed in mission posters allows multiple interpretations that take place in the dynamics of intercultural encounters. The inward journey of transformation in popular posters and book illustrations, on the one hand, demonstrate missionaries’ contributions of Christian accommodation in 13 Cf. 14

Stephen Bevans, Models of Contextual Theology, Maryknoll, NY 2002, 40. Küster, The Many Faces of Jesus Christ, 21.

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early China and Taiwan. On the other hand, the subordinate role of the context that missionaries have thought to missionize has the capacity to shape transmission and reinterpretation of the Christian message. Presenting many viewpoints, biblical texts, and theological ideas, an image can help interpret our lives rather than illustrate only one passage. This is the power of image that teaches us to appreciate ambiguity as well as those diverse perspectives.15 Spaces of mediation manifested in the posters demonstrate the effect of Christian accommodation within communities and meanwhile, raise questions in relation to the material culture of mission. Recognizing the allegorical nature of journey of self-transformation allows us to see how the Protestant consciousness of sin and repentance was correlated with religious propaganda in the context of the Reformed tradition. Journey imagery functions as an alternative, representational strategy for the didactic purpose of revealing the sinner’s salvation to Chinese audiences. Understanding mission posters as spaces of mediation has potential to manifest the multi-directional aspect of cultural exchange. For instance, the cultural phenomena offered by this space of mediation can include: Christianity and local cultures intertwine and evolve into a new worldview; new ideas emerged from culturally contextualized representation can transform old concepts and motifs of art; Christian posters merge traditional Christian iconography and local aesthetics as new works of art; hybrid art uses the ambiguity of visual representation as medium to express new perspectives. These intra-dynamics of Christian art are complex realities from their origins and remain so in the dynamic process of the intercultural encounter itself. Derived from the creativity of local productions and contextualized theological expression, Christian art in Asia manifests the liminal space between Christianity and Asian cultures.16 In other words, it is such in-between space of transmission and change that occurs during the process of communication in which the genius inculturation can take place. Emerged from an ongoing process of cultural contact and exchange, Asian Christian art could be channeled through a set of new cultural objects as resulting from the process of inculturation. While 15

Cf. Doug Adams, Ambiguity as a Gift of Arts to Formation of Inclusive Community, in: Postmodern Worship and the Arts, Doug Adams and Michael E. Moynaham, SJ (eds.), San Jose, CA 2002, 5. 16 Victor and Edith Turner’s concept of liminality that concerns being liminal or in-between can be applied here to interpret the process of transmission and change. It refers to the moving from one social state to another in the context of a rite of passage. Cf. Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, New York, NY 2011, 2.

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applying this dialogical approach to the arts, local and foreign influences evolve into a novel worldview of Asian Christian art, one that emanates from the liminal space of interaction and communication. Spaces of mediation created by a variety of hybrid forms of art, either high or low, build upon the ambiguity of indigenized representations to express new forms of lived Christianity. Correlation of art with Christian mission not only analyzes mission art in Asian context as a product of cultural mediation but also tells many stories, some of which overlap or contrast with other stories. These different stories allow us to gain a detailed view of the religious, social, and political factors that form a new face of Asian Christianity as well as the novel development of Christian art in Modern Asia discussed in the following chapter.

Chapter Three Asian Faces of Christ Spreading the gospel to the new contexts across Asia has raised the question of a successful communication of the message. In the process of cultural contact, Robert Schreiter points out that there are two characteristics of effectiveness and appropriateness for consideration.1 This chapter intends to answer the questions: How do Asian artists use elements from their respective cultures to create a work of art that speaks to their contexts? In what ways visual forms are given to the communication of the gospel between cultures? The discussion will focus on the issues of visual representation raised in the contextualization of Christ’s image, which is one of the most depicted subject matters in Asian Christian art. Christians of all generations throughout the centuries have tried to portray the image of Christ in the context of their cultures and worldviews. In the numerous depictions of Christ, we see the artist’s efforts to capture the core message of the gospel through the pictorial rendering of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. There are many prolific modern Asian Christian artists whose works reflect artistic influences from religious and cultural heritages as well as contemporary trends. The chapter is necessarily selective in its scope. Three artists, Sadao Watanabe (1913-1996), P. Solomon Raj (b.1920), and He Qi (b. 1950) have great willingness to enter into dialogue with their cultural contexts. Their artworks emerged from combining Christian worldview and the artists’ personal experiences achieve a novel expression of Christian art. This chapter looks at certain dominant characteristics that distinguish their artworks as both Asian and Christian. It is instructive to study some examples of artistic interchange between Christianity and the artists’ Asian heritage of Japan, India, and China. 1

Cf. Schreiter, The New Catholicity, 33.

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1. Sadao Watanabe’s Good Shepherd

Fig. 4, Sadao Watanabe, The Good Shepherd, 1975, stencil print on washi handmade paper, 18 x16 cm, in Sandra Bowden, Beauty Given by Grace. The Biblical Prints of Sadao Watanabe, Baltimore, MD 2012, 64.

Sadao Watanabe’s stencil print The Good Shepherd (Fig. 4) offers us an example of Christian iconography in dialogue with the Japanese aesthetic context. The well-known parable of the good shepherd takes on a new life in Watanabe’s hands. At the center of the image stands the shepherd with his head and upper body bent, cradling the lost sheep. The print evokes a strong feeling of exuberant love. The black outline of the shepherd and the lost sheep almost blend together with the floral patterns in the background, suggesting a moment of harmony. Seemingly without three-dimensional depth, Watanabe depicts the character of Jesus using a vigorous structural rhythm. A large S-shaped composition illustrates the moment, as the shepherd joyfully and affectionately embraces the lost sheep. The trees, flowers, and all creatures rejoice and dance together over this moment of reunion. This image recalls the hybrid form of blending traditional Christian iconography and local

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cultures, including the statue of Christ as good shepherd discussed in the preceding section. In order to capture the intimacy of an encounter of the Lord with a sheep, Watanabe appropriates biblical imagery, by utilizing traditional Japanese techniques adapted from the Okinawan craft tradition of stenciling for dyeing kimono.2 In terms of representing Christian imagery in the guise of Japanese culture, we can date back to the precedent in the sixteenth century when the Seminary of Painters of Giovanni Niccole (1560-1626) played a significant role in promoting art for the Jesuit missions.3 In 1583, Pope Gregory XIII (1572-85) set up this mission art studio that became a center for the diffusion of European visual culture throughout Asia. A set of works show the culturally based iconographic needs of its Japanese and Chinese audiences. In the seventeenth century, in a reaction against the mere mimesis of Christian imagery, Japanese Christian artists began to incorporate traditional folk art methods such as woodblock print, local pottery, and paper stencil work to depict ordinary life during the Tokugawa period (1603–1867).4 Christian art in the Meiji era (1868-1912) reflected the conflict between traditional culture and Japan’s modern industrial state.5 In the West, the Arts and Crafts Movement in Europe deferred to the medieval traditions of craftsmanship as a source of inspiration; meanwhile, the interest in pure, austere aesthetics of Japanese art increased.6 The founders of the movement, William Morris (1834-1896) and John Ruskin (1819-1900), championed the value of handmade crafts over mass-produced industrial artifacts. The movement’s aesthetic conviction was that a good design should contribute to its environment and to the ordinary people. This notion of modern aesthetics resulted in a widespread revival of the Japanese Mingei Folk Art Movement of the 1920s and 30s led by Soetsu Yanagi (1889-1961), in which Yoshinosuke Tonomura (1898-1993), a former Methodist minister and the director of the Kurashiki Folk Art Museum, took a leading role.7 The pioneers of the movement found profound beauty in the humblest utilitarian artifacts produced by unknown craftsmen for the ordinary people.

2

Cf. Sandra Bowden, Beauty Given by Grace. The Biblical Prints of Sadao Watanabe, Baltimore, MD 2012, 10. 3 Cf. Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542-1773, 53. 4 Cf. Takenaka, Christian Art in Asia, 16. 5 Cf. William Dyrness, Christian Art in Asia, Amsterdam 1979, 49. 6 Cf. Brown, The Lion Companion to Christian Art, 340. 7 Cf. Takenaka, Christian Art in Asia, 16.

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One should not overlook that Watanabe introduces the spirit of Mingei (民藝, folk arts or “arts of the people”) into the pictorial language of his Christian iconography. The entire scene including the rounded faces rhythmically fills the entire space. It would appear that Watanabe applies the beauty of Japanese spiritual life mixed with indigenous Shintoism, Confucianism from China, and various forms of Buddhism to appropriate Christian imagery.8 Sandra Bowden observes the influence of Watanabe’s teacher, the Japanese textile designer Keisuke Serizawa (1895-1984), and of Mingei folk art.9 These rhythms and conventional patterns, often derived from daily life and the natural environment, convey the collective wisdom of the Eastern world. Watanabe uses a traditional Japanese folk art technique of fabric stencil based on the craft tradition of Okinawa to develop his biblical art. By doing so, the artist grounds Christian images securely in his own cultural and religious background. The differences that Watanabe brings to biblical narratives in his modern stencil print lie in his cultural sensitivity to the folk art medium. The artist creatively adapts traditional techniques for his biblical imagery, suggesting the self-representation of Modern Japanese aesthetics. The folk art medium evidences the alteration of its techniques in Watanabe’s Christian prints, which promises the beauty of their accomplishment on a Buddhist aesthetic tradition. Instead of being made by a named artist, the simplicity of folk art comes from the anonymous craftsman who imitates a traditional pattern. From a Buddhist point of view, tradition as an accumulation of the experience and wisdom of several generations is called the Given Power (他力).10 The power of the anonymous artist is not consistent with the Western ideal of a genius but is bestowed by this external Given Power of the community that elevates individuals in the physical world. In this regard, the folk art tradition helps the viewer to appreciate the Buddhist concept of beauty derived from the collective memory of Japanese society. Soetsu Yanagi, the founder of the Mingei Movement, understands the Buddhist concept of beauty, as a Pure Land of beauty, to be found in these humble artifacts. The Pure Land or the realm of bliss in Japanese Buddhism can be regarded as a Utopia where there is no distinction between divine 8

Cf. Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542-1773, 54. Cf. Bowden, Beauty Given by Grace, 16. 10 In reference to the Given Power (外力), there are two ways of becoming a Buddha: One is called the Way of Self-Power (self-reliance; jiriki-do 自力道), the other one is called the Way of Other Power (reliance on an external power or grace; tariki-do 他力道). Cf. Soetsu Yanagi, The Unknown Craftsman. A Japanese Insight of Beauty, Tokyo 1989, 132. 9

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and human, the upper and lower, or skill and lack of skill, that is, the Land of Non-duality.11 The materiality of Watanabe’s work effectively correlates biblical image of Christ and Buddhist aesthetics, creating a hybrid form of Japanese Christian art. Another work of Watanabe, Christ Carrying the Cross (Fig. 5 & color plate), resonates perfectly with the representation of Christ, demonstrating social concern and moral beauty. The combination of traditional Japanese techniques and biblical subject matter creates a powerful medium for theological expressions. Both of Christ’s kneeling feet touch the ground with his upper body wearing a heavy cross on the shoulder. Christ’s image is a suffering servant who is portrayed as the one who is the universal savior understanding people’s joy and sorrow and living among them. We see that the face of Christ is portrayed as tight-lipped with passive facial expressions. John Kohan comments that Watanabe’s figures resemble actors wearing masks in Noh theater, where characters communicate delicately only with the movement of body language.12 The dramatic movement of the figure’s body in an Sshape nevertheless conveys strong emotions on the stage-like pictorial space. The tension lies in the elaboration of the biblical figure’s explicit, rapid movement and the figure’s passive facial expression. An Eastern aesthetics of the implicit expression of the character’s emotion emerge from the rhythm and movement of the work, creating an intimate interaction among the objects and viewers. The indirect expression of emotion in Watanabe’s biblical characters is connected with the aesthetics of wabi in Noh drama, in which the truly beautiful occurs only when joined with something subdued.13 Christ’s image created from an on-going process of cultural mediation becomes a visual text for Christology. The Japanese cultural identity shown in Watanabe’s interpretation of Christian art links the artwork with nationalism. The Christological understanding of 11 Cf. Soetsu Yanagi, The Pure Land of Beauty, in: The Eastern Buddhism Vol. IX, no. 1 (May, 1976), 19; Ronald Nakasone argues for an appreciation of the Pure Land of beauty as a Buddhist basis of the philosophy and aesthetics of Mingei. Cf. Ronald Nakasone, Given Form to the Formless: Yanagi Soetsu and the Pure Land of Beauty, in: Kitabatake Tensei Kyōju Koki Kinen Ronshu (Essays in Honor of Professor Tensei Kitabatake’s 70th birthday), Kyoto 1998, 476-477. 12 Cf. John Kohan, Profound Faith, Profound Beauty. The Life and Art of Sadao Watanabe, in: Beauty Given by Grace, 96. In Noh, the actors are trained to control their emotions and not to show themselves to the audience, thus giving the sense of novelty in the theatrical presentation. Cf. Motokiyo Zeami, On the Art of the Nō Drama. The Major of Treatises of Zeami, J. Thomas Rimer and Yamazaki Masakazu (trans.), Princeton, NJ 1984, xxxiv. 13 Cf. Zeami, On the Art of the Nō Drama, xxxvii.

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Watanabe’s work provides an access point for one to articulate the theological implication of its hybrid form, while maintaining the unity between the person and work of Jesus Christ. Watanabe’s depiction of Christ situated in the context of Japanese aesthetics expresses the artist’s desire to create God’s beauty for the people’s appreciation. Watanabe’s biblical image in Japanese techniques echoes the Christian teaching of incarnation where Christ is fully human and fully divine living among us. Christ himself is the incarnational one, the perfect union of two natures. Viewers thereby can imagine Christ as hybrid and sense what it means in the life of his followers.

Fig. 5, Sadao Watanabe, Christ Carrying the Cross, 1968, washi, 19 x 17 cm, in Sandra Bowden, Beauty Given by Grace. The Biblical Prints of Sadao Watanabe, Baltimore, MD 2012, 96.

2. Solomon Raj’s Water of Life Indian artists under the British rule attempt to revive traditional Indian art started with the Bengal Renaissance, a cultural, social, intellectual, and artistic movement in the Bengal region of India in the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Native traditions that survived in the local and indigenous forms have been rediscovered in the movement.

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The Bengal artistic revival was influential at the Calcutta School of Arts, one of the oldest institutions of India where the Hindu heritage was appreciated. Nandalal Bose (1882-1966), as one of the great Indian painters of the Bengal Renaissance, contributed to modern Indian art by interacting with the forgotten local tradition.14 Worth noticing is that Bose’s portrayal of the image of God contradicts to some of the Hindu visions of Gods who are mostly heroic and victorious in the Indian context. For instance, Kali is an Indian Goddess who holds a demon’s head with her neck wearing a string of skulls, and her red tongue with the blood. In Bose’s Christ Carries the Cross, instead, Jesus is depicted as wearing a loin-cloth like the peasants who form the majority of the Indian people. Christ is an ordinary Indian person signifying a God who identifies with the suffering of the masses. The genuineness of Bose’s contextualized work demonstrates a strong interest in human dignity. In the same vein with his predecessors, Solomon Raj, as a Lutheran pastor and theologian, believes that only a form of Christianity that is deeply rooted in the diverse cultures and the life of its common people can transform the churches in India. More a theologian than an artist, Raj searches for a way to communicate the Christian truth to his fellow believers. Raj depicts Jesus amidst the marginalized and suffering people, using batik and woodcuts the cheap materials readily available in the environment. Gudrun Löwner notes that the artist's favorite story is John 4, where “he shows the liberative message of Jesus taking water from an untouchable woman, something which is still distant reality in South Indian villages, where the Dalits are not allowed to take water from the wells of others since they are considered polluting.”15 The liberative moment then appear in Raj’s portrayal of Christ’s encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well. In Raj’s Water of Life (Fig. 6 & color plate), Christ’s image opens discussion of the culture’s active role in the process of inculturation under the Indian context. Raj, indeed, has a passion for inculturation. The artist wrote, “I was a pastor, a teacher, and a radio producer [...] However, my Sadhana, my personal discipline, and avocation was to root the gospel in the native soil of India.”16 Water of Life presents a contemporary transposition of Christ’s encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4:4-26) in Indian context. Küster comments that Raj’s Jesus as a suffering savior embraces the refugees under the 14

Cf. Dyrness, Christian Art in Asia, 16. Cf. Gudrun Löwner, Christian Art and Architecture in Asia, in: The Oxford Handbook of Christianity in Asia, Felix Wilfred (ed.), Oxford 2014, 458-476, 468. 16 Cf. David Zersen, Planting Lutheran Seeds in India’s Soil, in: The Lutheran, 2007, 26f..

15

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context of Dalit theology.17 The presence of Jesus Christ, as among the poor and oppressed has already clearly existed in the Indian tradition.18

Fig. 6, Solomon Raj, Water of Life, 2007, woodcut print, in Solomon Raj, P.. St. John’s Gospel.. A Gallery of Hieratic Art, Vijayawada, 2010, 56.

At the lower center of this woodcut print is a woman crouched down on the well’s right side, holding a rope with both hands drawing water from the well. On the left-hand side of the well, Jesus is standing with his head turned down toward the woman. The woman is wearing a blue sari with a long, yellow, and bright orange turban on her head, Jesus a bright red robe, and a stream of blue water comes from behind his head. The woman and Jesus are barefoot on a green grass field. In the foreground stands an earthenware vessel in front of the well. Both figures have dark skin and large oval eyes. The metaphor of garment sari links the work to the geographic location of India. Raj obviously transposes Christ and 17 Cf.

Volker Küster, Renunciation of Inculturation as Aesthetic Resistance. The Indian Artist Solomon Raj Seen in a New Light, in: Exchange 30, 2001, 359-360. 18 Ibid.

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the Samaritan woman into the Indian setting, interpreting two biblical figures as being dressed in local custom that speaks to people of India. Raj correlates the Samaritan woman at the well with the cosmic symbol of living water flowing out from Jesus. The soft lines of the woman’s blue sari echo the effect of ever-flowing water drawn from Jesus’ head, vigorously evoking the sense of liberating energy. Against the regular lined bricks of the well, garb, and turban of the woman structured with curved and elaborated cuts emerged from the green background. The water that renews and sustains people’s spiritual life flows from Jesus’ head and extends toward the woman’s body. The ornamental black contour lines mirror the repeated semi-circles on the ground, giving the picture an atmosphere of delight. Diagonally oriented to the woman, Jesus’ red garb reflects the orange-and-black color of the well and the yellow-orange brightness of the woman’s turban. In Raj’s print, the woman’s body becomes the symbol of living water underscored by the dynamism of the scene with abundant fertility. In the center of the work, Raj locates the rich imagery of the well to illustrate the grand outcome of the event, in which Jesus himself is the source of life. Different from Raj’s image of Christ where Hinduism plays scarcely a role in his work, Jyoti Sahi’s Christ is clearly inspired by the ancient myth of the River Ganges, relying heavily on Hindu sensibility. In Sahi’s Woman at the Well, Jesus is depicted as a Guru, an Eastern sage, sitting on the top of the hill with crossed legs in a posture of meditation. Two Bodhi trees beside him allude to Jesus’ image as the wise Buddha, who sat in meditation while experiencing enlightenment. The Samaritan woman is dressed in blue, signifying a stream of living water that flows from Jesus’s heart. The flowing water from the heart of the mountain indicates the River Ganges as flowing down from the body of Shiva who represents the mountain Kailash.19 Sahi approached this story of the encounter by utilizing natural symbols found in Indian mythology. The mountain, trees, rock, and water in Sahi’s Woman at the Well are metaphors for an inner spiritual transformation in light of the ancient wisdom of the East. The symbol of water, Sahi observed, “arises from a deep human need to communicate on issues that are most important to people, and which finally concern the relation of the human community to the planet earth, and to a search for wholeness through an encounter with the Divine.”20 All the 19

Cf. Jyoti Sahi, Dialogue and the Imagination: Reflections by an Indian Christian Artist, in: Exchange 39, 2010, 49-70, 66. 20 Op. cit., 57.

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visual elements of well, water, vessel, and fruitful field contribute to a vivid conversation between human and the Divine. However, it should not be ignored that the juxtaposition of Christ alongside Indian context of its multiple-religious systems wherein the mixture of Christianity and local culture may create the threat of syncretism. As we have seen that image of Christ has being reworked and recontextualized in Indian society. The artist is confident of depicting God’s son as one of God’s people of the oppressed. Raj’s image of Christ’s encounter with the woman at the well evokes strong characters of God’s loving kindness towards the marginalized. The space in-between two worlds of Christianity and Indian context provides us with an invaluable source of theological imagination; in our case, Christ encounters the oppressed in the continent where God is with us in every culture and human experience. We are reminded that the gospel can only be faithful to the past if it is in touch with the present context. 3. He Qi’s Christ before Pilate The fusion of Christian and Chinese symbols took place earlier than we can imagine. The historical development of the indigenization of Chinese Christian art can be identified as three stages. The first stage began with the Nestorian (or East-Syriac) Christianity disseminated to the Tang dynasty of China in the sixth and seventh centuries to the shortlived Franciscan missions during the Yuan-dynasty (1279-1368).21 The tablet of the Memorial of the Propagation in China of the Luminous Religion from Ta Ch’in (大秦景教流行中國碑 ) in Hsi-an, China is the most prominent and earliest material evidence of Christian presence.22 This Nestorian tablet clearly shows the Christian sign of the cross surrounded by Chinese symbols. We can see that on the top of the tablet, a Syrian cross interspersed with circle patterns and fire is standing on a lotus blossom surrounded with Chinese patterns of clouds and lotus. The second stage of the Christian evangelization to China started when 21

Cf. Küster, Christian Art in Asia, 30-31; id., Art: Catholic Art, Global Considerations II.: China, Korea, and Japan, in: New Catholic Encyclopedia Supplement 2011, Vol. 1, 143-148; id., Translating Religious Symbol Systems. Some Preliminary Remarks on Christian Art in China, in: Translating Religion. What is Lost and Gained? Michael P. DeJonge und Christiane Tietz (eds.), New York and London 2015, 137-168. 22 The Nestorian Tablet is a Tang Chinese stele erected in 781. The main text of the tablet described the history of the Syrian missionary Alopen who brought Nestorian Christianity from Persia to Hsi-an in 635, and the emperor Tang Tai-Tsung sent high officials to welcome him with honor. This tablet documents 150 years of early Christianity in Tang China. Cf. Xile Su, Christian Arts in China, Beijing 2011, 18.

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the Jesuits re-started Catholic missions to China two hundred years later from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. During this period of Western expansion, Jesuit missionaries played significant roles in the cultivation of art, due to their more open attitudes toward other cultures and religions. The third stage of Chinese Christian art was the awakening of the Protestant and Catholic missionary movements from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries. Since this period, Christian images painted in a Chinese manner have continuously been used for promulgation.23 In the early twentieth-century, an intriguing example of Christian appropriation attracts scholars’ attention. The Christian Church, especially the Catholic community, preferred a European style of images for devotional expression. Integrating local styles and techniques in religious painting for liturgical purposes has become central to cultural accommodation. Mary Lawton notes that an increased sense of nationalism motivates the development of the new center of Christian art. China’s exposure to foreign ideas strengthens Chinese Christian artists’ refusal to lose association with Chinese tradition.24 In Beijing, a fine arts department has been established in Fu-jen University, within which a traditional Chinese style of Christian art was established.25 A notable example of this period can be found in Luke Hua’s The Visit of the Magi. The painting shows three magi in Chinese clothing visiting a Chinese pavilion representing Chinese intellectuals to reverence the baby Jesus. Luke Hua painted this work in classical Chinese technique at the fine arts department of Sacred Heart Church, Kuang-an-men, a studio attached to Fu-jen University.26 Meanwhile, on the Protestant side, an art society called St. Luke’s Studio came into existence at Nanjing in 1926. Artists of this studio produced a number of Christmas cards in Chinese versions, including the adoration of the magi and different stages of the life of Jesus. Christian art here functions as the visual translation of biblical narrative. However, there was an emphasis of the word over the image. The early 23

Cf. Küster, Christian Art in Asia, 31. Mary Lawton, A Unique Style in China. Chinese Christian Painting in Beijing, in: Monumenta Serica Vol. 43, 1995, 470. 25 This movement of developing Chinese Christian art was mainly promoted by the Western missionary society. A former free-lance artist and art critic, Celso Constantini (1922-1933), titular Archbishop of Theodosia and Apostolic Delegate, played a significant role in ensuring this university would be a success. Cf. Jeremy Clarke, The Virgin Mary and Catholic Identity in Chinese History, Hong Kong 2013, 12. 26 Op. cit., 171.

24 Cf.

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efforts of this type of indigenization of Christian imagery in China were short-lived. The appropriation of Christian art continues to take place in China from the post-World War II period until the present. The artwork of He Qi, a Chinese-born artist, represents the contemporary development of Chinese Christian art.27 Before moving to the United States in 2004, He Qi was an art professor at the Theological Seminary of Nanjing. Growing up during the cultural revolution, he first discovered the power of Christian art in a Raphael’s Madona and Child picture. 28 The artist started to experiment with the folk art of paper cutting and his efforts were encouraged by Bishop K.H. Ting. He Qi’s artwork is a blend between woodcut and paintings with bright colors, embellished shapes and thick strokes. The various biblical narratives about human life and sufferings are He Qi’s favorite subjects matters.29 In Christ before Pilate (Fig. 7 & color plate), He Qi depicts with brilliant colors a biblical scene of interrogation, in which Christ is presented in front of Pilate before the crucifixion. The expressive yellows, reds, blues, and blacks of his work narrate the biblical event with dramatic tension. All of the biblical figures, including Christ, Pilate, and soldiers, wear theatrical costumes from the Beijing opera, demonstrating the artist’s familiarity with Chinese dramatic art and literature. Jesus’ hands depicted as constrained by a wooden block connect with the square patterns at his side, forming a cross-like composition in the center. It is noteworthy that Pilate looks like the good judge Bao (包), a famous judge in Chinese folk literature of the Sung dynasty.30 The left upper corner of the background marked with the black Chinese character su (肅) refers to solemnity. In addition, He Qi has added a female character as a foil that is often ignored in the traditional Christian iconography of interrogation. In Chinese folk tales, good judge Bao always acts and speaks boldly for the ordinary or marginalized people. Christ is reimagined in the artist’s mind as a man who will be saved by judge Bao and will not die by the hand of evil.

27 Born

in Nanjing in 1950, He Qi has now become one of the best known Christian artists in contemporary China. Cf. Küster, Christian Art in Asia, 35. 28 Susan Wunderink, From Mao to Moses, in: Christianity Today, April 25, 2008. 29 Cf. Löwner, Christian Art and Architecture in Asia, 468. 30 Cf. Morgan, The Sacred Gaze, 167.

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Fig. 7, He Qi, Christ before Pilate, 1998, Paint on paper, in David Morgan, The Sacred Gaze. Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice, Berkeley, CA 2005, 167.

Jesus’ last stage of life, indeed, is a relatively rare subject matter in Chinese Christian art. Lawton has argued that the absence of crucifixion scenes is due to the Chinese tendency to avoid the depiction of physical suffering in art. “The nudity of the image of semi-clad Christ suspended upon the cross would have offended the traditional sense of decorum and contravened the degree of respect felt to be due to Him.”31 This is because of the Chinese cultural sensibilities and influence that the most frequently repeated themes are not those prevalent in the West. The omission of the depiction of crucifixion in Chinese Christian art reflects its incompatibility with Chinese social values and echoes people’s concerns of decorum. It also manifests the preferred aesthetic perception of the Chinese audience. Christian images selected by local catechists must to be most suitable to their audiences’ need. Subsequently, the most popularly circulated images used for the instruction of Christian doctrine, including the childhood of Jesus, the life of the Virgin, or the parables of Jesus, become the popular subject matters for Chinese Christian art. Another example of a subject omitted is the depiction of the Prodigal son. The reason for very few depictions of this theme in Chinese Christian art is that the father ran to meet the son would never 31

Lawton, A Unique Style in China, 475.

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occur in the patriarchal society of China. These concerns of decorum affect Chinese people’s understanding of an ideal form of Christian art. Regardless of its relatively rare appearance in Chinese contexts, He Qi’s depiction of Christ’s passion shows a new invention, by utilizing the knowledge system offered by the other culture and religions. As David Morgan’s comments on this work, “Indigenous productions may introduce new motifs into the global circulation of imagery and visual practice, even returning to the missionizing culture and adding to or modifying it.”32 In Chinese Confucianism, goodness will always overcome evil. In this respect, if Jesus is a sheng-jen (聖人) as a perfect man with perfect morality in Chinese terms, he will never die on the cross as a criminal. He Qi’s Christ before Pilate provokes an alternative perspective to understand Christ’s passion in the context of Confucianism. In Confucian thought, the idea of T’ien (heaven) or T’ien-chu (God/Lord) is in contrast to the notion of God as an absolute otherness in the West. Moreover, Christianity’s status as a foreign religion is deeply entrenched in Chinese people’s minds. He Qi’s art may explain why the development of Chinese Christian painting since the modern period is tied together with a traditional Chinese pictorial vocabulary. It helps weaken the impression that Christian art in Western form is unsuited to China. He Qi follows the fashion of integrating Chinese cultural elements in the Chinese Christian art of the early twentieth century. Similar to Luke Hua’s depiction of the three magi as Chinese intellectuals. He Qi depicts three elders in Chinese dramatic outfits, representing the accepted authority of Chinese culture in his Adoration of the Magi. The work is the artist’s attempt to represent spaces of mediation between Western Christianity and Chinese civilization. Returning to Christ before Pilate, the brutal scene does not appear in He Qi’s Chinese version of interrogation. The image ironically reflects the idea of he (和) as unified harmony shown in Chinese dramatic art, which challenges traditional Christian understanding of the crucifixion. Such ambiguity is disclosed as the artist appropriates this scene of interrogation in an ancient Chinese court, depicting different dramatic persona endowed with Chinese moralities and strong stage effects. He Qi incorporates the elements from the theatrical convention of a play into his visual rendering of a biblical narrative. The biblical figures allude to the theatrical characters as the artist uses symbol of facial make-up in Chinese Beijing Opera to emphasize their personality. For instance, Jesus as sheng (生) refers to the male protagonist. Pilate as 32

Morgan, The Sacred Gaze, 166.

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ching (淨) refers to a painted-face role, known as hua-lien (花臉), and two soldiers as chou refers to hsiao hua-lien (小花臉). With their elaborate, colorful costumes and facial makeup, the performers of these characters are the only focal points of the work. The biblical scene of interrogation reflects not only He Qi’s audience’s resistance to a suffering, foreign Lord, but also a Chinese contextualized understanding of the multiplicity of reality. The artist does not use traditional motif to authorize a correct interpretation of Christ’s interrogation. Instead, He Qi shows to his viewers how a Christian-oriented image can interact differently within a new cultural context. It is difficult for people with a Confucian mindset to accept the Christian teaching of Christ as a perfect God who dies on the cross. Thereby, the artist’s work depicts a Chinese viewer’s yearning for a happy ending to the story in the tradition of Chinese dramatic art. By so doing, He Qi conflates the biblical subject with Chinese literary elements representing a form of Christian art that is based on Chinese thoughts and cosmology in a Confucian religious context. He Qi’s works thus allow the viewer to explore the epistemological characteristics of Chinese cosmology. A strong and realistic cultural identity is necessary for building a contextual theology that speaks to a context in its particularity. We can be aware that a Chinese understanding of Christ’s image as crucified needs to be balanced with other images of Christ, or with an image of the risen Christ who has successfully faced the terrors of evil and injustice. In sum, an on-going process of interaction between cultures creates the space of mediation that generates theological points for faith reflection. Chinese Christian art contributes to a reformulation of traditional Western faith paradigms and Asian aesthetics. The Asian images of Christ discussed above have led us to discern the elements of Asian aesthetics within a religious framework based on the pluralistic context of Asian Christianity. The imprint of the Buddhist concept of beauty, the divine image in Indian environment, and the integration of folk narrative all contribute to the fruitful production of Asian Christian art. The ongoing history of Christian art requires the addition of the image of Christ in Asia to the history of Christian iconography. Embedded within a holistic worldview derived from Eastern thought and folk religions, Asian image of Christ challenges the modern Western characterization of Christian aesthetics, where the world of feeling is opposed to the world of reason. In the critique of modern reason, aesthetic experience conveys the ambiguity of feeling better than logical reason does. Logic and reason live in the world of abstract and

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universal concepts, yet the world of reality is concrete and ambiguous.33 Rather than directly entering the territory of religious debate, depicting Christ as Asian helps gain insights into its plausible religious aesthetics and create space for arriving at an understanding of different cultures and religions. We have seen that there are specific visual strategies used by the artists to incorporate cultural elements into contextualized expressions of Christian-oriented images; yet, they are not exclusive but mutually informed. Watanabe depicts Christ in a folk art medium, hinting at the complex vision of a nation steeped in Buddhist aesthetics; Solomon Raj illustrates Christ in an Indian context and speaks for the oppressed who suffer from social injustice; He Qi’s Confucian-based art reconsiders the teaching of Chris’s passion, by drawing from the ideas from Chinese literature and Beijing opera. Asian Christian artists appropriate traditional Christian iconography into their cultural and religious environments, formulating an appropriate and effective form of faith expression that is suitable to and meaningful for their contexts. In their works, the interdependence of Eastern art, symbols, and religion in human experiences disclose what is true, good, and holy in God’s creation. Images of Christ in Asia overcome the gap that exists between religious traditions, leading us to see the pluralism of Christian aesthetics.34 The many examples discussed in this chapter make it clear that the faces of inculturated art are varied in order to speak sufficiently to the particular context. We have seen how each artist creatively incorporates his cultural heritage in depicting biblical motives, negotiating the cultural boundaries in the inculturation process. Christ’s image interlaces Asian cultural and theological imagination mediating revelation and conversion, and serving as the hermeneutical connection between art and social transformation. Asian Christ amalgamating different religious cultures demonstrate not only an inculturated art in the non-biblical world but also an intercultural understanding of the life of Christ 33

Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877-1947), a pioneering historian and philosopher of Indian art, was the first to bring the Western aesthetic tradition into dialogue with Vedic, Buddhist, and Confucian thought. Cf. Karl Müller, et al. (eds.), Dictionary of Mission. Theology, History, Perspectives, Oregon 2006, 18; Frank Burch Brown discusses the meanings of the words such as aesthetic, artistic, and religious, and asks a significant question about the nature of aesthetics: How can Christian aesthetics be formulated so that a plausible Christian aesthetics is possible? Cf. Frank Burch Brown, Religious Aesthetics. The Theological Study of Making and Meaning, Princeton, NJ 1989, 14. 34 Cf. Stephen Happel, Review of Religious Aesthetics. The Theological Study of Making and Meaning by Frank Burch Brown, in: Journal of the American Academy of Religion 61, 1993, 587-589, 587.

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in light of Eastern wisdom and religions. In creative ways, artists of the world reacted to the challenge of the genius inculturation deriving from a rich range of cultures and religions.

Chapter Four Symbol and Myth My world, my songs Rooted in a land blessed by spiritual eyes Passing on your gentle and resolute songs of eco-justice and peace Etan Pavavalung, Rooted in This Land

Despite that the image of Christ is a common subject matter of Asian Christian art, Christian theme in contemporary art is considered marginal. Emerging from the Pacific Ocean cultures and folk religions, Christian art in contemporary Taiwan has diverse themes, ranging widely from biblical imagery to non-Christian motif, providing us with invaluable resources to explore an alternative type of Christian iconography. The development of Taiwanese Christian art could be seen as paralleled with the Asian Renaissance movements in terms of its general concerns of privileging the people’s selfhood and history in many East Asian countries of the twentieth century. We will see that the various connections of local symbols and elements either enhance or subvert the taste and sensibilities of traditional Christian art forms. Since the visual sources manifest the diversity of Asian cultures and traditions, these works of art have much to tell us about Asian Christianity. Created between Christian faith and the pluralistic context of East Asia, Taiwanese Christian art deeply shapes not only the Asian artists’ religious sensibilities but also our awareness of margin and center relationships.1 The convergence of symbols in the artwork is a hermeneutic key 1

The religious/theological engagement of contemporary art in Asia echoes the trend of consideration of the margins and center in the scholarship of American art history. Understandings of certain sorts of religious images as the margins and their renegotiation with respect to the center, such as Puritan aesthetic aesthetics, have brought into focus of the scholarly debate. Cf.

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capable of opening the door for the conversation between Taiwanese history and Christianity. In this chapter, I will examine the paintings of two contemporary Taiwanese artists Etan Pavavalung (依誕・巴瓦瓦隆) and Cheng ChienChang (鄭建昌), and see how these two artists reinterpret their Asian Christian identities by receiving local symbols and myths within their living circumstances. The culturally contextualized representation of Christian faith enhances an understanding of the diversity of Taiwanese Christian art; meanwhile, Taiwanese life experiences revealed in the arts enrich the gospel itself as well. 1. Missiological Background A historical overview of Christian mission in Taiwan helps to understand the issues of self-recovery and liberating experience raised in Taiwanese Christian art. The first wave of Christian mission started in the early1620s when Dutch Reformed missionaries accompanied the Dutch East India Company to southern Taiwan. Beginning in 1626, Spanish Catholic missionaries entered the port of Kee-lung from Manila, Philippines to establish missions in north Taiwan. However, Christian missions disappeared within half a century after the Dutch regime was defeated by Koxinga (Cheng Ch’eng-kung 鄭成功, 1624-1662), a famous general from the Late-Ming dynasty. Started in the late 1860s, the second wave of Christian mission concerns people’s identity. Dominican priests Fernando Sainz and Angel Bufurall landed at Kao-hsiung in the southern part of Taiwan and established The Holy Rosary Cathedral in Chien-chin. On the Protestant side, James Laidlaw Maxwell from England and George Leslie Mackay from Canada were Presbyterian missionary pioneers to Taiwan. The third wave of mission began after the Second World War.2 Over the last four centuries, Taiwan has been occupied and ruled by the Dutch, the Spanish, the Manchurian Ching Empire, the Japanese, and finally the Chinese Nationalist regime. The colonial context, without doubt, is crucial for addressing the self-image of Taiwanese people, their art, and culture. Regarding the space for evangelization, Taiwanese church historian Cheng Yang-un raises four specific missiological concerns emerging from the interaction between the gospel and Taiwan’s historical/cultural Sally M. Promey, The Return of Religion in the Scholarship of American Art, in: The Art Bulletin 85, 2003, 581-603, 591. 2 Cf. 鄭仰恩 Yang-un Cheng, 定根本土的台灣基督教 Ting Ken Pen Tu Te Tai Wan Chi Tu Chiao (Contextualization of Christianity in Taiwan), Tainan 2005, 329-331.

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contexts: 1) indigenization and contextualization, the question of gospel and culture; 2) ethnic relations and national identity, the question of faith and ideology; 3) the impact of globalization, economic justice, and sustainable spirituality; 4) identification and co-suffering with the people.3 In this respect, finding the solution for the problem of contextualization becomes the artists’ main task of speaking out the voice of their unique contexts in a multicultural society. For the purpose of engaging Taiwanese Christian art and visual culture, we shall have to refer briefly to some of the accounts of its contextual theology. 4 The missiological connection to the cultural, religious, social, and political environment indeed plays a large part for a better understanding of Christian art from a Taiwanese perspective, specifically, focusing on the issues of identity and acceptance in relation to the living reality of Taiwanese cultures and history. Like many other Asian countries, the development of Christianity in Taiwan after the Second World War is accompanied by contextual theology and the mission movement. In the wake of Vatican II (1962-1965), the appreciation for liturgy in the vernacular form in the local church resulted in the inculturation model that is widely used in Roman Catholic circles.5 The rise of contextual theology faces the task of proclaiming the gospel as a transcultural message of salvation that is relevant not only in cultures molded by living world religions but also in countries influenced by modern civilization. On the Protestant side, Taiwanese theologian Shoki Coe (Huang Chang-Hui 黃彰輝, 1914-1988) contributed to the development of understanding theology in context. He was the first Asian who advocated the contextualization model to replace the indigenization model. For Coe, the term indigenization is past-oriented. Asian culture vividly lives in the context of now and future, and has its various cultural expressions. The term contextualization is indeed coined by Coe to advocate

3 Op.

cit., 334-349. theology” is considered broadly as a dialogue with local, particular cultures and with women and men in various social locations. It also includes dialogue with other Christians in mission and with people of other religions. Cf. Bevans and Schroeder, Prophetic Dialogue, 62. The trend of contextualization in Asia sets the stage for the development of bringing theology into contextual perspective. Cf. Jonah Chang, Shoki Coe. An Ecumenical Life in Context, Geneva 2012, viii. Contextual theology in Asia therefore challenges traditional thinking about Christian art by providing a richer frame for understanding the indigenous influences upon Asian Christian art and iconography. Cf. Foley, Art, 36. 5 Cf. Küster, The Christian Story, 38. 4 “Contextual

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for a new idea of indigenization.6 Coe and his colleagues of the Theological Education Fund (TEF) of the World Council of Churches (WCC) introduced a new concept of doing contextual theology in the early 1970s, inviting the churches in Taiwan and South East Asia to reflect on theological education and mission in their own contexts. Meanwhile, in the 1970s, another trend of theology called Homeland Theology emerged during the time of the Debate on Homeland Literatures in Taiwan society.7 Taiwanese theologian Wang Hsien-chih (王憲治, 1941-1996) proposed the theological issue of homeland when the political status of Taiwan became ambiguous. In 1971, the permanent seat of Taiwan, officially known as the Republic of China, was replaced by the People Republic of China at the United Nations; Taiwan suffered further isolation as its allies the United States formally recognized the One-China policy advanced by Mainland China in 1979. To respond to this political crisis, the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan (PCT) issued A Declaration on Human Rights upholding the universal principle of self-determination, advocating that Taiwanese people have the right to seek for an independent political status.8 Christ’s incarnation as the contextualization of God’s message of liberation can be the source of identity for Asian Christian churches and people, which speaks a prophetic voice affecting social transformation. According to Chen Nan-jou (陳南州), the contextual theology raised by the PCT includes three aspects: 1) identifying with the living reality of Taiwanese people, 2) discerning the theological meaning of Taiwanese history and cultures, and 3) participating in the building of koinonia to transform society and reshape the human spirit.9 The development of Taiwanese contextual theology accompanied the following political movements.10 The democratic movement since the 1970s had been developed in the society of Taiwan. The Church’s concern for the people’s 6 Cf.

Nan-jou Chen 陳南州 (ed.), Introduction to A Testament to Taiwan Homeland Theology. The Essential Writings of Wang-Hsien Chih 台灣鄉土神學-王憲治牧師文集, Taipei 2011, ix; The biography of Shoki Coe was written by Jonah Chang, Shoki Coe. An Ecumenical Life in Context, Geneva 2012. 7 Ibid. 8 Op. cit., 2. 9 Cf. Nan-jou Chen, Contextualization of Catholicity. A Taiwanese Theology of Identification, in: Asia Journal of Theology 9, 1995, 341-363, 349. 10 The relationship between contextual theology and the political situation is described by Shoki Coe: “Those who identified Taiwan, not China, as their homeland were severely censured and persecuted by the Nationalist (Kuomintang or KMT) totalitarian regime.” Coe proposed that the Taiwanese Christians have to focus on the contextual issues, namely the issue of “Homeland.” “Homeland” was taken as a theological issue in 1970s and accompanied with the debate

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well-being has been deeply connected to the restoration of Taiwanese people’s identity and dignity.11 In 1987, the martial law that had lasted for the past 38 years in Taiwan was finally lifted. “The government of Taiwan has been transformed from an alienated totalitarian model to a more indigenized and democratized one.”12 The political turmoil and the budding democratic movement stimulated artists’ creativity and concern for social justice, especially for the different ethnic groups of Taiwanese people. In this critical historical movement of political liberation with the awakening consciousness of cultural subjectivity, Taiwanese Christian artists started to pay attention to the ethnic identity that has unfortunately long remained a cause of political turmoil in Taiwanese history. In terms of the demographics of Taiwan. The small island is composed of four major ethnic groups: (1.) Taiwanese people (70%), the descendants of settlers from southeast China arriving in Taiwan in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, (2.) Hakka people (15%) who speak Hakka language and are linked to the provincial areas of Kuang-tung, China, (3.) Han Chinese (13%) who came to Taiwan from China with the Chinese National Party, Kuomintang (KMT), and (4.) Taiwanese indigenous people, people who are Taiwan’s original inhabitants (ca. 2%). In this regard, some indigenous tribes as minority groups in the society are still actively trying to re-appropriate their official names and identity.13 Thereby, Christian artists are empowered by using local materials from the living environment to reflect and reinterpret Taiwanese culture and history.14 A Christian understanding of a longing for one’s on homeland literatures in Taiwanese society. Cf. Chen, A Testament to Taiwan Homeland Theology, x. 11 Cf. Cheng, Contextualization of Christianity in Taiwan, 329-331. 12 Op. cit., 328. 13 Different indigenous tribes in Taiwan include Atayal, Paiwan, Lukai, Puyama, Yami, Saisiya, Toyoko, and Amis. The challenge for Taiwanese indigenes is seeking indigenous dignity, social justice, human rights, peace, self-autonomy, cultural rights, and returning to the land ownership. Cf. Walis Ukan, Development of Indigenous Theology in Taiwan. Biblical Perspective, in: Doing Indigenous Theology in Asia. Towards New Frontiers, Hrangthan Chhungi et al. (eds.), Nagpur 2012, 7. 14 In reference to this human experience and praxis, Asian Christian art, with its mystical, aesthetic experience, has, in many ways, anticipated the development of contextual theology. In La Cosecha, Eduardo Fernández advocates for a rediscovery of the methodological relevance which symbol and myth play in developing contextual theologies. Our worldview and mentality affect how we formulate analogy, symbol, and myth. Fernández suggests that Catholic theologian David Tracey’s analogical imagination is a way of understanding how theology influences content. Tracey draws on spiritual traditions and aesthetics to construct his use of analogical imagination in theology, offering a Catholic vision of reality as the frame of reference. The idea

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eternal dwelling reveals the artist’s yearning for one’s cultural origin. The discernment of the tension between the dominant culture and the subversive dimension of Homeland theology facilitates a deeper understanding of the political vision as well as the creative ambiguity of Taiwanese Christian art. How can different ethnic groups in Taiwan live peacefully in the same land? It is to be hoped that the different groups preserve the varieties of their traditional cultures and languages and make positive use of them as sources for contemporary cultural expressions. The question related to the social context and historical injuries should be well aware while understanding why the local symbols and Taiwanese geographic setting are important to the artworks discussed in the following. We will thus reflect upon two Taiwanese motifs which are capable of creating connection between Asian culture and biblical tradition. By reinterpreting symbol and myth taken from the local culture and tradition, contemporary Taiwanese Christin art is gradually developed. 2. Etan Pavavalung’s Verdant Cross Etan Pavavalung depicts the symbol of lily emerging from the aboriginal legends in his woodcut paintings. Worth noticing is that the prominent use of the symbol of lily carries a social and political dimension. Born in Tavaran, Ping-tung (屏東) as a small mountain village located in the southern part of Taiwan, Etan grew up in an aboriginal (Paiwan 排灣 ) family surrounded by a beautiful, quiet environment. Etan’s family has historically been creative and many members have artistic talents. Inherited from the artist’s mother’s side, the name of Etan means the brave in Paiwan language. Etan worked with his parents in the fields, where picking vegetables and wild lilies had become one of his most memorable experiences. The artist thus knows well the value of a simple life from his experience of growing up in nature. In addition to the life experiences in the mountain village, Etan’s theological education helped nurture his religious and spiritual art. The training instilled in the artist the desire to reflect upon the meaning of life as well as the issue of self-determination for his aboriginal society. A brief overview of the Taiwanese indigenous people's encounter with Christianity helps situate Etan's artworks in a larger context. In 1895 when the Ching dynasty ceded the island to Japan under the Treaty is helpful for discerning the role of Asian peoples’ lived experience and worldviews manifested in these cultural products. Cf. Eduardo C. Fernández, La Cosecha. Harvesting Contemporary United Stated Hispanic Theology (1972-1998), Collegeville, PA 2000, 114.

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of Shimonoseki, the plain aborigines (ping-pu-fan) were the first tribe to accept Christianity. However, the mountainous indigenes were forced to give up their tribal religions by the Japanese government. Taiwanese indigenous lived with their Han neighbors in a society that continued to acknowledge the superiority of Han Chinese culture until now. This is because the Taiwanese society still considers the Han to be the carriers of civilization and looks down on the indigenous.15 Since then Taiwanese indigenous people have been struggling to preserve their own culture and religion, fighting for dignity living under the dominant culture of the society. During the 1980s and 90s, while the Taiwanese society experienced rapid change under the democracy movement, Etan at that time worked as a graphic designer in several church organizations, and used art and literature to raise voice for the movement from a perspective of Christian faith. In the Wild Lily Student Movement, protesters wore white lilies and created giant replicas of the flower as a symbol of democracy. Protestors and college students at the same time set up a large outdoor installation of lilies in front of the square of Chiang-Kai-Shek Memorial Hall in Taipei. The giant lily symbol thus had a profound effect as it represented the protestors’ voice for democracy. Gradually, lily imagery entered the artist’s canvas under these social circumstances. In some of the artist’s woodcut posters and flyers, Etan used lily imagery to promote the democracy movement as well as aboriginal rights and dignity. The symbol of the lily marked the unutterable sign of renewal for people’s freedom and hope. Etan’s art then took a new turn after the artist got involved with the movement to advocate aboriginal people’s self-determination. Continuous social concerns turned out to be the impetus for Etan to further develop his lily symbolism shown in the series of works entitled Sweet Fragrant Mountain Winds, which was displayed at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in 2014.16 In 2009, the disastrous Typhoon Morakot brought great destruction to Etan's neighbors, who were forced to relocate their homes at the foot of the mountains. The massive natural disaster was a turning point for Etan to create this series of woodcut works in order to search for a place of inner peace. In Etan’s words, “None of us could change the fact that a disaster had hit, yet we could bravely 15 Cf.

Daniel Bays (ed.), Christianity in China. From the Eighteenth Century to the Present, Stanford, CA 1996, 132. 16 Cf. Etan Pavavalung, Shan Shang Te Feng Hen Hsiang. Yu Chien I Tan Te Wen Ch’i K’o Hua (Sweet Fragrant Mountain Winds. Meet Etan’s Depictions through Markings and Patterns) 依誕 巴瓦瓦隆, 山上的風很香 – 遇見依誕的紋砌刻畫, Taipei 2014, 6-9.

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reflect on the event and create opportunities for resurrection.”17 Etan appropriated lily imagery and intended to create a dialogue between ancestral wisdom and eco-theology. This series of works based on the artist’s reaction to the degradation of the environment examine the issue of people’s relationship to the nature coming from his personal life experience. In Rooted in This Land (Fig. 8 & color plate), Etan draws a red, organic, figure-like cross against a dark green background, which is joined with three wooden panels in a triptych form. Three giant black lilies are depicted on top of it. On the cross’s arms, inside the two lilies are the two big eyes, one on each side, and three more small ones are located in the green background. The emblems of eyes represent the ability to observe the divine or the unseen world in an aboriginal worldview. Etan incorporates into his work the symbol of the spiritual eye coming from the conventional imagery of Paiwan culture. Given their multi-referential ranges of meanings, Etan depicts the narrative of the work using these conventional symbols that allow the artist to master his native language in a visual form. For the purpose to respond to the villagers’ tragedy of losing their homelands, Etan developed a new art form, vecik, between painting and woodcut work.18 Derived from the aboriginal cultures, this new technique, vecik (Wen Ch’i K’o Hua 紋砌刻畫; trace, layer, carve, and paint) provides means for the artist to honor the ancient wisdom of the Mother Earth and to gain insights and strengths from it. The descriptive phrase, trace, layer, carve, and paint coined by Etan, is derived from the Paiwan’s ancient writing and drawing system of text and image, giving forms to the artist to reflect on the subjectivity of his aboriginal heritage. The unique forms and techniques of vecik based on material aspects of the artist’s culture helps to reinterpret Etan’s aboriginal Christian faith.19 The depiction of the lily through aboriginal techniques reveals both the artist’s Christian and tribal contexts, continually bringing inner 17 Ibid. 18 Op.

cit., 9. In the Paiwan dialect. Paiwan aborigines called images, patterns, lines, and texts vecik, and the verb for these actions is venecik. Vecik refers to all the visual elements in nature, cloth, houses, and tools, such as, lines, patterns, and images. For example, women venecik, which refers to embroidering cloth and head ornaments, and men venecik, which refers to carving wooden tools and stone blocks. The carved patterns on the wood, the woven patterns on textiles, the written or drawing lines and images, or any piled structures formed by wood or stone can be the locus of meaning. Cf. Pavavalung, Lingering in My Dreams, in: Sweet Fragrant Mountain Winds. Meet Etan’s Depictions through Markings and Patterns, 9. 19

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peace to the restoration of the village. The tactile qualities conveyed together by paint and woodcut strokes fully embody the artist’s cultural memory, as we see on Etan’s wooden boards of three dimensional effect in the techniques of vecik.

Fig. 8, Etan Pavavalung, Rooted in This Land (釘根), 2014, trace, woodprint, print pigment, acrylic paint, 150 x 200 cm (triptych). Courtesy of the artist.

It is our attempt to further examine the artist’s cultural identity by studying vecik between Chinese calligraphy and aboriginal patterns. On the one hand, vecik can be regarded as Ts’un Fa (皴法), a brush technique in Chinese ink painting popular among the literary circles resulting from the different applications of the paint brushes. On the other hand, vecik is derived from the indigenous epistemological systems refering to all the conventional lines and patterns, as we see in other aboriginal groups in different parts of the world. Etan believes that the word vecik represents the act of writing serving as a spiritual emblem, as the Paiwan community interacts with images in nature in order to dialogue with their belief. In reading the artist’s work, a formal analysis based on the comparisons with European works and historical model to some extent is not

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my intention. Instead, studying the use of aboriginal technique becomes a way to rediscover the originality of Etan’s work.20 Being a Christian in an Asian society often means to carry the expectation of keeping away from other folk religions, including the aboriginal religions, because they are perceived as idolatrous. Yet, these diverse manifestations of Aboriginal culture have much to teach us about a creative world view of Christianity. In this regard, the heritage of traditional aboriginal culture and religion such as myth, oral stories, proverbs, songs, wisdom traditions, rites, and rituals are all in need of reinterpretation. In our case, the oral and visual sources emerge from Etan’s indigenous language, allowing the artist to fully express his understanding of the sacred existence in ordinary life. In other words, every action in the mundane world opens new ways for the artist to experience God’s beauty and grace. A close examination shows that a vertical line of small tiny yellow dots connects with three giant lilies at the top of the cross, which ends in an organic shape of seeds and roots at the bottom of the cross. Significantly, one oval seed hinds the shape of the island of Taiwan, as a sweet potato surrounded by several concentric circles, oriented in a south-to-north direction (Fig. 9). Thousands of woodcut strokes with organically curved lines are richly textured. Several small, white, and yellow dots, symbols of eyes on the lily’s stem, and leaf-like patterns in the green background all highlight the work with their bright tones. Frequently shown through the entire series is the lily of spiritual eyes personified as an agent of humanity and divinity that carries multiple meanings. In Taiwanese aboriginal culture, the lily among the other signs and symbols signifies dignity and purity in the community. For example, the lily appears frequently on the building’s stone wall, representing the sign of royalty; A headdress made of lilies demarcates chastity of the bride in the wedding ceremony. The lily symbol gives the artist’s work a space for expressing cultural memory. The symbol of lily in Etan’s woodcut strokes reveals not only Christian signs of resurrection but also the ancient spirit of the village. The series of Sweet Fragrant Mountain Winds, in the artist’s words, “creates a way of religious reflection, expressing that we must dance in harmony with the created world, and realize once again the 20

Christian theme in New Spain painting is another example of examining the original iconography by the means of techniques. Cf. Clara Bargellini, Originality and Invention in the Painting of New Spain, in: Painting a New World. Mexican Art and Life 1521-1821, Donna Pieterse et al. (eds.), Denver, CO 2004, 79-91, 81.

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sacred revelation and truth of the blowing winds.”21 Lily imagery turns out to be a sign of renewal, providing for Etan a thoughtful reflection on the environmental issues relating to human sustainability with theological implications.

Fig. 9, Detail of Rooted in This Land, 2014.

In Hopeful Sign 盼望的記號 (Fig. 10 & color plate), Etan draws a giant green lily as a cross shape, adding some other conventional symbols to deepen the spiritual meaning. Rendered either in the abstract or figurative form, the artwork occupied by different natural elements, including snails, the sun, plants, or animals speak to the artist’s aboriginal context. Against a yellow background, several pots surrounded with the designed circles represent the ancestor’s spirits, pointing to the ability of communicating with the spiritual world. To accomplish this, the artist uses lily and other aboriginal elements drawn from the traditional pattern system. Developed from the Paiwan interpretation of natural phenomena, both figurative and line-based symbols are conventional ways of expressing nature. The use of an aboriginal idiom relies on a rich visual lexicon and vocabulary which may be used in a multitude of combinations and contexts. Like poetry with all its inherent complexities, this unique visual form multiplies references and intended ambiguities, such as symbols or icons within a work which may encapsulate a variety of meanings. Etan asserts his aboriginal identity and responsibility as his work incorporates ancestrally inherited symbols and patterns.

21

Pavavalung, Lingering in My Dreams, 9.

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Fig. 10, Etan Pavavalung, Hopeful Sign (盼望的記號), 2013, woodprint, print pigment, acrylic paint, 90 x 120 cm (triptych). Courtesy of the artist.

Sign of Hope (Fig. 11 & color plate) is not the exception that the meeting of symbols derived from both aboriginal culture and Christianity takes place.22 When both cultures share a similar interpretation of a single image, convergence occurs. In this case, the lily imagery provides the space of mediation between the aboriginal tradition and Christianity. A simple and poetic verdant cross with earthy red outline stands on the semi-circle, emerging from the ivory white background. Many small whirling circles form a ground of earthy colors of yellows, reds, and browns. This simple drawing-like composition easily reminds us of the biblical scene of the humble cross on Calvary hill. 22

Baily uses three phenomena: juxtaposition, convergence, and syncretism to describe the situation of acculturation. Cf. Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 15421773, 28.

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Fig. 11, Etan Pavavalung, Sign of Hope, 2016, woodprint, print pigment, acrylic paint, 120 x 120 cm (triptych). Courtesy of the artist.

In the Western Church art tradition, we find a similar composition of flora at the edge of the cross in a mural painting that depicts Christ’s crucifixion on a verdant cross from All Saint’s Church of Godshill, an Anglican church in Isle of Wright, England. The rare symbol of a lily crucifix is believed to be derived from the medieval faith tradition that the annunciation of Christ and crucifixion occurred on the same day of the year, March 25. Instead of the plain wooden cross, the flora-like cross grows in three directions, representing the sign of renewal where Jesus is crucified. The mural in the All Saint’s Church demonstrates the cross of suffering, accompanied with the lily of resurrection. The imagery of a verdant cross expresses with poetic consciousness the Christian imagination by which the crucifixion atoned for humanity’s fall. Another example of cultural integration exists in cruciform from New Spain. In the sixteenth-century Mesoamerica, the imagery of the sacred tree intertwined with the cross.23 Cruciform is a cosmic symbol shared by both parties of Christianity and Aztec culture. The concept of heaven 23

Sacred trees of life were thought to be links between the celestial and subterranean realms, with the species of plants associated with ancestry and prosperity. Trees were also personified as a Christian cross and were linked to notions of sacrifice and rebirth. Trees, like the stone stele that were erected in the temple courtyards, acted as cosmic centers and were also ladders between the upper and lower worlds. Cf. Jaime Lara, City, Temple, and Stage. Eschatological Architecture and Liturgical Theatrics in New Spain, Notre Dame, IN 2004, 152.

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Tamoanchan in the Aztec world is represented by an anthropomorphic tree in which the composition is similar to the cross. To sum up, by means of the local symbol and technical references to Paiwan and its people, the artist discovers biblical themes and motif alive in his own context. The symbol of lily represents fields of experience within the artist’s culture, meanwhile, the symbol of hope is translated easily into Christian context. Since both Christianity and Taiwanese aboriginal cultures have a similar interpretation of the lily imagery, Etan uses lily to blend both Christian iconography and aboriginal symbol, facilitating the encounter between Christian faith and Taiwanese life experience. It is the artist’s deliberate choice to make Christian theme and motif alive in his aboriginal culture. With its multiple layers of religious, political, and ecological implications, the lily symbol successfully mediates Christianity and Paiwan aboriginal themes. In so doing, Etan’s art opens space for mutual communication and understanding regarding the meaning of hope that has the capacity to speak to the local community. Etan’s verdant cross not only seeks commonalities between distinctive cultures, but also raises theological questions regarding the understanding of cultural difference. 3. Cheng Chien-Chang’s Creation Myth Taken up from creation myth in both Taoist context and Christian tradition, Cheng Chien-Chang translates the image of God into his own cultural context. The work demonstrates the artist’s understanding of God’s relationship to the natural world and to humankind. It is not surprising to see the co-relationship of creation myth between Christianity and local culture since creation myth on the origin of the world can be easily found in almost every culture and religion. Nevertheless, considering the lack of anthropomorphic images of God in the artist’s context of folk religion, the symbolic depiction of an invisible God, as well as the cultural origin of Taiwan, makes fruitful reception to the novel expression of Asian Christian art. Born in 1956 in Chia-yi ( 嘉義 ) in the southern part of Taiwan, Cheng studied art during his college years in Taipei. Taiwanese society in the 1980s was an era brought to awareness by advocating for Taiwanese subjectivity, yet the art world of the academy was still permeated with Western avant-garde art, such as Concept art or installations. The question arose in the artist’s mind: how might both the content and form of art reflect the politics, economics, and culture of the contemporary Taiwanese society? The social and cultural concerns stimulated the

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artist’s ideas to create a new form of art. Cheng soon discovered that his true passion was to use art as a medium of social critique. The artist then made a decision to escape from the center of the art circle in Taipei and moved back to his hometown at the periphery of both Taiwan and the academic world. With this awareness of being a Taiwanese living in a multicultural society, from 1994-1999, Cheng produced a series of paintings that advocated the subjectivity of Taiwanese art and culture. Cheng used visual language to explore the historical experience of being a Taiwanese who is the owner of his or her land. Natural elements of trees, lands, and rivers derived from the reality of ordinary people’s life started to occupy Cheng’s works, as the artist imagined how his ancestors migrated from mainland China to the island Taiwan over the past four hundred years.

Fig. 12, Cheng Chien-Chang, 創世一紀 Chuang Shi I Chi (Genesis 1), 2010, oil on Canvass, 194 x 260 cm. Private Collection, Courtesy of the artist.

The titles of his many exhibitions reflect Cheng’s passion for reconstructing the culture and history of Taiwan, such as, The Chanter of an Epic (Shih Shih Te Yin Chang Che 史詩的吟唱者 , 1994), The Native

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Land of Life (Sheng Ming Te Yuan Hsiang 生命的原鄉, 1996), Island Impression (Tao-Yu Yin-Chi 島嶼印記, 1998), and Taiwanese Classics of Mountains and Seas (Tai Wan Shan-Hai-Ching 台灣山海經, 1999). Cheng incorporated nature elements including mountains, seas, lands, rivers, stones, trees, and clouds into his canvas in order to emphasize the deep connection between Taiwanese people and their living environment. Despite that the landscape of Taiwan is the focus of the work, Cheng depicted Taiwanese peoples as figures with exaggerated bodies, and thick, solid palms and feet, seeking to reflect their common characteristics of integrity, diligence, peace, and passion. From a set of paintings The Great Clod Series (Ta Kuai Hsi Lieh 大 塊系列), a work entitled Genesis 1 (Chuang Shi I Chi 創世一紀) clearly alludes to the Christian creation narrative (Fig. 12 & color plate).24 We see that an active blue giant occupies the pictorial space. Striking a large hole in a white cloud, the giant’s strong arm breaks the chaotic fusion, allowing a column of air (ch’i 氣) to erupt from below. A group of tiny people appear besides the hole surrounded by the cloud. In an intriguing expression, the giant’s chest and hips, arms and knees, shins and back form the rolling hills and valley. Cheng imagines the landscape of Taiwan to be made up of parts of a giant’s body, or, inversely, the giant’s body is made up of Taiwanese landscape. The giant’s body as a divine figure turns out to be an imaginative landscape, showing the artist’s creative interpretation of his homeland. Nevertheless, the title of the series The Great Clod Series complicates the above interpretation. The giant figure of the divine manifested in the correlation of Taoist philosophy and Christianity demands our attentions. It is interesting to note that what the artist tries to do is to translate the transcendence of God into symbolic representation that speaks to his own context of folk religion. The Chinese term Ta Kuai, the Great Clod, is derived from the well-known Taoist text: the Book of Chuang-Tzu (莊子). Great Clod (Ta Kuai) as a Taoist concept refers to an understanding of nature in which heaven and earth are in an on-going relationship of harmony. Tao refers to an inner experience in which the distinction between subject and object vanishes.25 As many Asian religious thinkers, the philosopher Chuang Tzu views the origin of creation 24

Genesis 1 (Chuang Shi I Chi 創世一紀) belongs to a series of Cheng’s works The Great Clod Series (Ta Kuai Hsi Lieh 大塊系列). Cf. Cheng’s art book entitled 山・海・岱員: 鄭建昌創作集 Shan. Hai. Tai-Yuan. Cheng Chien Chang Ch’uang Tso Chi, (Mountain, Sea, Taiwan. Cheng Chien Chang’s Collective Works), Taipei 2015. 25 Cf. Chung-yuan Chang, Creativity and Daoism. A Study of Chinese Philosophy, Art, and Poetry, New York, NY 1963, 19.

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as beyond the duality of being and non-being. The cosmos is thus in an inconceivable unity.26 The Great Clod, here, refers to an ongoing force back and forth between heaven and earth.27 Humankind should follow this principle to live in harmony with nature. In this regard, Cheng’s depiction of a blue giant in Genesis story alludes to the Taoist understanding of nature, in which the boundary between subject and object is blurred. This Christian image of God, nevertheless, is contradicted by a typical Taoist view of the cosmos, in which the universe is defined as a pantheistic, rather than an anthropomorphic concept of God. The Chinese concept of heaven (T’ien) helps to further understand the artist’s Taoist vision of God’s image and the theme of creation. The imagery of God, Heaven (T’ien 天), during the Shang dynasty in China, refers to the Ruler above (Shang-ti 上帝). The symbol of God is an anthropomorphic one. For example, the worship of God in China was originally the extension of ancestor worship, which was itself an extension of interpersonal relationships between humans. Thus, the God in earliest China, before the twelfth century B.C., was an anthropomorphized divine.28 Later in the Chou dynasty, however, the imagery of God, T’ien, or, Heaven, is an illustration of an ideal God and a movement from a personal to an impersonal supreme being who ruled the destinies of humans.29 The image of God as an impersonal being can also be revealed to those who cultivate their virtue: “Cultivate your virtue in order to live up to Heaven. Blessing must be sought by yourself.”30 It is the realm of non-being from which all birth issues forth and to which all death returns. It is all-embracing, far-reaching, never-ceasing, yet is the realm of unknown.31

26

Cf. David Maclagan, Creation Myths. Man’s Introduction to the World, London 1977, 13. well-known story of The Great and Venerable Teacher (大宗師) in section six of the Book of Chuang-Tzu records the conversation between the Master Chuang-Tzu and his student Tsulai (子來). When Tsu-lai asked his teacher about the issues of life and death, Master Chuang replied, “The Great Clod burdens me with form, labors me with life, eases me in old age, and rests me in death. So if I think well of my life, for the same reason I must think well of my death.” Chinese version of this Taoist text: 夫大塊載我以形, 勞我以生, 佚我以老, 息我以死 故善吾 生者, 乃所以善吾死也. Cf. Burton Watson’s English translation in Chuang-Tzu. Basic Writings, New York, NY 1964. 28 Cf. Chang, Creativity and Daoism, New York, NY 1963, 61. 29 Ibid., 61. 30 Chinese master Lao-Tzu (老子) calls Tao the great, or Mother of All Things, meaning that Tao is the primordial unity of every beginning and every end. Cf. Chang, Creativity and Daoism, 62. 31 Op. cit., 35.

27 The

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Ch’i (air), a Taoist term offers another clue to understand Cheng’s image of God as made up of Taiwanese landscape. The school of Chi attempts a materialistic explanation of the universe, but in terms of a primal quality of existence. Ch’i condenses and constitutes itself into the various particularities of the cosmos, including the human himself.32 Humankind must be united with the harmony of the universe of Ch’i. In addition, the concept of heaven as a transcendent God is evident in many traditional Chinese landscape ink paintings in which humankind lives in harmony with the universe. It seems to echo the artist’s depiction of the creator. Here the blue giant strikes a large hole in a white cloud to break the chaotic fusion, in which a column of Ch’i (air) the life energy can be erupted from below. Cheng incorporates the Taoist thoughts into his depiction of the divine image, so that the connection of the theme of God and of creation, particularly, the landscape in Taiwanese setting is clear. In another of Cheng’s work Land, Signification, Attractiveness (Ta Kuai, Yin Chi, Hsi Yin Li 大塊, 印記, 吸引力 (Fig. 13 & color plate), the hills and valleys on the body of a green giant, again, transformed into a strange and surreal landscape, becomes the space in which people, plants, and forests dwelled. The image of Taiwan as a green giant imparts the sense of a dwelling place, thereby, transforming to a more abstract and perhaps, more intimate landscape, reflecting one’s inner being. The landscape imbued with the sacred power of nature forming the giant’s body as well as the land of Taiwanese people. The bodies of a mythical figure in this imaginative landscape links this specific land to the Taiwanese culture and ancient history of the unknown. The giant connects people to the land where they live, expressing the intimate feeling of connectedness in the history of Taiwanese people. Examining Cheng’s Taoist version of the divine in light of the Christian Genesis narrative further deepens its intercultural interpretation. Cheng’s portrayal of a symbolic image of an invisible divinity echoes the traditional Christian iconography. In most of the scenes, God’s image portrayed as a man with authority exists in the context of Western church art. An illuminated manuscript from the twelfth-century depicts

32 Chuang-Tzu

also argued for heaven, referring to T’ian as nature, that is, Tao. The master believes that human and nature are two into one, in which there is no any contradiction. Tao tracks over all things, and everything might be a universe. Humankind and all things form a harmonious world of coexistence. Chuang-Tzu considered that T’ian is nature, Tao, which is indispensable in the world. An ideal world refers to a unity between human and nature. Chang, Creativity and Daoism, 63.

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the work of God’s creation unfolding over the seven days that correspond to the Christian liturgical week. This God creates day and night on the first day. Lastly, on the sixth day, God creates humankind as a sign to complete the work of creation. The Genesis narrative ordered by God’s words describes the successive stages of creation as a series of divine events in which God’s word is acknowledged. In addition, in John’s Gospel, all creation has come about through the Word (logos) and the Word is God. Jesus is the human form of the divine logos as cosmic order that creates the universe (John 1:1).33

Fig. 13, Cheng Chien-Chang, 大塊, 印記, 吸引力 (Land, Signification, Attractiveness), 2008, oil on Canvas, 130 x 162cm. Private Collection, Courtesy of the artist.

We recognize in Cheng’s paintings that this giant is the teacher, the Great Clod and master of nature, from whom all humankind can learn the lesson of life. At the same time, the landscape of Taiwan in the form of a giant body gives space for the artist to express a feeling of ownership over his homeland that has been ruled by foreign regimes for cen-

33

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John1:1, NRSV).

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turies. Describing the landscape as the divine figure conveys the domestication of a wild landscape and justifies claiming it for its inhabitants. At first glance, this protagonist giant in Cheng’s narrative as a God of creation probably is not immediately identifiable. The green giant is more a wild hero with an immense power to create or destroy the world. The spatial structure of the painting alludes to a world full of wonders and unknown. Cheng’s creation myth, thereby, stimulates the viewer to consider the image of God as well as originality of one’s cultural identity. It goes without saying that Cheng’s image of God has been integrated into the local context linked up with forms and motifs already known to Taiwan. By depicting God as a giant, a land God, Cheng’s work suggests that certain aspect of the local concept of God also need to be modified if they are to be integrated into the context of the Christian faith expression. Cheng translates the transcendence of God into symbolic representation into his context. What is radically new is that the art creates a dialogue about the personification of the invisible God between the Christian Genesis story and Taoist myth of creation. Despite that the suspicion toward a hybrid form of Christian art as lacking of the originality to be a vital component of the cultural identity,34 it is important to note that contemporary Taiwanese Christian art linked to ethical issues of social justice and liberation reveals a unique form of Asian Christian art. In sum, Cheng’s image of God intertwines with the artist’s socialhistorical commitments to his homeland, representing the visual sovereignty advocated by Taiwanese Christian art and visual culture. Cheng’s creation myth in the Taoist context offers us a new interpretation of a familiar Christian narrative, demonstrating how the depiction of God’s image could be a product resulting from a dynamic interaction between Chinese philosophy and Christianity. The process of interaction and communication is never purely linear, but rather more of a spiral nature suggested by the recognition of liminal space across cultures. As a result of this dialectic process, the original Taiwanese traditional culture and religion come to shed light on the reinterpretation of the Christian message and vice versa.

34 Cf. Philip Sheldrake (ed.), The New Westminster Dictionary of Christian Spirituality, Louisville, KY 2005, 89.

Chapter Five Feasting at the Lord’s Table The bread of life is Christ himself It is not the manna in the wilderness It is not the magical addition of bread It is not the corruptible substance But the life of eternity Wang Jen-Wen, Christ, the Bread of Life

The artworks discussed in our previous chapter have demonstrated that God can be found in every corner of the world, as Etan Pavavalung and Cheng Chien-Chang use native symbol and myth as visual strategies to speak to their contexts. The following chapter will continue the conversation primarily through sensory responses to works made by two Taiwanese artists, this time from female perspectives. The two Taiwanese women artists Wang Jen-Wen ( 王貞文 , 1965-2017) and Chris Chou (Chou Lan-Huei 周蘭惠), one of whom lived in Asia and the other one has moved to the U.S., use visual elements of nature, dots, and circles to reflect the struggles and challenges of daily life, expressing their encounter with God in their respective contexts.1 Their faith expressions through images invite the viewer to see one’s enriching relationship with the world as a Christian way of living among God’s creation. Taking the feast imagry as hermeneutic connection between theological imagination and artistic expressions, this chapter aims to answer two questions: (1.) How do women artists make God visible in their social contexts? (2.) How can different imageries of feast enhance our understanding of God’s grace in the reality of the world? Women’s life experiences yield new ways to understand the truth, beauty, and goodness of God. 1

Sections of this chapter were published as a journal article, Imagine the Real. Teaching with Asian Christian Art in the Theological Classroom, in: Journal of Asian / North Asian Theological Educators 2, 2016, 40-50. It was then revised for this volume in 2019.

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The aesthetic reception of the arts plays a key role in accomplishing the process of inculturation. 1. Wang Jen-Wen’s Body Metaphor

Fig. 14, Wang Jen-Wen, Christ the Bread of Life (生命的糧乃是基督自己), 2013, Watercolor.

Wang Jen-wen successfully portrays the Christian Holy Communion in the context of Asian women’s life when the artist depicts Christ sharing bread with a group of female followers. In a watercolor entitled Christ the Bread of Life (Fig. 14 & color plate), the female disciples are seated in a semi-circle around a dining table, receiving the bread of life from Christ himself.2 In the center of the table, a chalice, several small cups of wine, and a plate of broken bread clearly signify the Eucharistic banquet, as the participants partake in Christ’s body and blood of eternal life. The presence of leaves and strokes on a dark green background seem to represent signs of life and renewal, and two white doves flying out from the background suggest the abundance of joy and hope in this warm and hospitable environment. This composition evokes the viewer’s engagement with the notable theme of Jesus’ last meal with his twelve disciples, which appears frequently in the masterpieces of Western religious art. Christ the Bread of Life is the example of an inculturated art, in which the body of Christ is incarnated in people of different genders and ethnicities. 2

Source: Lin Wen-hai (林文海) and Lo Song-en (羅頌恩) (eds.), 在基督信仰之上創作: 台灣基督教藝術 Tsai Chi Tu Hsin Yang Chih Shang Ch’uang Tso. TaiWan Chi Tu Chiao I Shu Te I Chung Chang Shih (Art-making Based on the Christian Faith. An Attempt of Taiwanese Christian Art), Taichung 2015, 66. 的一種嘗試

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Born in 1965 in Taipei and raised in Chia-yi, Wang pursued doctoral studies in theology at Kirchliche Hochschule Bethel in Germany. After returning to Taiwan she taught Church History and Christian Worship at Tainan Graduate School of Theology and Changjung Christian University. Wang, as a church historian and woman pastor, wrote extensively on criticisms of Christianity and Christian literature. During her time studying theology in Germany, Wang had used the native Taiwanese language, a local language that is often conspicuously overlooked and dismissed by Mandarin speakers, to write poetry, prose, and fiction.3 Wang’s effort to preserve Taiwanese women’s identity is obvious in the purposeful use of vernacular language in her many literary works. In 2013, Wang was diagnosed with cancer and took leave for treatment. After surgery and chemotherapy, she was on and off at the college. During this time, she started to frequently use ink pen and watercolor to draw scribbles and sketches in her pocket notebooks. In between her treatments, Wang wrote, “Many things not easy to be understood in life have started to settle down through the process of drawing; then, my life became clear with transparency.”4 Undoubtedly, visual art opened up new ways for Wang’s personal process of healing. As seen in healing rituals in many parts of the world, word and image have proved to be ways to record and rediscover one’s mind and soul in one’s practices of prayer and spirituality. The small sized watercolor paintings Wang created during this period, including Christ the Bread of Life, allow for a more intimate interaction with the work, and faithfully illustrate how Wang’s wounded flesh experiences God’s providence and protection in the artist’s daily pain and suffering.5 It is interesting to note that the visual appropriation of the Holy Communion scene into Wang’s living reality reflects the artist’s awareness of her feminist consciousness and suffering body. Christ’s hospitality for the suffering reflects one’s longing for deep communion with the Holy One. Wang’s images record an awareness of her spiritual hunger for Christ’s love: The bread of life is Christ himself, not something 3 Wang Jen-wen published her first Christian novel Angel, in 2006, and her poetry collection Honey Lemon Tea in 2015. Wang is regarded as one of the significant Christian writers in Taiwan. 4 Lin and Lo (eds.), Art-making Based on the Christian Faith, 66. 5 Apparently, the first round of therapy was effective, and Wang returned to teaching the next year, but the cancer did not stay away. In 2016 she had a relapse, but the chemotherapy did not work this time. Wang decided to forego treatments and finally passed away on May 10, 2017, at the age of 52 years.

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else, but eternal life.6 Christ’s broken body for His disciples in a liberating and life-affirming scene proves to be a source of strength for the artist’s wounded spirit. Wang transposes the composition and atmosphere into her much more subjective style, relating the biblical imagery of feasting to her personal narratives in a contemporary world. Christ the Bread of Life deepens the theological meaning of the Lord’s supper. Meanwhile, the reinterpretation of the classical iconography of Holy Communion invites multiple meanings and reinterpretations of those meanings. This is an example of how the artist interprets the great art of the past, as she embraces the heritage of Renaissance art of the Golden Age. The great art of the past becomes an incomparably precious heritage of meaning for cultural contact and exchange.7 Wang depicts an original scene of female fellowship, experimenting with this classical motif of the last supper in the history of Western sacred painting. Gender consciousness is definitely one of the expressions in this work, and through it, female subjectivity and spirituality are communicated vividly, as Wang explicitly depicts a female community. The viewer is invited to witness Jesus Christ through an Asian woman’s eyes and see the most intimate illustration of the artist’s life situation. Christ becomes the one who empties Himself like the broken bread of life for those who are in need. The aspirations of life, the hope for peace, and the gratitude for the graciousness of God are central to the artist’s works as well as human existence in a broader inter-cultural context. The juxtaposition of Christ’s image with female disciples in the work demonstrates the artist’s own perspective of being Jesus’ follower. It echoes C.S. Song’s story theology, in which Asian people’s stories of old and new, past and present are abundant sources for developing contextual theology.8 Wang’s feast imagery invites viewers to experience the meaning of the arts through the “third eye,” that is, the eye of the mind, a vision of an invisible God.9 Christ offers those who are hungry for love and healing His abundant life of eternity. Theological engagement with the art 6 Lin

and Lo (eds.), Art-making Based on the Christian Faith, 70. Cf. Hans Küng, Art as Heritage, Anticipation, Elucidating of Meaning, in: Art and the Question of Meaning, London1981. The essay is selected in part, in: Gesa Elsbeth Thiessen (ed.), Theological Aesthetics. A Reader, Grand Rapids, MI 2005, 256-258, 257. 8 Choan-seng Song, Tell Us Our Names. Story Theology from an Asian Perspective, Maryknoll, NY1984, 57. 9 The term “third eye” is derived from Buddhism. According to Japanese Zen master Daisetz Suzuki, in Zen Buddhism, we need to “open a third eye to the hitherto unheard-of region shut 7

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becomes a process of struggling against a dehumanizing status quo, in this case, the patriarchy and paternalism which are pervasive in Asian society. Wang’s image speaks to each of God’s people and proclaims women’s solidarity in the midst of Asia. Wang’s portraits of the female disciples of Christ at the Lord’s table thus not only strengthen a believer’s faith but also challenge that person’s faith. The depiction of female discipleship honors the embodied nature of being a woman with a sense of self-worth, urging the viewer to pay attention to one’s bodies and environments with the possibility of opening oneself to an invisible God. The Wound is a Fern Leaf (Fig. 15 & color plate) demonstrates another concrete example of Wang’s personal reflection on the female body.10 Wang depicts the broken body as having the potential to manifest God’s presence in multiple realms of life, opening new eyes of compassion within oneself and others. This intimate work shows a halflength female body with her torso as the symbol of tree, which is locked in this woman’s identity and in her experiences of pain and suffering. Looking closely, the nude female with closed eyes seems to sink into her thoughts. Out of her shaven head and shoulders grow many small branches with leaves growing close to the body, which might be associated with the growth of her hair. A dark, oval shape of a wound on the center of the woman’s chest is a fern leaf as suggested by the title that grows out of her distorted body. However, the woman’s broken body covered in fern leaves signifies the figure’s body that will grow up freely, though hidden in darkness.11 Wang develops this work out of her personal narratives of bodily trauma and pain and their influences on the artist’s self-identity as a woman. But more than this, the female body denotes human finitude through the distortion resulting from the physical suffering and frailty. In this trauma experience, the body blending with a tree becomes the physical site of struggle and anxiety, connecting humanity and divinity. The imagery of a wounded female body as a fern leaf communicates a concept of self-worth as well as the artist’s longing for a harmonious relationship between the self and nature. The metaphor of body as tree thus can be interpreted as expressing the artist’s longing for the freedom to be connected with the lives of God’s creatures. Wang’s exaggerated away from us through our own ignorance.” Cf. Choan-seng Song, Third-eye Theology. Theology in Formation in Asian Settings, Maryknoll, NY 1979, 26-27. 10 Source: Lin and Lo (eds.), Art-making Based on the Christian Faith, 66. 11 Cf. Wang, The Wound is a Fern Leaf, 70.

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depiction of the body as a tree nourished by the water of life offers the viewer an opportunity to transcend the present world to eternity.

Fig. 15, Wang Jen-Wen, The Wound is a Fern Leaf (傷口是一片蕨葉), 2014, watercolor.

Christ’s hospitality portrayed in Wang’s works exemplifies that Asian Christian art resists being understood as merely the adaptation of motifs from Western paintings. The truth-claim of the work emerging from the artist’s faith reflection on her trauma experiences transcends the viewer’s personal taste and subjectivity, leading the viewer to deeply engage with Christ’s truth and mystery. Wang’s artworks speak to audiences across the boundary of East and West, recognizing the transformative power of Christ’s imagery: Jesus came and died for all peoples, regardless of their gender and ethnicity, and will bring life and hope when He comes again. We see that Jesus among female disciples transforms the scene of Holy Communion into an assurance of Asian women’s hope and salvation.

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2. Chris Chou’s Dots and Circles Compared to Wang’s figurative painting of the Lord’s last supper, Chris Chou’s feast imagery conveys strong dynamics through abstract forms. Born in Taipei, Taiwan in 1961, Chou moved to the U.S. in 1991 to pursue her career as a painter and received her Master’s Degree in fine arts (M.F.A.) at Boston University, Massachusetts. Chou studied art in Taiwan, Hawaii, New York, and Boston, completed residencies at several artist colonies, and received the Guggenheim Fellow Award in 2007. Chou is currently living and working as a Boston-based full time artist. For Chou, drawing has been a natural way of living, just as breathing is necessary for sustaining life. In her own words: I see things very directly. I only select the form or color, which really speak to me. I am using personal symbols to tell the story of thing which I care. They come from nature and the relationship between people/things and God/me.12

Abstract art as a universal language is thus an adequate means for the artist to record her response to God’s grace in daily experience. In her oil paintings with organic, dynamic patterns, Chou finds in natural symbols, such as dots and circles, ways to express the artist’s praise of the truth, goodness, and beauty of God’s creation. Chou’s Six Jars (Fig. 16 & color plate) depicts a biblical theme of feasting in simple forms of dots and circles, yet with exquisite colors and strokes.13 The energetic forms and colors invite the viewer to participate in a world of biblical narrative where the joyful wedding in Cana of Galilee takes place. Looking closely, the simple composition of the work is primitive, but not in ordinary form. Six ovals lie side by side in front of the viewer’s eyes. These oval shapes could be symbols of eggs, life itself, echoing the celebration and rejoicing in this wedding feast of love. Each organic shape arranged in the composition of a bird’s eye view occupies all of the pictorial space and the viewer’s sights. These six organic circles allude to the six magic jars which witness the miraculous moment of Jesus’ turning water into wine at the wedding of Cana. Colors of bright oranges, reds, yellows, blues, and greens in Chou’s works are exceptionally gorgeous and lively, creating a joyful spirit which demands from the viewer a sensory response.

12

Chris Chou, Painting is an Attitude of Life, in: Asian American Theological Forum 5, 2018, 37f. 13 Source: Exhibition catalogue. A Dot, But Not Just a Dot (Solo Exhibition of Chris Chou, 2012. 0908-10.07) published by ArtDoor Galley, Taipei 2012.

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Fig. 16, Chris Chou, Six Jars (六個水缸), 2006, oil painting, 104 x120cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Observing these egg-like symbols more closely, in the varieties of dots and circles one sees that each oval has a different design. Each dot speaks to the viewer about who God is and how the grace of God is worthy of tasting. It could be a seed filled with life energy or the heavenly bread with unknown power to nourish humanity. It is worth noticing that the design for the dots in the artist’s work inspired by the biblical concept of manna refers to the heavenly bread that tastes like honey. Likewise, the viewer tastes God’s amazing grace as one encounters these manna-like dots. The image comes alive to interact with the viewer, satisfying the viewer’s hunger for fellowship with God. These basic and structural elements of dots and circles as metaphors of nature transcend all reality.14 The feast of love with the abundance of food and drink reminds viewers of God’s fruitful supply from generation to generation. Through the luxurious colors and simple designs of dots and circles, viewers smell the fragrance of good wine and taste the sweetness of God’s mercy.

14

Thiessen, Theological Aesthetics, 213.

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Chinese characters in Chou’s abstract paintings indicate the artist’s Asian cultural background. Circles in Six Jars each with a unique pattern look like flowers of love in their full bloom. The feminine colors and exquisite strokes permeate the organic symbol and composition of the work. If we notice carefully, two of them have traditional Chinese characters, hsi (囍), at the top. Hsi means double joy in Chinese language, conveying a joyful attitude toward life. Incorporating Chinese ideogram into the depiction of the biblical narratives, Chou’s dots and circles lead the viewer to enter the depth of human spirituality and a life of solidarity in an Asian context. Chou’s paintings suggest a traditional Asian form of harmony between nature and humanity with warm affection, using organic images found in her everyday life. As proposed by Ye Lang, the traditional Chinese aesthetics is located in the world of idea-image, the interfusion between feeling and scene.15 Human feeling and scene cannot be understood as separated from each other but as a harmonious unification. Chou reflects her consciousness of Asian-ness by fusing Chinese ideograms and universal symbols of dots and circles in her biblical art. Visual imagination is a means to sense the humanity reflected by the artist’s spirituality, and urges the viewer to take action to respond to the message of God. Chou utilizes energetic symbols from her cultural background whereby the viewer can see God’s work of creation and salvation in one’s lived reality. Chou’s contextualized expressions of biblical messages through an Asian perspective manifests the meaning of Christ’s love and hospitality, and the Holy Spirit’s amazing work. It is no doubt that the idea of T’ien-Jen He-I (天人合一) – the continuity between heaven and the human world – has deeply permeated Chou’s organic form of iconography. The harmony of the divine-human relationship in the East thus is vividly reflected in its composition of dots and circles. Despite using the Western techniques of oil painting and abstract form, the Chinese ideograms, and bird’s eye view echo the artistic and religious tradition of Chinese landscape ink painting. One should not neglect Asian people’s mentality and intuition while perceiving these creative images. As an Asian female artist, Chou’s notion and vision of God come to be associated more with intuition than with

15 The

term “idea-image” (i-hsiang 意象) refers to feeling (I 意) and scene (hsiang 象). Cf. Lang Ye, Several Inspirations from Traditional Chinese Aesthetics, in: Ken-ichi Sasaki (ed.), Asian Aesthetics, Kyoto 2010, 112-118, 113.

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reason.16 Her art and aesthetics demonstrate how Christian faith’s monotheistic epistemology is negotiated under the artist’s context of Asian cultural and religious heritages.

Fig. 17, Chris Chou, Fish 153 (ㄧ五三尾魚), 2006, oil painting, 104 x120cm. Courtesy of the artist.

A close examination of Fish 153 (Fig. 17 & color plate), reveals an oval shape in the center of the work that signifies a fishnet full of large fish with a profusion of symbols and numbers inside. On the left-hand side of the work, Chou boldly depicts the Chinese ideograms of “fish 153” (一五三尾魚) against a blue background. Again, on the right-hand side of the work, six circles with numerous dots shaped like the heavenly bread coming from above are full of life energy. The work references the biblical scene of Jesus’ calling His disciples by the sea of Galilee, where the miraculous catch of fish has occurred: “It was full of large fish, 153, but even with so many the net was not torn” (John 21:11). The net with an astonishing number of fish indicated by the repeated uses of symbols, numbers, dots, and circles vividly speaks to a contemporary world. Jesus then invited his disciples to come to have bread and fish. The inclusive and transformative theme of the net suggests the idea 16

Song, Third-eye Theology, 62.

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of invitation, pointing to the Holy One who is inviting each of the viewers to experience God’s abundant blessings.17 Art becomes a means of grace bridging cultural boundaries so that an individual or community learns to transmit and share the languages of differing tastes. Through participating in the reception process of the arts, the perception of the Holy One can begin to be shared. Chou’s visual language of dots and circles across borders provides an inclusive vision for the viewer to learn from the artist’s life and spirituality. By blending the natural elements and the biblical symbols together, Chou has created an Asian aesthetic experience of harmony that transcends the physical world and reaches into the presence of the divine. 3. Contemplating God in Everyday Realities Engaging the art as text for expressing God in human situations has led us to see the richness of the process of inculturation. As we have seen, Wang Jen-wen and Chris Chou depict the transformative dimension of the divine image in different ways. Either in the figurative form of the Lord’s table or the abstract illustrations of the biblical manna, these works advance the contextualization of Asian Christian iconography. The familiar biblical narratives speak to the viewer and demand a reply, as the artist expresses faith in image by using contemporary visual language. Likewise, the viewer observes how social transformation functions in the intersection between Christian motifs and Asian worldviews that makes the traditional biblical iconography come to life. Art as a text for visual theology becomes an invaluable source to unveil to the viewer not only the artist’s interior landscapes of the heart and mind but also the truth, goodness, and beauty of God. One can be aware of how the inculturation itself can be achieved through the aesthetic process of reception. Images elicit a response and invite us to reflect on what is both common and unique in our human experiences. Perceiving images thus opens a fresh way of thinking in which the image of God and the reality of the world are constructed and expressed. This process of dialogue through the art is an active engagement with the non-verbal, sensory quality of images. Every image demands us to respond with our multiple senses through not only the sense of seeing but also the sense of hearing and touching. To truly access the 17

Brown asserts that the most meaningful Christian exercise of taste is to cultivate “ecumenical taste,” that is, to enjoy and judge different artistic and aesthetic dimensions of life and worship that contribute to our spiritual growth in an act of love. Cf. Frank Burch Brown, Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste, New York, NY 2000, 12.

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materiality and the sensuality of the image, we need to feel its weight, smell, sound, and texture, which are essential for faith reflection. By the same token, in God’s incarnation, a loving God who values every individual by sending His beloved son to the earth to embrace the world, so that all humankind can feel the presence of God who is living among us. Moreover, multisensory engagement with the art has created a meeting space for an intercultural aesthetic conversation that expands our existing insights. Despite the fact that the contemporary development of Asian Christian art has often been regarded as being transposed wholly from Western motifs and conceptions, these two artists’ works reflect Eastern worldviews and social values, as they utilize visual languages derived from their present contexts. Images as ways for the contextualization of present human experiences offer theological texts for investigating Asian cultures and religious imaginations. By the means of images, the viewer encounters the artists’ faith experiences from their respective contexts and is in dialogue with the viewer’s concrete socialhistorical contexts. Images are universal language capable of speaking to people across cultural boundaries without language barriers. By doing so, images from the other cultures look directly to the viewer and demand a reply. Both production and reception of the works disclose one’s theological and aesthetic commitments, creating a space for contemplation and devotion. Images help foster faith expressions, as two female artists interlace metaphor and symbols inspired by their everyday situations. The practical application of theological aesthetics is in relation to the prophetic voice of Asian Christian art spoken from a given culture.18 Viewing of the arts offers an alternative approach to pastoral ministry, fostering contemplative and devotional possibilities for social transformation. The idea of using art in the study of intercultural theology captures the goal of the Christian way of life as experiencing God in every day realities. Art as mediated cultural form speaks to the condition of people today. Viewing of the art offers the potential to both see the visible world and yet try to see the Holy. Taiwanese women’s iconography manifests Christ’s hospitality in its social contexts and subverts to a 18 Hans

Urs von Balthasar (1905-88) has articulated a more explicit “theological aesthetics” that “grounds the theological enterprise in Christian worship, spirituality, and contemplation of the Beauty and Glory of the Lord.” Orlando Espin and James Nickoloff (eds.), An Introductory Dictionary of Theology and Religious Studies, Collegeville, Pennsylvania 2007, 17; In the section of his first volume of The Glory of the Lord, Balthasar outlies his understanding of the relationship between form and splendor. Cf. Thiessen, Theological Aesthetics, 320.

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stereotyped understanding of Asian Christian art. Metaphors of body and nature from Asian and Asian-North American perspectives create an intimate space, inviting the viewer to experience a liberating moment of creative tension, shown through a joined conversation between the biblical and contemporary world. In both artists’ works, we see that biblical iconography and Asian aesthetics are intertwined in ways that evolve into a novel worldview of Asian Christian art, emanating from this process of searching for multiple belongings. Asian Christian art has the ability to move beyond the image and points to the viewer to a new direction for comprehending the wholeness of the Beautiful One. As Alejandro Garcia-Rivera proposes, theological imagination moves the human heart toward the good and true.19 Viewers are willing to open themselves to experience the mysterious and strange that can move them to journey where they have never been. Both Wang’s and Chou’s works build upon the ambiguity of visual representation to reinterpret traditional Christian iconography. Their theological aesthetics invite the viewer to revise one’s present story and cultural contexts in light of the kingdom of God. Through our engagements with art, traditions, and the artist’s personal experiences, this chapter has demonstrated the perception of the arts as fundamental experiences of contemplation and devotion. Theological imagination becomes a means for social transformation in understanding the human condition and responsibility in a world that is increasingly inviting more cultural awareness. We have seen how images can be intimately interwoven in the cultural and religious fabric of our lives. Images challenge viewers to name our present situations, confront our personal stories in light of the community of faith, and finally, lead us to make decisions to respond in action. One of the powers images have is to invite us to imagine reality through the aesthetic perception of Christ’s hospitality and inclusivity. Perceiving two female artists’ works in Asian and Asian-North American contexts becomes a process of sharing cultural backgrounds and life experiences in which people and churches from different parts of the world are bound together.20 Aspects of both the local and the global in Asian Christian art enable viewers to examine the creative process of interculturation and to reimagine the everyday reality of the world. 19 Cf.

Alejandro Garcia-Rivera, The Community of the Beautiful. A Theological Aesthetics. Collegeville, PA 1999, 24. 20 Cf. Kenneth McGuire, Eduardo Fernández, and Anne Hansen, Culture-Sensitive Ministry. Helpful Strategies for Pastoral Ministers, Mahwah, NJ 2010, 15.

Chapter Six Portrait of the Soul To know oneself as the symbolic bird in David’s poems is to recognize our inner nature of ignorance, inability, and emptiness, and to accept sheltering and guidance of the Creator. Stanley Fung, Dust Icons

Rising in prominence in the past two centuries, photography as a significant visual medium has a deep capacity to convey theological expressions.1 While much has been written about photography and theology, less attention has been given to its development in the Asian context. This chapter examines the portraits selected from two series Dust Icon and Nature’s Caretakers, made by Taiwanese pastor-artist Stanley Fung (Fung Chun-lan 馮君藍, b. 1961).2 Fung explores human being on a quest to become the image of God. His work offers to the viewer a case study of portrait as an expression for theological anthropology. The culturally contextualized biblical representation asks viewers to reconsider how a historical consciousness of self and community work together to shape one’s sense of the sacred. Looking at two specific examples. The Virgin in Preparing (2011) and Mary (2011), the first section explores the topic of the divine representation in a photographic form and how Fung interprets concepts of time and timelessness in the context of a Protestant church. The second 1 Cf.

Frank Burch Brown, How Important Are the Arts, Theologically? in: Arts, Theology, and the Church. New Intersections, Kimberly Vrudny and Wilson Yates (eds.), Cleveland 2005, 36. 2 Part of the works in Dust Icon series was first exhibited at art center in National Ch’ing Hwa University (清華大學), Hsin Chu, Taipei, Taiwan 2011: 在去而不返已先: 阿藍攝影個展 Tsai Ch’u Erh Pu Fan I Hsien. A Lan She Ying Ko Chan (May 12-27, 2012); 自然的園丁 Tzu Jan Te Yuan Ting (The Nature’s Caretaker series) (Nov. 22, 2014-Jan. 4, 2015) is the extension of the series, Dust Icon. These two series were exhibited at the Art Door Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan in 2012 and 2015.

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section explores how the use of light facilitates the viewer’s theological imagination on life and death by examining Fung’s Collar of Nature (2014) and Shem, the Son of Noah (2014). The social concern in Fung’s version of the Genesis story enhances the viewer’s awareness of the theological expressions of creation and redemption. Through object, light, and story, the chapter concludes that the sacred experience in relation to time and memory can be constructed and persist in an artist’s visual imagination.3 1. Stanley Fung’s Dust Icons Portrait photography as a devotional art has been overlooked, particularly in relation to its figurative representation of divine image, which remains unfamiliar in the Reformed churches of Asia. Despite that, the new medium of photography functions as a significant aid, including the use of electronic presentations and film clips, hearing the word of God rather than seeing the image of God is the primary mode of communication. Contemporary photographers in Asia face the controversial issue of divine representation, searching for autonomy within the realms of both visual art and young churches. The ever-present tension between artists and the church in North America and Europe also exists in Asian countries. How does this conflict of word and image impact the development of contemporary Christian photography in relation to the current Asian Christian church, where the gospel can be expressed through different cultural media? Born in 1961 in Hong Kong, Fung moved with his family four years later to Taiwan where his father founded the country's first Methodist church. Fung studied sculpture in art school. An art designer at first, Fung later developed an interest in photography and held his first exhibition in 1988. At the age of 35, Fung entered Taiwan Theological College and Seminary. Soon after his ordination in 2008, Fung would realize that his ministry was not merely being a pastor, but, at the same time, a professional photographer in the contemporary world. Fung’s small Protestant church in Taipei You Fu Tang (有福堂) is unique due to its display of portrait photography on a red brick wall. People entering the church’s lobby for the first time are struck by the

3 The

psychoanalytical term object refers to the sense with which one “speaks to the object of someone’s affection or attentions. No distinction is made between persons and inanimate things: individuals, parts of the body, and the satisfaction of needs can all be objects.” David Macey, The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory, London 2001, 279.

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interior design of the building. It is hard to determine whether the building is a church or a gallery while looking through the glass window entrance. Unlike traditional Protestant church settings with pale, empty walls, this is a space that welcomes people to enjoy images. It is interesting to note that most of the models in Fung’s portraits are members of his congregation and their photos were taken in this small church. Figures dressed in ancient outfits relate to various biblical characters from the Old and New Testaments, including the Virgin Mary, Hannah, David, Noah, Zacchaeus, Daniel, and Habakkuk. By meditating on the faces of fellow parishioners in these photographs, the viewer enters each biblical character’s earthly journey.

Fig. 18, Stanley Fung, The Virgin in Preparing (預備著的童女), 2011, Photography, 100 x 67.5cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Using two specific objects – clothing and plants, Fung’s portraiture successfully blurs the boundaries between time and space, past and future, ancient Jewish history and contemporary faith community, evoking the viewer’s longing for eternity. The Virgin Preparing (Fig. 18) is a black and white icon.4 Standing in the center is a little girl with an Asian face 4 An

icon in the Eastern Orthodox Church allows the believer to experience the presence of Christ or the saint. It functions as a sort of site or place where the divine can be encountered.

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and black hair in a fringe, staring out at the viewer’s mind and soul. Although the little girl’s body is covered by a Chinese robe, the viewer senses the beauty of youth by looking into her innocent eyes. A flower in full bloom as a symbol of virginity is placed at the lower part of her body. A dynamic force between the biblical event and contemporary life slowly flows in and out through this iconic image. As a matter of fact, the use of clothing and plants is not difficult to find in the history of Chinese Christian art. Both types of objects can be considered metaphors for spreading the gospel in different cultural forms. The gospel is as not only a new dress worn by an old culture but also a plant planted in new soil. For instance, in a series of Chinese porcelain paintings with a Christian theme, biblical figures wear ancient Chinese robes in a scene where Eastern symbols of pines and bamboos are frequently seen. These artifacts produced by former Buddhists create opportunity for them to earn a living and to express their Christian faith through images.5 Plants function as significant agents in the dialogue between the photographed person and the viewer, evoking the viewer’s memory of the sacred. In the history of mission art, plants as metaphor indicate that the gospel is like a plant planted in the new soil of another culture, or, plants from local cultures can gain new interpretations in light of Christian faith. Plants play a key role in Christian iconography, mediating the connection between human and divine. One of the most famous symbols in Church paintings is the lily held by the Angel Gabriel, as he greets Mary in the Annunciation, signifying the holiness of the message for God’s maidservant. In the modern Christian art in Asia, Bamboo Madonna made by Sadao Watanabe depicts Mother Mary’s dress with bamboo patterns. Masao Takenaka also considers the meaning of Christian faith through discussing the use, importance, and symbolism of bamboo in Asian context.6 Both objects of clothing and plants have the capacity to spread the gospel, stimulating the viewer’s imaginings of the divine message from a life-giving God. While examining the allegorical meaning of clothing and plants in Fung’s biblical icons, the pictorial tradition of portrait historie should

Cf. John Dillenberger, A Theology of Artistic Sensibilities. The Visual Arts and the Church, Eugene, OR 1986, 32. 5 Cf. The preface to The Gospel in Chinese Art, Tao Fong Shan (ed.), Hong Kong 1991. 6 Cf. Masao Takenaka, When the Bamboo Bends. Christ and Culture in Japan, Geneva 2002, 10.

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not be neglected.7 The ambiguity between biblical events and the contemporary world manifested in Fung’s icons can also be found in examples of Western modern photography. British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), known for her portraits of celebrities and everyday people of the time, was a leading pioneer in modern photography of the nineteenth century. 8 Cameron’s biblical figures depicted in their contemporary Victorian environment are cropped closely around the subject’s face in soft focus. The subject matter of Cameron’s photography was a mixture of biblical stories and heroic legends. Similar to Fung, Cameron captures in people around her whom she has costumed the spirit of characters from poetry and the Bible. In some of Cameron’s works, we see a maid transformed into a Madonna wearing an ancient outfit with a headscarf, and a neighbor’s child transformed into the infant Christ. Both photographers of East and West capture people’s personalities of contextualized expressions in their respective cultures. Mary (Fig, 19) is another example of the interaction between human and divine, as the artist uses ancient clothing to express tender qualities and the sense of intimacy. Mary wears a Chinese outfit suggesting to the viewer the everlasting memory of a loving Virgin. The virtues of love and compassion exhibited in her full-length body and quietly seated posture in profile enhance the viewer’s meditation on the message of annunciation. Mary’s bare feet touch the wooden floor with several tiny dust motes shining around the wooden chair, creating a poetic atmosphere for mediating the viewer’s devotion. Born out of Fung’s intention to create a liminal space as an in-between moment for transformation, this young Mary with an Asian face imbues a sense of ambiguity of time and place. Worth noticing is that the clothing in Fung’s biblical icons represents the suffering of the artist’s family in the aftermath of World War II. Fung explains, “it is my intention to add a sense of history in my photos […] I want to show the intimacy coming from the living background that my father and grandfather have experienced.”9 Instead of attempting biblical accuracy, Fung’s choice of Chinese outfits reflects 7 The

definition of portrait historie: The depiction of known individuals in the guise of biblical, mythological, or literary personages. Cf. Peter Sutton, Rembrandt and Portrait Historie, in: Rembrandt’s Late Religious Portraits, Arthur K. Wheelock and Peter C. Sutton (eds.), Chicago, Il 2005, 57-67, 58. 8 Cf. Colin Ford and Julia Margaret Cameron, Julia Margaret Cameron. A Critical Biography, Los Angeles, CA 2003, 59. 9 Fung, interview notes, Taipei 2014.

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the artist’s personal narrative. A specific time and memory coming from both familiar and estranged histories of the past permeates the pictorial space. This creates nothing more than a certain distance, which is ironically not from Fung’s current life in contemporary Taiwan, but rather from the memory of the suffering that his family endured during the Nationalist-Communist Civil War in China. Chinese dress reveals the social concern of the art impacting our sense of time.

Fig. 19, Stanley Fung, Mary, 2011, photography, 100 x 67.5cm. Courtesy of the artist.

The viewer cannot tell whether The Virgin Preparing is an old photo taken in 1920 Beijing, 1945 Shanghai, 1960 Hong Kong, or a new invention made in 2011 Taipei. The ambiguity of time conveys not only the artist’s personal experience but also the artist’s Christian faith identity. Fung says, “I hope the sense of time transpiring in my photo has a certain distance from the world of reality, so that I can use it as a hint for the viewer to sense the existence of another kingdom of faith.”10 Metaphors of clothing and plants, here, provide us opportunities to see time and space with the mind’s eye. Every Christian, for Fung, has dual 10 Ibid.

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identities of being a citizen both on earth and in heaven, thus the human journey is to live continuously in both kingdoms of materiality and transcendence. The Virgin Preparing and Mary in Chinese clothing erase the borderlines between the illustration of a portrait and a biblical event, between now and past.11 The deeply felt human experience makes the borderlines between the material and spiritual worlds disappear, as Fung uses objects as significant agents of mediating the divine. Meanwhile, Fung’s contemporary photographic icons as tactile objects displayed in a Protestant church setting blur the boundaries between the ritual space of churches and the secular world of society, challenging people’s traditional understanding of the sacred image. Depicting the image of the divine in a concrete, figural mode of representation is not an easy task for Protestant artists like Fung. Perhaps this is why Fung cleverly uses objects of clothing and plants as metaphors for the sacred – as “an acceptable abstract, analogical way of representing the divine” – to provoke our imagination.12 God’s image reflected in human figures is thus an analogical idea embodied in Fung’s biblical icons, instead of a figural representation of God’s physical appearance. I have suggested that in both images the perception process is fundamental to the formation of our religious experiences. While borrowing the dress codes from both mission art history and the artist’s personal narratives, objects serve as signs and symbols for Fung to express the sacred memory. Mary in a Chinese outfit reflects Fung’s family’s history from a previous century, reveals the social concern of the art, and thus impacts our interpretation of the sense of time and timelessness. Biblical icons embodied by Fung’s fellow church members become a means for the artist to explore human subjectivity before God. This divine representation of the sacred transcends our physical world, pointing to the possibility of imagining a heavenly world. Fung’s photographic icons cross the worlds of materiality and spirituality, projecting the artist’s individual and collective memories of his faith journey. 11 Portrait-like

images, such as images of Jesus or the Virgin Mary, serve as iconic signs of memory that erase the temporal difference between past and present. These portrait-icons strike many devout viewers as concrete acts of memory and construct personal and collective identities. Cf. Morgan, Visual Piety, 195. 12 Mochizuki discusses visual imagination in the Dutch Reformed context, using text painting in the early modern Netherlands as the example. A similar strategy of appealing to the mind’s eyes focuses on the importance of absence, which allows the viewer to meditate on the Word of God instead of the image of God. Mia M. Mochizuki, The Bible on the Wall, in: Infant Milk or Hardy Nourishment? The Bible for Lay People and Theologians in the Early Modern Period, W. Francois and A. A. den Hollander (eds.), Leuven 2009, 352.

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2. Nature’s Caretaker It is significant to note that the entire narrative of Fung’s black and white portrait photography emerges from dramatic lighting effects. In Collar of Nature (Fig. 20), Fung emphasizes the use of sudden light on the figure’s body against the background of hazy darkness. This sort of light is artificial, constructing the photographed figures in a stage-like space. The action of the character is, thereby, frozen in a moment of stasis. Like many photographers, Fung has pointedly taken past paintings as models to create his artistic photographs. Rembrandt in the seventeenth century is one of the artist’s favorite Western painters. Rembrandt’s use of lighting effects successfully creates an intimate and transcendental space, which can be seen in Fung’s “fabricated photograph.”13 This contrast of light and shadow in Fung’s portrait of a single-frame-drama boldly speaks to an imagination of remote distance, yet simultaneously leaving one to deeply connect to the light of inner beings.14 By so doing, light and shadow are the theological language that speaks to the viewer’s life situations and confronts one with messages of life and death, redemption and resurrection. Fung’s use of a reflective mode of the sacred image, rather than a figural representation of the divine, without doubt, successfully conveys the aesthetics of the Reformed church.15 Fung’s art is an acceptable abstract way of visualizing the sacred and has the capacity to affirm times “to mourn and to dance” in communion rites.16 The senses of time and timelessness, life and death, conveyed by the lighting effects are brought from the biblical text to the contemporary world. In the center 13 “Fabricated

photograph” belonging to a modern school of photography is “one in which the subject has been constructed or staged to be photographed.” Photographers craft environments to challenge our beliefs about what is photographic truth and to question conventions of representation. Cf. Sylvan Barnet, A Short Guide to Writing about Art, Upper Saddle River, NJ 2011, 128. 14 A work of visual art has the capacity to portray simultaneously different periods of life and so prevent us from seeing life in terms of either/or. Instead, an artwork offers us a fuller view of life in terms of both/and. Doug Adam uses Edouard Manet’s depiction of Christ as an example to demonstrate how the light and darkness on Christ’s face could express two different phases of Jesus’ life. Viewers are invited to remember both Christ’s life and death. Cf. Doug Adam, Eyes to See Wholeness. Visual Arts Informing Biblical and Theological Studies in Education and Worship through the Church Year, Prescott, NV 1995, 60. 15 The idea of a reflective beauty, rather than a mimetic depiction of the divine, plays a key role in the aesthetics of the Reformed church interior. Cf. Mia Mochizuki, Supplanting the Devotional Image after Netherlandish Iconoclasm, in: Negating the Image. Case Studies in Iconoclasm, Anne McClanan and Jeff Johnson (eds.), Aldershot 2005, 142. 16 Adam, Eyes to See Wholeness, 60.

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of Collar of Nature, the young man’s illuminated face and collar of leaves express a unique dramatic tension. He wears a long black robe standing confidently like a European aristocrat with his left hand on the waist and right hand on the back of the chair. A triangle formed by the young man’s head and both hands creates a stable composition. The figure’s facial expression is calm and full of affection, confronting the viewer with a frontal gaze, and bringing intimacy into one’s perceptions. Due to the darkness blurring the boundary between the background and the young man who wears a black garment, it is hard to recognize the figure in such an obscure scene. The rather static posture of the man conveys the artist’s attempt to freeze a certain moment in time.

Fig. 20, Stanely Fung, Collar of Nature (自然的衣襟), 2014. photography, 100 x 67.5cm. Courtesy of the artist.

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Looking closely, the young man’s face is illuminated by light against the background of darkness. His head, neck, and shoulders surrounded by a scarf-like material made of dried leaves mark the photo with its light and shadow. Instead of expensive furs, the young man’s collar is made of natural, fragile objects, evoking the moment of death and humanity’s temporal, uncertain existence. Looking at a picture with the man standing in the hazy darkness, we see a person who is both familiar and strange. The contrast of light and dark lies between the youth of the man and the capriciousness of the darkness, providing a compelling perceptual experience. This photo in particular, with its hazy dark background and brightly-lit plant in the foreground, impels us to capture ancient memory and alludes to the contrast of light and shadow in the biblical story of creation. In a special way, the young man standing in the convergence of light and darkness appeals quite strongly to a memory that still exists at a remote distance from the sacred: At the beginning of the world a drama of universal scale was unfolded in the hazy darkness that was still over the surface of the deep, as God created the heavens and the earth. The portrait of this young man wearing dried leaves confronts us with humankind’s souls. Through the illuminated face of this young man, we thus imagine the human’s glorious nature and the creator God who is the Word become flesh and dwelling among us. The lighting effects between light and shadow, life and death, lead us to imagine a human being made in the image of the glorious One who is full of truth and grace. Fung clearly uses his models to personify an invisible God that becomes a significant memory aid calling for a sense of holiness and human responsibility to achieve a better life. Therefore, the representations of biblical figures with ancient garments and dried leaves become means for exploring the longing to fully understanding oneself and the Almighty One.17 Symbols of nature here unfold the mystery of God’s creation, reflecting both local and global contexts of the work. Frequently located in the artist’s works, the use of light as strategy enhances the dramatic effect on dried plants, which accordingly adds another layer of ecological concerns. The light shining on the young man’s collar indicates his dignity that the human being as the steward of God has the capacity to transcend the world. Fung’s portrait photography deals with the issue of human beings as the divine representation in a more abstract way. By using lighting effect upon his models, Fung shows an image of a living God reflected by the human

17 Cf.

Fung, interview notes, Taipei 2014.

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existence in a world of darkness.18 Therefore, each human being is not the result of an accident but rather a creation made in the image of God. People who abandon faith in God give up one’s responsibility to nature and dignity of being God’s creation. As human beings, we are both of flesh and spirit, rely on the source of our nature created by the God of light.

Fig. 21, Stanley Fung, Shem, Son of Noah, 2014, photography, 100 x 67.5cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Light continues to play a significant role in Shem, the Son of Noah (Fig. 21), another biblical character recorded in the Genesis narrative (Genesis 8:20-22). A young man wearing a black hat bares a naked chest with his hands holding a giant plant, his upper body and face almost covered by its shiny leaves. The light of hope is shining in the darkness where 18 Ibid.

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the young man holds plant in his hands. Fung’s portraits of souls engage our imagination on humanity’s earthly journey in the light of hope and calls for a splendid communion with God’s love of the world. Without the invention of photography and its optic techniques, Fung’s image of the photographed person in a stage-like space, where the drama in human history takes place, cannot be well presented. Human existence cannot be ignored in relation to the process of imagemaking in photography. Fung is aware that there is a connection between the artist’s creation of a portrait and God’s creation of human beings. The artist can turn intangible memories into something tangible through the process of image making. “This is not so different from how God created Adam, in His own image.”19 Human beings’ dignity manifests the divine image of God shown through the light in Fung’s biblical icons. Despite the uneasy balance between concrete and abstract forms in divine representation, light in Fung’s one-person-drama creates a stage-like space that keeps confronting the viewer with the meaning of life and death.20 Viewing Fung’s portrait is similar to examining the passage of lives in a state of this–has–been. In Roland Barthes’ phrase, the time of absence is indeed full of drama, where the battles of good and evil, joys and sorrows take place.21 In this regard, the photographed person in a photo is never the same person in the real world but is our memory of the one photographed. As Fung says, “One irony in life is no matter how narcissistic people get, no one will ever have a chance to ‘directly see’ their own faces. A person can never see his or her own face, even through a self-portrait.”22 The medium of photography thus encourages us to rethink how a subject understands the self and world, and how we understand things in the present day.23 The prophetic dimension of photography challenges 19 Op.

cit., 4. the relationship between photography and theater, in Roland Barthes’s words, “it is not by Painting that Photography touches art, but by Theater […] Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the death.” Barthes points out that the intermediary between photography and theater is death: “The camera obscura, in short, has generated at one and the same time perspective painting, photography, and the diorama, which are all three arts of the stages; but if Photography seems to me closer to the Theater, it is by way of a singular intermediary (and perhaps I am the one who sees it): by way of Death.” Cf. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography, New York, NY 1981, 31. 21 One of the features of photography is “this-has-been.” “It is precisely in this arrest of interpretation that Photograph’s certainty resides: I exhaust myself realizing that this–has–been […].” Op. cit., 107. 22 Fung, Garden 91, Vol. 23, 4. 23 Cf. Jerry Thompson, Why Photography Matters, Cambridge 2013, 15. 20 For

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the viewer to ask the ever-lasting question, “What is man?” 24 The viewer is reminded to confront both the artistic reality of the photography and one’s eternal destiny in the larger community of human history. Fung’s works embody an on-going process of fully understanding the reality of the world and the God of light. To sum up, Fung’s biblical photography based on Genesis narrative has challenged us to see things at a deeper level. Light and shadow come into play, stimulating our visual imaginings of life and death. The lighting effect as a significant feature of Fung’s photography expresses not only the human limitations to fully understand ourselves but also a longing to capture the eternal light of salvation. Fung’s biblical icons with ecological concerns allow us to understand how the controversial essence of photography can contribute to facilitating devotion not only in the context of Protestantism but also in transforming the society. Light and shadow invoke the sense of time, stimulating our biblical imagination regarding past and present, life and death, and bridging the divide between contemporary photography and theology, artists and churches. 3. Time and Memory Fung’s biblical icons, with their many layers of narratives, are not only images to see but stories to read. They are stories about creation and redemption that serve the pedagogical purpose of interpreting recollection of the biblical past in order to reconstruct one’s own story.25 Fung’s culturally contextualized biblical narratives engage the viewer’s sense of memory, calling for an awareness of ecological crisis and responsibility for a better planet for all creatures.26 The visual translation of biblical stories, without doubt, plays a significant role in evoking the viewer’s memory.27 24 The

artist writes, “There has never been a clear answer on this issue. My existence is relative to another dimension, another person, another object.” Fung, Garden 91, 5. 25 David Morgan’s interpretation of the three functions of image in connection with memory in American Protestantism in the nineteenth and twentieth century is helpful for our understanding of the relationship between Protestant art and imagination: “They satisfy the pedagogical purpose of forming memory; they assist the interpretive recollection of Bible past; and they inform the constructive representation of one’s life course.” Cf. Morgan, Visual Piety, 183. 26 Metz proposes that Christians do not primarily form an argumentative and reasoning community, but a story-telling community, and that exchange of experiences of faith takes a narrative form. Cf. Johann Baptist Metz, A Short Apology of Narrative, in: Why Narrative? Readings in Narrative Theology, Stanley Hauerwas (ed.), Grand Rapids, MI 1989, 251-262, 255. 27 In terms of the memory in connection with the sacred experience, the correlation of biblical teaching and imagery is not a new phenomenon. According to David Morgan, memory is the

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While reflecting upon life and destruction channeled through the dried plant in Fung’s works, German theologian Johann Baptist Metz’s concept of remembering humanity’s suffering history for saving identity provides us with solid ground to reconsider Christian responsibility for our faith and history. The “dangerous memory” of human suffering is called back to one’s memory in the present, as the viewer investigates Fung’s biblical narratives.28 Perceiving the tensions between life and destruction, creation and redemption becomes a process for understanding humankind and proclaiming social justice and transformation. Our individual and collective memories of the past present the dangerous memory of being a Christian. The dangerous memories evoked by Fung’s photographs challenge the viewer to remember that the people and the planet are still suffering from the hardships of economic and ecological injustice. Thereby, the viewer is empowered by the dangerous memory of human history that continues, through time, to speak a new understanding of the future. Human beings, as the sons and daughters of Noah, are the caretakers of nature and the entire universe. However, the present world is still facing the challenges of global warming and climate change that have resulted from the sinful nature of humanity, just as the destruction of the world happened in the time of Noah. Fung’s photographic illustrations of biblical figures thus bring to the viewer a new understanding of Christian faith and responsibility. By remembering the suffering of the past and imagining a better world for the future, Christians stand at the crossroads of history, seeking to understand human subjectivity.

place to store the “bread of God” for the later use, and images are the means of installing it there. Cf. Morgan, Visual Piety, 184. 28 Metz’s narrative-memory-solidarity theory gives us a hermeneutic framework to investigate human subjectivity as exemplified in Fung’s portrait photography. Metz posits that the human being can be understood as the bourgeois individual in the context of modern society, and the act of remembering becomes fundamental for a theological understanding of how men and women are subjects. The reality of the human condition is conveyed through the “dangerous memory” of suffering that happened in human history. The idea of “dangerous memory,” which Metz uses to illuminate the understanding of Christian faith in our present situation, has a narrative structure. “What we have in mind is not a memory in which the ‘good fortune’ and ‘salvation’ of the past is always applied only individually. What we have in mind here is the ‘dangerous memory’ that carries the past and problematizes it, since it remembers the past in terms of a future that is still outstanding. This kind of remembering breaks through the spell of the ruling consciousness. It reclaims unresolved, repressed conflicts and unrequited hopes. It holds up the insights garnered from past experience and in this way destabilizes all those things that are taken for granted in the present.” Cf. Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society. Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology, New York, NY 1980, 170-182.

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In this regard, Fung’s images highlight the representations of the subjectivity of human being through the specific features of the photographic medium. Retelling biblical narratives in contemporary settings confronts us with the questions, What is a human being? The photographic medium has the capacity to raise issues in relation to the subjectivity of human being’s self-image and self-assurance. As biblical stories and events are represented in the lived experiences of God’s peoples from different historical periods, Fung’s icons can bring to the viewer influences on one’s worldviews and attitudes to life. Biblical icons facilitate an understanding of one’s Christian identity and the concept of person itself as the fundamental question in theological anthropology. Fung’s photos unveil oneself to the self and become the cultural production expressing the artist’s belief in humanity. In addition, each one photographed by Fung is a person who lives in the real world and inspires Fung’s works. Being a pastor, Fung’s personal encountering of each model, who is from the artist’s congregation or is the artist’s friend, significantly contributes to the contemplative nature of his work. Unlike painting, the quality of likeness is never a challenging task in photography, yet it is the spirit of the person that catches the eyes of the viewer and makes Fung’s biblical icons become true portrait of the soul. Even though the interrelation signified between biblical characters and each person is not necessarily consequential, each biblical figure’s story functions as a hint for viewers’ meditation upon their own experiences of encountering God. Thus, Fung’s goal is never the mere resemblance of the ancient character found in the likeness of the sitters. Laid behind each of Fung’s photographic icons is the artist’s distinct interpretation of the human encounter with God and the notable concept of self. For Fung, knowing oneself and knowing God are interrelated. The intimate relationship with God also reflects the artist’s encounter with his congregation members. Fung always sees in his subjects the pure, true, and glorious human nature that serves as a vehicle for the grace of God. Each of God’s people is participating in a bigger story of salvation in a unique way. The trust between the photographer and the photographed person plays an indispensable role in building up an intimate communication that contributes to the exchange of emotions between photographic work and the viewer, engaging one’s visual imagination of human destiny.29 Photography has the capacity to record the person photographed perfectly that suits Fung’s intention to ask about the reality of the world. 29

Cf. Fung, interview note, Taipei 2014.

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Contextualizing known individuals in the guises of biblical personages shows the ambiguity of interlacing two layers of narratives – the biblical story of salvation in the past and a human being’s current life in the present – challenging the viewer to examine which narrative represents the human’s real historical existence. Photographic icons become the means for Fung to convey his historical consciousness and challenge the viewer to answer the question: What is the meaning of the true image of human being made in God’s image? For Fung, a photographer’s production of an image is like a human being’s attempt to preserve a certain moment in time and as one’s eternal existence. Narrative in Fung’s photos here engages the viewer’s sense of history by providing a new perspective to retell humanity’s story in the world of reality. It is indeed the ambiguity of such photographic language that conveys both the absence and presence depicted in Fung’s photographic icons. The figure in Fung’s photo is not the real image of the person, but the memory of one’s existence in that specific time and space in a certain moment of life. In this way, memory is not less significant than the real world. As Fung explains, “A picture is not just a snapshot of what took place. It represents man’s anxiety of an unpredictable future […] No picture you see will ever be completely objective. What you believe determines what you see.” 30 Humans as innocent yet fallible creations have a strong yearning for eternity. This characteristic of narrative in Fung’s photography provides a critical examination of human understandings of time and history. This chapter has explored humanity’s consciousness of being an image of God as well as the artist’s strategy of using portrait photography to practice environmental justice and solidarity. The findings on the object, light, and story have led to our understandings of the artist’s biblical imagination and how it shapes our sense of the sacred and the world. Compared to the traditional art form of painting, photography as a momentous medium of the day reflects theological issues of the current context. We have seen that the representation of an invisible God is shown in these photographic icons, as Fung contextualizes biblical icons into a contemporary setting. This is exactly what Fung’s biblical icons communicate so well: that portrait photography has the capacity to serve a pedagogical purpose in interpreting biblical events and characters in order to retell one’s life story.31 By successfully using ancient 30

Fung, Garden 91, 4. A photographic image with its ability to focus or frame certain time and place may serve as an offering inviting the viewer’s attention and reflection upon one’s life story. Cf. Kimberly 31

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clothing and dying plants as agents to mediate the human-divine encounter, Fung’s works evoke our theological imagination on time and timelessness. Light and shadow also play significant roles in stimulating our memories of life and destruction in the ancient past, and finally, inviting us to reexamine our stories in the bigger story of redemption and creation. The stories of ten virgins in the kingdom of heaven and Genesis on God’s creation and humanity’s original sin both come into play, stimulating our reception to the image, and enhancing the spirit of devotion. Fung’s biblical portrait photography with its many layers of narratives then invites us to reconsider how the memory of the sacred can be manifested in the contextual representations of biblical stories, particularly in the context of Protestant churches in Asia. All these findings have cleared the way for our imagination of time and memory manifested in contemporary forms of devotional art, creating a bridge between the tangible and ineffable, physical and transcendent worlds. Fung’s biblical portraits have suggested the importance of using photographic images as primary sources, and offer us the examples of how visual analysis can be applied in studying theology. Contemporary photographic icons are vital and dynamic agents in the articulation and formation of belief. Ultimately, Fung’s missiological strategy of using portrait photography as an expressive tool for spreading the gospel contributes to an interdisciplinary study of art and inculturation. Fung’s biblical icons have thus allowed us to further explore how biblical photography, a material artifact of Christianity, shapes the reformulation of belief and the space of worship, not only in the context of Asia but in a broader global reality.

Vrudny and Wilson Yates (eds.), Arts, Theology, and the Church. New Intersections, Cleveland, OH 2005, 240.

Conclusion The significant outcome of the present study is to confirm that contemporary Taiwanese Christian artists use images as instruments for theological expression, by deliberatly integrating elements from their cultural and religious backgrounds. Their arts rooted in the context of Taiwan thus illuminate and incarnate the gospel. As Taiwanese church historian Cheng Yang-en proposes, contextualization or inculturation is the most perplexing theological question for Christians in Asia. In order to critically evaluate Asian culture, and yet, at the same time, to esteem cultural integrity, the first step is simply to embrace wholeheartedly one’s own cultural identity.1 Several conclusions regarding the relationship between art and inculturation are listed below. Mediation as Visual Strategy Rather than merely imitating the conventional forms of Christian signs and symbols, contemporary Taiwanese Christian art results from the mutual conversation between Christianity and Taiwanese culture. These cultural products have demonstrated that the correlation of symbols, myths, metaphors, and allegory derived from both the gospel and artists’ living circumstances can be powerful mediums engaging one culture and another, serving as effective means for Christian mission and witness.2 Without acknowledging the identity established in Asian cultural and religious heritage, the significance of a work of art rooted in the Asian context will not be truly affirmed. Therefore, recognizing 1 In

term of the missiological issues originating from the encounter and interaction of the gospel and Taiwan’s own historical and cultural context, Cheng Yang-en presents the four prominent and dominant issues which correlate respectively to aspects of culture, politics, economics, and the people. Cf. Cheng, The Contextualization of Christianity in Taiwan, 335. 2 As Bevans proposes, the inculturation process is not a mechanical activity. Instead, working towards inculturation involves the “elusive qualities of insight, depth, creativity, imagination, wisdom, openness to grace, courage in the face of risk, and recognition of the unexpected.” Cf. Bevans and Schroeder, Prophetic Dialogue, 89.

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the inherent value of the native culture and religion in their art-making elevates our appreciation of Asian Christian art to another level. Several mediating tools summarized in the chart below help understand Christian artists’ constructions of visual strategies that offer insights to better articulate the communication between cultures. Artists Etan Pavavalung Cheng ChienChang Wang Jen-Wen

Medium Printmaking, mixed media Oil painting

Mediating Tools Symbol of lily

Theological Topics Local techniques and landscape

Creation myth

Intercultural /interreligious dialogue

Watercolor

Body Metaphor

Chris Chou

Oil painting

Dots and circles

Stanley Fung

Photography

Biblical icons

Feast imagery; Woman and community Sensory response to the arts Theological anthropology; God’s creation

Chart 1, Visual Strategies of Contemporary Taiwanese Christian Art

Correlating art and visual culture with Christian mission has formed a space of mediation to engage in a prophetic dialogue concerning God’s creation. Resulting from the encounter between Christianity and Taiwan’s historical and social contexts, images as spaces for interaction and communication have helped us truly appreciate the amazing wealth of the multiplicity of East Asian cultures, social practices, and belief systems within the Asian communities.3 Taiwanese artists respond to their social realities by using visual language to witness their Christian faith. Their works embedded within their own social-historical contexts are products of a conversation between art and mission, as the artists aim to correlate elements derived from their local settings to their faith expression. The Christian witness manifested in contemporary Asian Christian art urges us to recognize a more dynamic process of inculturation, which is both open to change and future-oriented.

3

For instance, Fumitaka Matsuoka raises a threefold epistemological scaffold: (1.) the meaning of race experienced and interpreted by Asian Americans, (2.) a sensitivity to pathos that has grown out of a culture of dissonance and dissent, (3.) an “amphibolous” faith that is “likely to be expressed in a domain of a myriad conflicting historical religious traditions such as Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, coming together, forcing us to live in a state of dis-identification with any existing religious tradition in which we find ourselves.” Cf. Fumitaka Matsuoka, Learning to Speak a New Tongue. Imagining a Way That Holds People Together – An Asian American Conversation, Eugene, OH 2011, 1-15.

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Visual Representation of the Invisible By applying symbol, myth, metaphor, icons, and allegory as visual strategies, Taiwanese artists depict image of an invisible God into their contexts for faith expressions. Regarding the artists’ use of visible, local material to represent the invisible God, tension apparently exists in this complex process of cultural exchange. In any situation of cultural contact, a symbol belonging to one culture is rarely accepted by another without a change in meaning.4 Figurative expressions of a transcendent God among contemporary Taiwanese Protestants churches are still considered to be controversial, due to the influence of the iconoclastic movement in church history. In order to build up a conversation in terms of their relationship with God, artists carefully portray the divine image through artistic expression. By virtue of their expressive modes of transformation, images here serve as agencies to explore the interplay of Christian faith and Taiwanese culture, creating spaces of mediation across borders to dialogue with the other. Artists look for new Christian narratives in their relationships to spiritual meanings as means to express their imagination toward the image of God. Reception contributes to Inculturation Process As a matter of fact, both production and reception of the images contributes to inculturation itself. On the one hand, artists aim to bring the aesthetics of Asian culture and history from the margin into the center of theological reflection. On the other hand, perception to signs and symbols received from the artists’ community contributes to a better understanding of a lived Asian Christian faith. The process of inculturation, no doubt, demands that the viewer theologically engages particular social contexts. The personal interpretation of the arts thus plays big part in articulating Christian faith within one’s faith communities. Images provide sources for the viewer to encounter new systems of cultural patterns and artistic practices. By participating in such an aesthetic process of reception of the arts, the viewer is first transformed by the power of image and open to change. There is a great need for future research on topics related to the aesthetic approach to Asian Christian art, including the reception process to the material histories of Asian Christianity in global contexts, the influence of Asian Christian art and aesthetics on the educational system and curricula, and the relation of aesthetic space to interreligious encounter. In this regard, an aesthetic framework of studying art and 4 Cf.

Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542-1773, 28.

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inculturation theology in the non-Christian world of Asia does not exhaust our attempts to examine cultural artifacts for other social settings, but rather foments a fuller understanding of the spirit of intercultural mediation and interreligious dialogue. Taiwanese Christian art represents an awareness of a significant shift from indigenization to contextualization of the gospel. One which acknowledges that God has already been at work in Taiwan and moreover, that this same God is inviting us to participate in this creation.5 These various works of art, whether they be prints, woodcuts, watercolor, oil paintings, or photography, show a radical change in perspective, one seeking to highlight the rhythm and contour of people’s communal life. The artists lived experiences rooted in cultural contexts sustain value and meaning for the Asian people and their land, which provide an invaluable source to faithfully understand the context as well as to interpret the gospel itself. This research on the particularity of context in light of Christian faith has taught us to witness the Asian artists’ commitments to integrating cultural identities with their Christian responsibility for a better planet. In this manner, Asian Christian communities are recognizing their needs to speak out with the voice of their cultures, thus opting for a vibrant process of inculturation. Finally, Christian artworks for centuries are cultural products resulting from reworking and reinterpreting the old message of Christian faith. Asian Christian art in its pluralistic contexts is deeply molded by different faiths and cultural traditions. If I were to redesign that liturgical banner made for my seminary chapel a few years ago, I would be more confident in freely using signs and symbols from both Christian and Taiwanese cultures and religions. Asian Christian art by its nature is both old and new, its quality of mediation has the capacity to translate, reinterpret, and express the relationship between faith and culture in fresh and creative ways. Image plays a key role in breaking boundaries, enhancing an intercultural understanding of mission, and thereby enhancing an open-minded, contemporary dialogue with different cultures and religions.

5 According

to Taiwanese theologian C. H. Hwang (Shoki Coe)’s understanding of contextualization, contextualization of theology is the profound interplay between cultures: Context interprets the text, and the text cannot be interpreted meaningfully without a true understanding of the context. Cf. Cheng, What New Song Shall We Sing?, 304.

Epilogue Teaching Asian Christian Art in the Theological Classroom In the Fall of 2016, I taught a course entitled Christian Art of Asia at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, California. This opportunity allowed me to concretely explore what I have learned through this present study. My reflection on teaching Asian Christian art pertain to how I taught this subject in this particular theological classroom, but also how I might teach it in the future. This Epilogue also presents some other issues involving Asian Christian art which surfaced and will have to be the subject of other research projects. The Newhall Fellowship Award from the Graduate Theological Union allowed me to offer the course Christian Art of Asia at an intermediate level.1 During this process of engaging Asian Christian art to study theology, I learned valuable lessons from the students as my fellow learners. Their diverse nationalities and denominational backgrounds taught me that teaching art in the theological classroom can break down cultural boundaries and provide a space for exploring one’s spirituality.2 Both instructors and students discovered that engaging the arts collectively in a learning community is a powerful way to practice or do theology. These pedagogical moments were mined as we studied the riches of the other in Asian cultural heritages in the classroom as well as on a museum trip. To this end, the present Epilogue describes 1 This

course was based on my research topic on art and inculturation and was offered under the supervision of Dr. Eduardo C. Fernández, SJ, a missiologist and practical theologian. I want to express my immense gratitude to Dr. Fernandez for his strong support for our journey together throughout the Fall semester of 2016. 2 In terms of the ethnic diversity of students in the classroom, most of the students came from different Asian backgrounds, such as the Philippines, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Singapore, as well as one from Germany. The students’ Christian denominational backgrounds were also diverse as the group included not only Protestant students but also Catholics, among them some priests and deacons.

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the goals, methods, and outcomes of our time spent in exploring Christian Art of Asia. Time spend in searching how God’s love had become manifested in exploring our own cultural identities. Either as Asian Americans or international students who were interested in Christian art in an Asian context, the students of the seminar convinced me of the contemplative and pedagogical possibilities of using culturally oriented art for self-exploration. For example, one Singaporean student, who was in the process of rediscovering his cultural roots, commented on the last day of class that the course helped him reconnect to the rich diversity of the artistic expressions from Asia. Experiencing the masterpieces of Asian art and other aspects of its cultural heritage was rare for him as an Asian Protestant. Asian Christian art and spirituality thus has much to teach us today. After introducing the topic, I will describe the course’s content, method, and some specific lessons we learned from our group exploration. Topics The course primarily examined the problems of visual representation raised in Christian art of Asia.3 The trend of Asian Christian art after World War II has paralleled contextual theology and the mission movement. The development of a contextual theology coincided with the independence of the young churches within a pluralistic Asian context, thus emphasizing human experience and praxis that is manifested artistically. Asian Christian art has followed the trends of ethical concerns and cultural exchange, as artists utilize cultural symbols and narratives in the project of contextualization. Indeed, issues surrounding contextual theology in each Asian nation have become the central focus of Asian Christian art in the second half of the twentieth century. Asian Christian art, communicating various contemporary cultures and beliefs, illuminates the diverse expressions of Christian faith. Art thus has the capacity to fill the gap of understanding the interaction between Christian faith and the multiplicity of Asian cultural and religious traditions. In this regard, one of the learning goals for the class required students to articulate the multiple facets of Asian Christian art and visual culture within its complex definitions. The course generally understood Christian art in light of the content of the work, and how successfully the artist has matched the medium with the message.4 Christian art’s 3 For

the three elements to define Christian art in Asia by Ron O’ Grady, see footnote 1 in the introduction chapter. 4 Cf. Schaeffer, Art and the Bible, 64.

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content, in turn, stems from the artist’s worldview, one ultimately shaped by scripture and other religious themes. Through this presentation, the debate about the definition of Asian Christian art opens spaces for dialogue with Asian cultures and religions. Christian art itself is culturally contingent, offering an opportunity to see how the role of image functions when the Christian message has been translated, transmitted, and received visually through the process of inculturation. Studying the medium of images relies on an intercultural hermeneutics to understand the ways in which meaning negotiates cultural boundaries.5 These religious practices and attitudes toward the use of images inform the act of seeing, as it occurs in a given social and cultural circumstance. Our study of Asian Christian art, both high and low (popular), engaged scripture and tradition directly and allusively, unpacking cultural codes of narratives, signs, symbols, imageries, metaphors, and allegory. These findings on Asian societies’ construction of visual perspectives through images offered insights to better articulate the communication between cultures while correlating art and aesthetics with the studies of mission and theology. More Detailed Topical Treatment Drawing on the resources of mission studies, material culture, visual analysis, Asian spirituality, and artistic experiences allowed the students to investigate the hermeneutical connections between theological thoughts and Asian Christian art. The current theological interest in engaging the visual arts relies on a deeper and more expansive study of the visual culture and how it relates to theology. David Morgan’s exploration of the role of object/ image in mission art history helps define Asian Christian art through an examination of visual cultural study.6 Morgan’s interpretive framework emphasizes the interplay of these hybrid images in the process of cultural encounter. In this regard, Asian Christian art is not seen as a static work of art, but rather as an object that has its own life and history. Asian Christian artists and their works form spaces of mediation in which people form, transmit, and modify their identities while encountering other cultural groups and religious practices. 5 Robert

Schreiter proposes four distinctive characteristics of this intercultural hermeneutic position: meaning, truth, sameness/difference, and agency. Cf. Schreiter, The New Catholicity, 39; Bergmann discusses on the notion of contextual perspectives on art and the theological significance with four examples of art in context. Cf. Bergmann, God in Context, 113-179. 6 Morgan analyzes mission objects of six different moments throughout the history of colonization and mission using a visual cultural approach. Cf. Morgan, The Sacred Gaze, 151.

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One of the central goals of the course was critiquing practices and examples of Christian art as seen through the goal of inculturation, or the dialogue of faith with the various Asian cultures via the arts. Pondering both Asian Christian art as an artistic and spiritual discipline, the students produced significant theological reflections. While engaging a range of art works from different Asian countries, including ivory sculpture in China, religious painting in India, calligraphy and screen painting in Japan, and images of the Virgin Mary in Southeast Asia, we framed our investigations around themes that highlighted the methods, efforts, debates, institutions, and ideologies that have emerged in the discipline. Each of our weekly classes, such as Art and Idol, explored the interaction of Asian Christian art within the non-Christian world and its potential for creating an intercultural dialogue. In another week we explored the unique materiality in Asian Christian art that transcends the plain copying of the European style of Christian iconography. Networks also played significant roles in understanding agency and transmission of image in mission history. Our readings probed recent studies around the topic of cultural mediation, for instance, early Manila trade and the routes that connected Japan with the Philippines and Mexico. Having generally described some of the thinking related to the pedagogical design of the course, I now focus on methodology. Method The study of images provided the content and method for the course. Christian art of East and West naturally became the best sources for students to draw from for visual practicing and thinking. Our attention to the images in different sensory modes, such as feeling, memory, and sensation, were thus interwoven with our intellectual learning process as well as our devotional time. For instance, as we explored art and spirituality in a close examination of a single biblical painting, Woman at the Well made by the famous Indian Christian artist Jyoti Sahi, a student commented that spirituality is our hunger for union with God and image can help us to be engaged with the divine. A particular assignment which became very appealing for students was that each of them had to prepare and lead a weekly devotion engaging the arts. As a matter of fact, each week the class began with a 15-minute activity, as each

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student took turns engaging visual art for prayer and devotion.7 One Korean student led us through a close contemplation of William Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World, a nineteenth-century painting representing Jesus knocking on a tall, unopened door. The student was able to give an interpretation of the image related to his personal experience, and then explained why this image played a significant role in his faith journey. The integration of image as a key component during the class’s devotional time became one of the students’ favorite activities. The lectures, reading materials, group discussions, and students’ presentations were indeed filled with striking works of Christian art and image, ranging widely across geographic areas and time periods. Throughout the semester, students had several opportunities to practice collaborative learning using image as the focal point. For example, one week I allowed the students to freely form small groups and then to lead the class in closely revisiting the image they had already contemplated in their small group, an intensification which became very energizing. Since the students needed to choose one image/object as a starting point for their final research project, another week’s session consisted of each of them introducing their project along with an initial analysis and interpretation of their images. As a visual artist and educator, I believe that each of my students is created in the image of God and thus has inherited God’s creativity. Yet, this task of engaging on a work of art did not appear to be part of their educational background. Some of them, for example, expressed that this was the first art class they had ever taken in a seminary setting. I, on the other hand, have been trained since my youth in visual thinking and art making. Because of that, I know the power of image to access human capacity to think beyond our limitations and point our lives towards the unknown. One of the students initiated our devotional time by asking us to describe either verbally or visually, what the image of God was for each of us. In that moment of describing an image of God in our lived experiences, each one was bound to the other, as we learned to do visual thinking and theologizing together. We understood the power of image as more than words and thoughts, that is, God as a living God is much bigger than what we can think and imagine. Our prayer no longer needed to be mere abstraction that lacks reality, but a concrete experiencing of God alive in our learning community. 7 As

Michael Battle points out, the power of prayer requires community because we must rely on other’s experience with God to come to know God. Cf. Michael Battle, Teaching and Learning as Ceaseless Prayer, in: The Scope of Our Art. The Vocation of the Theological Teacher, Gregory Jones and Stephanie Paulsell (eds.), Grand Rapids, MI 2002, 155-172, 161.

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Overall Lessons Learned “What are some cultural and religious challenges, i.e., a certain iconoclasm in some denominations, which might be encountered in reference to Christian art in Asia?” The above constitutes one of the questions I asked students to reflect upon during our last session. My initial motivation for these type of questions was to stimulate those students from particular Protestant backgrounds, where image in the liturgical space remains suspect. However, this inter-cultural approach to the study of Asian Christian art demonstrates that the multi-potentiality of Christian art has the capacity to open up space for increased interpretations. Surprisingly, the question also encouraged critical thinking on the inculturated image of Christ for students who came from an image-friendly environment. One Filipina American student mentioned her difficulty in appreciating historically inaccurate images of Christ from other contexts. As a Filipina from a Catholic background, non-Western images of Christ had been problematic for her before taking this class. As a corrective to the excessively Western artistic expressions of Christian faith, Asian Christian art appeals to people from different cultural contexts. Its unique colors and patterns cannot be replaced by the images found in the history of Western religious paintings. At first, I considered only filling my lectures with contemporary reading materials, such as articles discussing how artists started to incorporate native cultural elements in their appropriations of Christian art in Asian contexts. A student’s comment on the last day class convinced me that I was right to add materials on Asian Christian art from the sixth to eighteenth century into our reading. The 1200 years of Asian artistic expressions of Christianity became a resource for many students’ recognition of and appreciation for their Asian cultural roots and belongings.8 One student from a Protestant background expressed her excitement at finding an access point for studying the beauty of Asian art and culture. Her midterm project topic explored the art of South East Asia, by addressing the historical roots and characteristics of Marian piety in the Catholic Vietnamese context. Her final project presented a inter-cultural understanding of the transgender imagery of Kuan-yin/Kannon in a Japanese context and concluded with pastoral applications. Coming from a Protestant background in which the bodily sense of hearing is privileged over that of sight, I treasured the opportunity to 8I

am dating the early Christianity in Central Asia which began in the late fifth century when Christians belonging to the Church of the East, living in Sasanian Iran, crossed the Amu Darya (Oxus River). Cf. Ken Parry, Early Christianity in Central Asia and China, in Christianity in Asia, Chong (ed.), 26.

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learn from my students how to integrate art into one’s spiritual life, especially during the devotional time at the beginning of each class. At one point, I kept to this class activity despite my mentor’s concern that it was taking too much time in the class period. One student, for example, led the opening prayer by silently playing photographs of flowers with different colors and shapes on the big screen, and asked the rest of the class to quietly contemplate the displayed pictures. In the end, he started to share a simple message that everyone is like a flower of different kinds, no matter whether we are blooming or withering. The student concluded with a prayer asking God to grant us God’s love so that we could realize our wonderful relationship to flowers and act wisely with the other flowers around us. As I reflect theologically upon the lived spiritually of this devotion, I realized that the power of the student’s message on that Tuesday afternoon relied on the promise and goodness in every student that exists because God who fashioned them lives in them. Images can thus invite us to contemplate more deeply God’s presence in us and in all of creation. Some Final Remarks One of the limitations of the course was that it was unable to cover more fully the variety of Asian Christian art from different geographic areas against the backdrop of different religious heritages. For the most part, images introduced in the class were selected from the artworks produced by artists from Christian backgrounds, their geographical locations being mainly from China, India, and Japan. As Alan Chong observes, “Christian art in Asia was created by artists of many different faiths: Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Confucian, and so on.”9 Asian Christian art thus opens gateway for intercultural and interreligious dialogue. As Peter Phan writes, the future of Asian Christianity depends on dialogue, that is, dialogue with the Asian peoples, Asian cultures (contextualization or inculturation), and Asian religions (inter-faith or inter-religious dialogue).10 Christian art made by non-Christians be a fruitful subject for the further study of mission and interculturation. In conclusion, as I look back upon the journey which began the day I first walked into our initial class session, my heart is filled with love and gratitude. Through an examination of our lived experiences, a key component in the discipline of Christian spirituality, I see that it was God who led us in the challenge of our daily experiences. God is our 9 Op. 10 Cf.

cit., 9. Peter C. Phan, Christianities in Asia, Malden, MA 2011, 257.

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best teacher and mentor. I feel that this same God is now reminding me that those before me are God’s gifts entrusted to me. Each student taught me how they see images in ways different from my own. Just as each flower has a divine truth to share, I, as a teacher teaching art and theology, have as my task to discover and nurture God’s image in each of my students.

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Color Plates

Fig. 8 Etan Pavavalung, Rooted in this Land, 2014.

Fig. 10 Etan Pavavalung, Hopeful Sign, 2013.

Fig. 11 Etan Pavavalung, Sign of Hope, 2016.

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Fig. 12 Cheng Chien-Chang, Genesis 1, 2010.

Fig. 13 Cheng Chien-Chang, Land, Signification, Attractiveness, 2008.

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Fig. 14 Wang Jen-wen, Christ, the Bread of Life, 2013.

Fig. 15 Wang Jen-wen, The Wound is a Fern Leaf, 2013.

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Fig. 16 Chris Chou, Six Jars, 2006.

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Fig. 17 Chris Chou, 153 Fishes, 2006.

Fig. 3 Unknown Artist, Transforming to a New Person (A New Robe).

Fig. 5 Sadao Watanabe, Christ Carrying the Cross, 1968.

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Fig. 6 Solomon Raj, Water of Life, 2007.

Fig. 7 He Qi, Christ before Pilate, 1998.

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