Lee Chi-mao (1925-2019) was born as Lee Yun-tai on March 22, 1925, in Guoyang County (present-day Lixin County), Anhui Province, China, and lived to the advanced age of 94. His grandfather, Lee Ting-hsuan, was a local landowner, while his father was a scholar. In 1934, Lee was placed under the tutelage of Lu Hua-shih, who taught him brushwork techniques and artistic concepts by copying examples of bird-and-flower scenes, landscapes, animals and figures from the Jieziyuan Huapu (Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden).
In 1943, Lee went to Shanghai, where he joined the Youth Corps and changed his name to Lee Chi-mao. He then came to Taiwan in 1949, where he was to become one of the first generation of representative Chinese ink-wash painters in the post-war period. Lee held his first exhibition in 1950, themed around the “four gentlemen” and bird-and-flower painting, together with still-life techniques. In 1952, he was accepted into the Fine Arts Department of the Political Worker Cadres School (now called the Political Warfare Cadres Academy, also known as Fu Hsing Kang College), where he received a formal art education under Liang Ding-ming and his brothers.
In 1956, Lee was stationed in Kinmen for his military service, where he witnessed firsthand the intensive shelling by the People's Liberation Army during the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1958. It was here that he felt the call of his vocation in figurative painting.
In 1960, he produced works such as Wutu, Wumin (My Land, My People), in which he depicted scenes of ordinary people going about their lives, and in 1966 received an award in the Chungshan Academic and Cultural Creative Arts Awards, the first of many accolades he would be given over his career. In 1968, he painted the Guofu Xingyitu (Biography of the Founding Father), depicting 100 scenes from the life of the Republic of China's founding father Sun Yat-sen in ink with pastel washes. In 1970, he named his studio the Tsaifeng Study and himself Master of the Tsaifeng Study, an allusion to the fact that his work often portrayed stories and customs from around the world.
In 1964, Lee began traveling to other countries and holding exhibitions to disseminate Chinese culture and art around the world. When he went to West Berlin to hold a solo exhibition of Chinese ink painting in 1972, he came to understand that artwork should ideally speak with a unique voice of national character and modern times. It was also at this time that he became keenly aware of the importance of dynamic, flowing brushwork and simple lines as expressive tools. This epiphany was to produce a major turning point in his work that developed into his own characteristic style. As an initial foray into cross-strait cultural exchange, he held his first solo exhibition in Shanghai in 1991, then in 2012 opened the Lee Chi-Mao Museum of Art in Gaotang County in China's Shandong Province. Over the course of these two decades, he devoted himself to promoting international and cross-strait cultural exchange events, aspiring to expand artists’ creative visions.
Lee Chi-mao has taught in the art departments of his alma mater the Political Worker Cadres School, as well as Chinese Culture University, the National Taiwan College of Arts (now the National Taiwan University of Arts), San Jose State University in the US and Dankook University in South Korea, teaching art and cultivating the next generation of artists.
The artists Lu Hua-shih and Liang Ding-ming had the biggest influence on Lee's career, giving him a firm foundation in draftsmanship. While his early works depicted warfare and conflict, he would subsequently turn his brush to subjects of everyday life in Taiwan and ordinary people, starting a new trend in common aesthetics. Reflecting the times, his wide variety of subject matter showed scenes full of local flavor, with street hawkers peddling their wares, night markets and passengers on MRT trains. At the same time, he was influenced by the creative spirit of Qi Baishi, imbuing his works with conceptual ideas and capturing a fleeting moment in time.
This, coupled with his expansive and unrestrained freehand, his brush tip charged with ink, imbue the elements rendered by his brush with dynamism as well as elegant refinement. The paintings give free rein to the imagined world, extending beyond the original conception and its composition, unlimited by the surface of the painting itself to express the artist's inner intent. Lee's achievements have been recognized throughout the globe, bringing him international renown.
Lee Chi-mao's relationship with the National Museum of History began in 1962, when the museum invited him to participate in a national exhibition on horses. He contributed a painting that captured with brush and ink the speed and rhythm of galloping horses from his recollections as a young boy in the Jiayu Pass in China's Gansu Province. The realism and rhythm he managed to distill in these depictions captured the world's attention.
From 1964 to 1974, Lee was invited by the museum to participate in numerous exhi-bitions in dozens of countries, all of which were well-received. In 1971, the museum commissioned him to create a collection of works depicting Sun Yat-sen at different stages of his life and during various significant events, which Lee executed with dis-ciplined lines and an artistic eye, relating the life of this great figure in a series of 100 pictures that are now housed in the museum's collection.
In 1981 he joined 10 other artists representing three generations, including the giants of painting Chang Dai-chien and Huang Chun-pi to create the 215ft horizontal scroll Baodao Changchun Tu (Formosa Evergreen), the process of which he related in an interview organized by the museum in 2018 as part of its digital content project. In his concluding remarks, Lee said: “Today, if it weren't for the National Museum of History, there would be no Taiwanese art.”
The museum collection contains 160 works by Lee Chi-mao in 61 sets, including paintings and paper cuttings, as well as the 100 works from the Biography of the Founding Father commission.
