TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — This painting of an old temple in Taipei City's Wanhua District is featured at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.
The work is by the late Taiwanese watercolor painter Ni Chiang-huai (倪蔣懷) and is titled "Bangka Patriarch Temple" (艋舺祖師廟). Bangka is the Taiwanese Hokkien word for Wanhua District, Taipei City's oldest district.
The piece was painted in 1939 on the third-floor terrace of Ni's son-in-law's house, which overlooked the Sanxia Qingshui Zushi Temple and homes and buildings in Wanhua District at the time. Also visible in the painting are hills on the other side of the Tamsui River, providing a glimpse into Taipei's past.
It is among 500 of his creations donated by his family to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum on the 80th anniversary of his death in 1943, reported National Education Radio. This marked the largest number of donations since the museum opened 40 years ago.
On Saturday (April 22), the museum held the "Time Capsule: Ni Chiang-huai Works Donation Ceremony" to thank Ni's descendants for their donation of his precious works and related collections.
The donation includes 215 of Ni's watercolor/oil paintings, eight sketchbooks, family and school photo books, and four diary manuscripts. It also includes the carefully collected works of other artists, related books, and documents, such as the 36 masterpieces of Ishikawa Kinichiro.
The family also donated 176 volumes of Taiwanese and foreign art albums, catalogs, and art magazines bought and collected by Ni. This portion of the donation was meant to enable museum visitors to learn about the artistic inspirations that influenced the artist in the 1930s.
Ni's 1928 painting "Houtong Ruisan Mining Industry." (Taipei Fine Arts Museum image)
Ni Hou-jen (倪侯仁), the artist's son and family patriarch, was present at the ceremony. He said that his father had died of kidney disease at the age of 50.
The junior Ni said that he was only a little over one year old at the time his father died. He said that most of his memories of his father came from the paintings that he decided to donate.
According to Ni's son, during wartime air raids, his mother and elder brother carried the paintings on their shoulders and fled to the Ruifang Mountains on the upper Keelung River to hide, and these collections have been preserved to this day. After the Ni family went through wars and emigrated several times, part of his father's collection was purchased by the government as an art museum collection, and other works were kept by 12 family members at home and abroad.
After discussion among the family members, it was decided that through a public donation ceremony, the world could "see the humanistic landscape of Taiwan a hundred years ago under his father's watercolor brush, and his desire to promote art education, cultivate young talent, and to get to know him and other early Taiwanese painters better."
The artist's ambition during his lifetime was to establish an art museum named "Baofeng" (Baofeng is the name of Ni's ancestral hall in Quanzhou, Fujian), with the aim of promoting art education in Taiwan. The Taipei Fine Arts Museum stated that with this gift it will "shoulder the heavy responsibility of preservation and maintenance of works, education research, and exhibition, and hopes to continue Ni's artistic vision, enrich the research context and promote art education through precious collections."
"Bangka Patriarch Temple" by Ni Chiang-huai. (CNA photo)