Fu-sheng KU 1935-2017: Fu-sheng KU - Song of Myself - Years

An eternally innocent heart

In the summer of 1993 I saw Ku Fu-sheng again in Taipei. He had come back from the USA to visit his family. Looking back, we hadn’t seen each other for at least five or six years since he left San Francisco for Portland. Though we both live in America, we don’t necessarily manage to get together very often—in fact, as we live quite some distance apart, we hardly see each other at all. But after all, Taipei is our old stamping ground, and as chance would have it we both flew back at the same time. We arranged to meet one afternoon at the Eslite bookstore for coffee, and when we came out we walked to the circle at the intersection of Tunhua South Road and Jen-ai Road. It was the Taipei evening rush hour, and a flood of people and vehicles gyrated around the circle like a carousel. In the heat of August, the sticky and filthy city air hung in a smog between the crowded skyscrapers of Taipei’s most upmarket district, and through the haze the evening sun bathed their glass walls in a blaze of color. Fu-sheng and I must have been overawed by this post-modernist Taipei street scene, and as there was no chance of hailing a taxi, we simply sat down on some stone steps by the side of Tunhua South Road. Oblivious to the stream of passers-by and the roar of the traffic, we began to talk and joke about everything under the sun. Fu-sheng is three years older than me, and was close to sixty, but as we chatted, all the ravages of the years fell away from his face, and the Ku Fu-sheng before my eyes was the same Ku Fu-sheng I had met more than thirty years before—a painter with an eternally innocent heart, who embraces art and throws himself into it unreservedly. Art is the whole of Ku Fu-sheng’s life. It fills his entire world, leaving no space in his heart for anything else. For over thirty years, no setback has ever caused Ku Fu-sheng to waver in the slightest in his passionate and persistent pursuit of art. Throughout his life, he has devoted himself to art completely.

I think Fu-sheng was taking a more and more tolerant attitude toward life, so that his vision was becoming broader, and there was room for compromise between man and nature and between man and self. In a picture of lilies, every flower bud contained a curled-up naked baby—this was a “hundred children” picture in which heaven and earth were at one. This change also brought humor into his art, and suddenly we saw, for instance, a pair of human legs sticking up from the center of a large cake.

Ku Fu-sheng’s world has always been a surreal one, and he has always been breaking through the bounds of rationality, to make his fantasies and dreams fly wherever he pleases. That night I slept in that little attic room. Seeing those paintings with human figures flying through the heavens, a zebra standing in a bedroom or a great black donkey floating above a person’s head, I could not help gasping in admiration at artists’ power to recreate our visual world. 

Back when Ku Fu-sheng and a group of up-and-coming young painters founded the Fifth Moon group, it had a profound influence on Taiwan’s modern art circles. Over more than thirty years, the artistic enthusiasm of this pioneer of Taiwanese modern art has not diminished in the slightest. Fu-sheng’s perseverance and courage as an artist are what I admire most about him. 

A Life Devoted to Art—A Sketch of Ku Fu-sheng by Pai Hsien-yung