A Song in the Clear River, Yu Chengyao

Archive Label 2003:
Yu Chengyao was a National military officer, trained in Japan, who taught himself to paint late in life. He later said that wartime travels with his troops gave him a keen understanding of topography and helped him to grasp landscape forms. In 1949, after the Nationalists were defeated, Yu left the mainland for Taiwan where he "took up the brush to kill time" and quickly became deeply engaged in recreating the remembered mountain landscapes of his homeland. Unlike most traditional Chinese landscape painting, Yu Chengyao's work does not emphasize refined and practiced brushwork. Instead, he uses busy, scratchy brush strokes to build up the texture of the mountains and contrasting ink tones to define form and create a clear sense of spatial relationships.

Yu Chengyao was recognized in the United States many years before he was appreciated in Taiwan. In 1960 C.C. Wang visited Yu in Taiwan and introduced his paintings to the United States. In 1964 A Song in the Clear River was among ten of Yu's landscape paintings included in The New Chinese Landscape, an exhibition organized by Chu-tsing Li and Thomas Lawton.

Archive Label:
Yu Chengyao spent most of his life in China as a soldier. When the communists took over China in 1949, he retired from the military and went to Taiwan to become a businessman. He stated in his autobiography that he "took up the brush to paint [in his sixties] merely for killing time." This self-taught artist quickly grasped the techniques necessary to express himself.
Unlike most traditional Chinese landscape painting, Yu Chengyao's work does not emphasize the refinement of "cultivated" brushwork. The busy, scratchy brush strokes, reinforced by the density of dark ink, help to build up the overall texture of the mountains. Equally important is his use of contrasting ink tones, which defines the forms and creates a clear sense of their spatial relationships.
Yu Chengyao's landscape paintings are primarily based on his recollection of his travels in China. The human presence within towering peaks and running streams recall the eleventh-century Song monumental landscape tradition. The importance of Yu's work,however, does not reside in his recapturing of the lost tradition, but creating a new one.