Lin Hsin-yueh, 1939–2025
By Emily Cheung
LIN HSIN-YUEH at the opening of his exhibition at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung in 2019. Courtesy Taiwan Ministry of Culture.
On January 7, the Taiwanese artist, art historian, and cultural critic Lin Hsin-yueh, who held solo exhibitions at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2013) and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung (2019), passed away at the age of 87.
Expressing his condolences, the minister of culture in Taiwan, Li Yuan, remarked on Lin’s contributions to the appreciation of Taiwan’s natural landscapes through his paintings. He said he would request a presidential citation for the late artist.
Born in Taichung in 1939, Lin showed an early talent for art, despite being an orphan by the age of six. In 1965, he gained his degree in fine arts at the National Taiwan Normal University. While reading extensively across history, philosophy, and psychology, including the theories of Sigmund Freud, his painting style in the 1970s grew more surrealistic with mysterious undertones.
Beginning in 1975, Lin went to study art in Spain for three years. While there, he witnessed the country’s turbulent democratization process after the end of the Francoist dictatorship. In April 1978, on his return journey to Taiwan, the Korean Air Lines flight he was traveling on was shot down by air defenses after it accidentally crossed into Soviet airspace. These experiences prompted him to reflect on the social responsibilities in art and brought about a shift to realism in his paintings from the 1980s onward while Taiwan was still under martial law. His passion for the local perspective and his native land is conveyed in his large-scale landscape paintings and in his foundational publications such as A History of Taiwanese Art (1991) and The History of One Hundred Years of Chinese Oil Painting (2002).
Though the artist was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2008, the condition did not prevent him from completing multiple oversized paintings for his major solo retrospective exhibition, titled “Enchanting Taiwan,” at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) in 2013. TFAM’s director at the time, Huang Hai-ming, commented that his “broad vision, confrontational realism, and keen insights” manifested in his paintings “have been constructed on the basis of historical awareness” and that they are “thoroughly imbued with the history of Taiwan.”
His works belong to the collections of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, and Kaohsiung Fine Arts Museum. Two of his paintings are also displayed in the Taiwan Rainbow Hall of the Presidential Palace.
Emily Cheung is an editorial intern at ArtAsiaPacific.
