Wushe

When Shiotsuki Toho served as a juror in the Western painting division of the Taiwan Fine Art Exhibition, the exhibition was also his main platform for showing his work, oil paintings of Taiwan's unique natural environment and social customs. He especially loved Taiwan's indigenous people and their cultures, trees, forests, and the mountains and sea around Eluanbi, at the island's southernmost tip. His work combined the fresh, bright colors favored by Impressionists and Fauvists with East Asian ink painting's relaxed linear approach, establishing an aesthetic vocabulary both intensely personal and imbued with local color. In the mid-1930s, Touhou's use of heavily applied oils in his paintings of indigenous figures became more apparent, the thick black contouring showing the French painter Georges Rouault's (1871-1958) influence. In October 1930, the Wushe Incident took place, the largest indigenous uprising against Japanese rule in the history of the colonial era. The aborigine leader Mona Rudo led about 200 Seediq (indigenous people) warriors in an attack on Japanese at an athletic meet at Wushe public school while other groups of Seediq attacked police stations. Over 130 Japanese died in the assault, leading colonial authorities to dispatch a large contingent of troops to suppress the revolt, killing over one thousand Seediq. Shiotsuki had deep feelings for Taiwan's aborigines, and produced several paintings dealing with the Wushe Incident. At the 6th Taiwan Fine Art Exhibition in 1932, he exhibited?"Mother," a bleak depiction of an indigenous mother and child, destitute and homeless in the wake of the violence. In this work, Shiotsuki used an intense shade of orange as a color base, freely rendering the figure and the figure's clothing and posture with other hues. The large, patterned swaths of white draped obliquely on the figure's body represent Seediq warriors' traditional costumes. Touhou's ingenious use of color to depict the distinctive characteristics of traditional Seediq costumes—the four white lines, running from top to bottom—highlight the power of ethnic symbols. The glare in the figure's eyes seems to transmit a silent protest, lending the work a surrealist quality, deepening its symbolism and spiritual connotations. In addition to bright oranges, Touhou liked to use red; in Seediq culture, red represents blood and is a symbol of power. He also used other primitive colors—blues, greens, yellows—to portray his unique impressions of Taiwan's indigenous peoples and folk customs.