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Legacy Series XXXI: Hung Rui-lin

  • Date:2020-06-11
Legacy Series XXXI: Hung Rui-lin

A donation of a lifetimes worth of memories


Best known for painting vivid views of miners' everyday life, the late Taiwanese artist Hung Rui-lin's (洪瑞麟) deep human insights made him a distinguished portraitist. While spending his later years living with his eldest son, Hung Chun-hsiung (洪鈞雄), in California, Hung continued to document the beauty of life until he passed away in 1996, at the age of 84.


Twenty-four years after the artist's death, Hung Chun-hsiung, now in his eighties, has decided to donate over 2,500 of his father's paintings and sketches to the Ministry of Culture.


Explaining why he donated these works to the nation, Hung Chun-hsiung said that his father's artistic legacy belongs to Taiwan and that he hopes the donations will be accessible to future Taiwanese generations so they can enjoy his father's art as well.


Hung Chun-hsiung keeps only one piece to commemorate his father: a sunset-themed painting which was finished after he and his father took a walk at sunset one day. While strolling along the beach, the painter told him that he heard music playing, "but all I could hear was the rolling sound of ocean waves," Hung Chun-hsiung recalled.


"He said that the sunset was performing a symphony: 'All of the colors were speaking to me, as when a concert comes to an end and all of the instruments join in one after one, and then there is just silence, as if the colors were bidding me farewell.'"


"Just by looking at it [the painting], I feel as though my father is speaking to me," he said.


Having had preserved his father's paintings for four decades, Hung said that though it feels like giving his daughter away, he is more grateful that his father's priceless artworks will be preserved in Taiwan, as the older Hung maintained a strong sentimental attachment to the country of his birth.


"One evening when my father and I were taking a stroll, all of a sudden he started to feel a bit homesick," Hung said. "Keep heading that way, there is Taiwan," he recalled his father saying.