The root of culture is the main issue artists have been facing and questioning through time, especially, for half a century, under the unique background of Chinese political entity, ideology, ceded territory and confrontation, the root of culture has been interwoven with a strong desire and action for seeking, tracking, rebuilding, and integrating. Moreover, with the intervention and impacts of modern western civilization, artists who seek the goal of individual freedom in spirit have to ponder and take action while facing choices.
   
Lee Shichi is an artist who has grown up in such an era and territorial background and who has brought important impact to his time. His uniqueness comes not only from his personal history but also from the particular area he grew up-Jin Men Island. His uniqueness has to do with a peculiar time and ideology, that is, when “everyone else is enjoying blue skies; we can only lay and shiver inside the air-raid shelter.” Within such a certain unusual background, “culture” would be more likely to be able to surpass the frame of time, space, and ideology and embodies a mutual ethnic civilized consciousness and sense of identification. In that sense, the root of culture is not just a hallow concept, not just the decorative border for art, but a self-conscious indication of the deepness of history and human ideology, and it experiences the bitterness and lessons of history, surviving and seeking the eternal existence of civilization and culture.
   
In the mid 1950s, the movement of modern art had come to its prominence in Taiwan. Many modern painters started their concern about the discovering and inheriting of traditional Chinese art form. Lee Shichi had actively participated and organized modern art groups, and he was both the founder of the “Modern Print Art Association “and an indispensable member of the mid and late periods of “Oriental Painting Association.” He has been insisting on the feature of “Orientation” in Chinese culture, and trying to find an appropriate modern stage of it. He has won his international acknowledgement with his philosophical thinking for the square and circle variations in his abstract paintings.  
  
Lee Shichi has been exploring the visual elements in both Chinese and western art. He has been pursuing the innate order and beauty within them. He first looked for his inspiration within Chinese calligraphy, combining and integrating the traditional crafts of silk print painting with modern modeling art. Later, he went to mainland China to experience the charm of the paintings in Hubei Province. He searched for the most ancient origins of painting in Fu-Zhou Province. He then combined traditional cultural elements such as the horizontal inscribed board and delivered the verve of Chinese traditional culture in modern expressions. He has found the brand new essence of visual language from Chinese calligraphy. He integrated the momentum and connotation of calligraphy into his specific modern art language. Within the infusion and interlacing of modern structure and primitive tattoo, he has pursued the thick and dark loneliness and bitterness. His imagination and variable creativity has also won him his nickname-“the Variable Bird of the Painting Scene.”
  
 Looking back into Lee Shichi’s feature and originality in his modern painting art, one finds two crucial elements and set out points-one being the latent influences of folk and traditional ethnic elements such as calligraphy, lacquered art, and folk arts, the other is the substantial attraction of western modern art and esthetics. These two major elements-through the setting point of interweaving Jin Men Island’s local color with the bitterness and sensitivity of Chinese culture and history, has formulated a possibility for multiple choices and expressions in the modern opening atmosphere of art. From his first works such as “The Lost Palace of the Qin Dynasty,” “The Lonely Chin-Huai River,” “The Worship of the Moon” series, to the “Epiphany” series which utilized traditional calligraphy as the material, “The Great Calligraphy” series and the so called “Post-Orientation” paintings series, he has searched for his artistic originality that belonged to his ethnic egoism between tradition and modernism. He has insisted on his concern about the substantial art language that comes from folk and traditional arts. At the same time, he has been more eagerly pursuing the metaphysic modern spirits. This is exactly the spiritual questioning of the root of culture proposed by Lee who stood in the ongoing history.
   
For many years, Lee’s works have been exhibited in various important sites and museums that won him high evaluations. Guang- Dong Museum of Art has also presented his works in some joint exhibits. Some of his works have become my museum’s important collections. This time, in “The Rising Wind and the Scudding Clouds-the Art of Lee Shichi Exhibit” in Guang-Dong Museum of Art, we shall expect this exhibition to further explore the meaning of the dynamics of infusion in Chinese culture and its modern art development.

By  Guang-Dong Museum of Art Curator,Wang Huangsheng