30-second overview: On March 25, 1947, in front of Chiayi Railway Station, a man who wielded a paintbrush was bound with wire and shot dead in the street. His name was Chen Cheng-po — the first Taiwanese artist to break into Japan's Imperial Art Exhibition with oil paintings, and the one who went to negotiate during the 228 Incident and never came back.
After his death, his wife Chang Chieh hid several hundred paintings in the attic, burned the picture frames in front of their house, and told the watchers that "the paintings have been destroyed." They stayed hidden for thirty years.
Sunset over Tamsui sold for approximately NT$220 million at auction in Hong Kong in 2007, still the highest auction price for an oil painting by a Taiwanese artist.
| NT$220 million | 1926 |
|---|---|
| Sunset over Tamsui auction price | First Taiwanese artist selected for the Imperial Art Exhibition |
October 10, 1926
The newspaper headlines that day were remembered by the people of Chiayi for a long time.
Chen Cheng-po, 30 years old, a Chiayi native who had just resigned from his teaching post at a public school and gone to Tokyo to take the entrance exam for an art school, had his oil painting Chiayi no Machi Hazure (Outskirts of Chiayi) selected for the 7th Imperial Art Exhibition of Japan (Teiten). This exhibition was the highest authority in the Japanese art world at the time, and Chen Cheng-po was the first Taiwanese artist to break through with an oil painting.
In 1924, at age 29, with the support of his wife Chang Chieh, he resigned from his stable teaching position and was admitted as a special student to the Tokyo School of Fine Arts based on his drawings. At the time, the Taiwanese art community regarded selection for the Teiten as the highest honor — it made the newspaper headlines and brought pride to the Taiwanese people. He achieved this while still a third-year student at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts.
Outskirts of Chiayi depicted the scenery on the outskirts of Chiayi City: vast fields, the boundary between sky and horizon, with a few trees in the foreground. Technically, Chen Cheng-po was influenced by modern Japanese Western-style painting, but he mixed something of his own into the brushwork — a heavy, subjective sense of color, as if he were spreading his feelings for the land directly onto the canvas. The Japanese judges took notice of that "something different."
📝 Curator's Note
Chen Cheng-po went on to be selected for the Teiten multiple times and was repeatedly chosen as a special selection for the Taiwan Fine Arts Exhibition (Tai-ten). In his diary, he wrote down his artistic philosophy: a work must possess "サアムシニーグ (Something)" — something that cannot be put into words, only felt. This "Something" ran through his entire creative career.
Those Four Years in Shanghai
In 1929, after completing his studies at the Graduate School of the Western Painting Department of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, Chen Cheng-po did not return directly to Taiwan.
He went to Shanghai.
While studying in Tokyo, he had met the Chinese painter Wang Chi-yuan, and through Wang's introduction, he was hired to teach at the Hsin-hua Art Academy and the Chang-ming Art Academy in Shanghai. By 1928, he was already directing the I-yüan Painting Research Institute, gradually establishing himself in the city.
Shanghai from 1929 to 1933 was the golden age of Republican-era culture. There, Chen Cheng-po met Chang Dai-chien, Pan Yuliang, and Pan Tianshou, exchanging letters and artworks. He joined the reformist "Juelan Society" and later served as a Western painting juror for the First National Art Exhibition in Shanghai. In 1931, his painting Clear Stream was selected as one of twelve works representing the Republic of China at the Chicago World's Fair in the United States.
This was his most intensive and experimental artistic period. He began exploring a "East-meets-West" painting style, attempting to integrate Eastern sensibility into Western oil painting techniques. A colonial painter from Chiayi had found his place in the cultural capital of Republican China.
In 1932, the January 28 Incident broke out in Shanghai, anti-Japanese sentiment surged, and Taiwanese people were regarded as Japanese nationals, making their situation difficult. Chen Cheng-po first sent his family back to Taiwan to take shelter, staying behind to settle his affairs. In 1933, he returned as well.
Back in Chiayi, carrying the vision gained from four years in Shanghai, and an even deeper attachment to his hometown.
The Colors of Chiayi
After returning to Taiwan, Chen Cheng-po entered the peak period of his creative output.
He helped establish the Tai-yang Art Association and devoted himself to promoting a local Taiwanese art movement. Then came the endless plein-air painting — carrying his easel across Taiwan, from downtown Chiayi to the banks of the Tamsui River, from the snow-capped peaks of Yushan to the southernmost cape of Pingtung. His footsteps left oil paint across the entire island.
Sunset over Tamsui, completed in 1935, is one of his most well-known masterpieces. The composition looks down from an elevated vantage point, with traditional Southern Min-style houses along the Tamsui River estuary layered one upon another, red roof tiles stretching from the foreground to the background — red buildings, a church steeple, the Dodd & Co. trading firm, and in the distance, Fort San Domingo. This was the real face of Tamsui in the 1930s. The compositional rhythm is not flat but circular, all elements wrapped together by him in an organic way.
But what best represents Chen Cheng-po are still those paintings of Chiayi: the fountain roundabout, sunlight on street corners, the colors of the market. His way of painting his hometown carries a very personal thickness — not the record of an outsider, but the feeling of someone who lived there, of the air itself.
✦ "After returning to Taiwan in 1933, Chen Cheng-po's intensely strong subjective consciousness and乡土色感 (local color sensibility) formed a unique artistic style, leaving behind a large body of moving works for his hometown." (Liang Gallery)
The Choices of 1946
In 1945, Japan was defeated. The Taiwanese people joyfully welcomed the "motherland."
Chen Cheng-po was one of them. He painted a work titled Celebration Day, depicting the raising of the Blue Sky with a White Sun and Red Earth flag over the Chiayi Police Bureau building, with people on the streets rejoicing. He was elected vice-chair of the Chiayi City Committee for Welcoming the National Government.
In 1946, he joined the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) and was elected to the first Chiayi City Council.
Some later called these choices naive, some called them enthusiastic, and some saw them as the genuine expectations of an intellectual who had been suppressed under colonial rule for many years, looking toward a new era. In any case, he chose to step into politics, believing he could play a role in the new order of his city.
⚠️ Controversial Perspective
Chen Cheng-po's joining of the Kuomintang and his service as a city councilor are occasionally glossed over or downplayed in 228 discourse. In reality, his political participation was not that of a passive victim but of someone who actively embraced the postwar political order. When he went to Shuishang Airport as a negotiator in 1947, Taiwan Panorama magazine reported that "some people urged him not to go, but he was too enthusiastic and insisted on going" — how much of that was naivety and how much courage is impossible to separate.
Shuishang Airport, March 1947
After the outbreak of the 228 Incident, the conflict in Chiayi was particularly intense.
Nationalist troops retreated to Shuishang Airport and were besieged by civilian militias. The Chiayi City "228 Incident Settlement Committee" accepted the military's request for negotiations and decided to send representatives. Chen Cheng-po, who spoke Mandarin and had lived on the mainland, was chosen as one of the representatives (some accounts say he volunteered), along with Chen Fu-chih, Pan Mu-chih, Lu Ping-chin, Ko Lin, and others — twelve people in total.
Twelve people went. Only three came back. Chen Cheng-po and the others were all arrested by the other side and bound with coarse wire.
On March 25, 1947, they were transported to the front of Chiayi Railway Station and, without any trial, shot dead in the street as a public warning. Chen Cheng-po was 52 years old.
Afterward, the military forbade the family from collecting the body immediately. "The corpse lay exposed for several days, surrounded by flies and mosquitoes." (228 Memorial Foundation records)
It was not until four or five in the evening that the Chen family was notified to retrieve the body.
For a more complete historical account of the 228 Incident, including the persecution of elites across Taiwan, see the dedicated entry.
Thirty Years Under the Eaves
When the news reached home, Chang Chieh did not break down — or rather, she hid the breakdown.
She washed her husband's body, dressed him in clean clothes, and carefully preserved the bloodstained shirt riddled with bullet holes. She quietly asked a photographer to capture Chen Cheng-po's final face. She wanted to preserve the evidence.
Then she did something remarkably calm: she removed all the paintings from their frames, rolled them up, and hid them in the attic. Then, in front of the house, she burned all the frames and painting equipment.
She wanted to tell the watchers: "Chen Cheng-po's paintings have all been destroyed."
Chen Cheng-po's post-mortem photograph was hidden behind the ancestral spirit tablets — security agents would not search a household shrine. On the altar was his Self-Portrait, completed at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, gradually darkening with the passage of time.
For over thirty years, Chang Chieh and the children struggled to make a living. But every so often, she would shut herself in the attic for several days, carefully tending to her husband's works: worried about mold, she would unroll each of the hundreds of oil paintings one by one, cover them with newspaper, layer upon layer, then roll them up again; when dust accumulated in the attic, she would follow the brushstrokes with a brush dipped in water, gently wiping it away.
"She spent her whole life waiting — waiting for Chen Cheng-po to return from Tokyo, waiting for him to come back from teaching in Shanghai... then came another long wait, waiting for his paintings to see the light of day again." (GJTaiwan, "The Woman Who Hid Paintings (and Words) — Chang Chieh")
She did not live to see vindication. Chang Chieh passed away in 1993. The official apology for the 228 Incident would not come until 1995, when former President Lee Teng-hui publicly apologized to the victims.
In the late 1970s, as Taiwanese society gradually opened up, Chang Chieh began to make the paintings and materials public. With the help of Chen Cheng-po's former classmates and students, the first "Chen Cheng-po Posthumous Works Exhibition" was held. Then the Kaohsiung Incident (Formosa Incident) broke out, and everything froze again for several years.
After Martial Law
In 1987, martial law was lifted, and Taiwan began to confront its own history.
Chen Cheng-po's name transformed from a taboo into a cultural legacy. His paintings moved from the attic into art museums, onto auction blocks, and into textbooks.
In 1993, Dusk over Tamsui sold at Sotheby's for NT$11 million, setting a record at the time for the highest price for a Chinese oil painting at Sotheby's. In 2006, Tamsui sold at Sotheby's Hong Kong for HK$34.84 million (approximately NT$144 million). In 2007, Sunset over Tamsui sold at Christie's Hong Kong for approximately HK$50.73 million including buyer's premium (approximately NT$220 million), still the highest auction price for an oil painting by a Taiwanese artist.
The advancement of transitional justice in Taiwan has ensured that Chen Cheng-po is no longer just a name — there are exhibitions, a former residence cultural center, and a complete research archive.
On March 25, 2025 — the anniversary of his death — his grandson Chen Li-pai signed an agreement to donate nearly all of the more than 2,000 works that had survived in the attic, including oil paintings, sketches, and manuscripts, to the preparatory office of the National Museum of Fine Arts in Tainan. "It's like marrying off a daughter," he said, "and I believe she's marrying into a good family, so I feel relieved, as if a wish has been fulfilled." (United Daily News, 2025)
That day was the 78th year after March 25, 1947.
Political Symbol or Painter Himself
The exhibition description at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts contains a line worth remembering: "Because of his image as a 228 victim, the general public has overlooked his artistic achievements."
This is not just one exhibition's view.
The order in which Chen Cheng-po entered the public consciousness is usually: first as a 228 victim, then as a painter. Many Taiwanese know him as the man who was shot, but are less familiar with his paintings themselves — their color logic, their sense of space, the tension of squeezing subjective emotion and realistic scenery into the same frame.
This is a structural problem in Taiwan's process of healing historical wounds: when a person becomes a political symbol, their other dimensions recede into shadow. Chen Cheng-po's oil paintings have an independent standing in the history of modern East Asian art — when he interacted with members of the Juelan Society in Shanghai, he was an artist standing alongside Chang Dai-chien and Pan Yuliang, not a victim. When he was selected for the Teiten, he spoke through his work, not through his death.
That said, to say his artistic value was "amplified by politics" is also an oversimplification. The NT$220 million for Sunset over Tamsui bought a genuine masterpiece — the composition, brushwork, and treatment of light are achievements that few in 20th-century Taiwanese oil painting reached. The tragedy of history made his name endure, but what makes his works valuable is the paintings themselves.
Art and politics in Chen Cheng-po's case are not competing forces but two inseparable threads. His choice to remain in Chiayi, his choice to go to Shuishang Airport, and his choice to paint Chiayi's sun with intense color sensibility — these were choices made by the same person.
Timeline
- 1895/2/2 — Born in Chiayi; father Chen Jo-yu was a Qing dynasty provincial graduate (juren)
- 1924 — Resigned from public school teaching post; admitted to the Tokyo School of Fine Arts based on drawings
- 1926/10/10 — Outskirts of Chiayi selected for the 7th Imperial Art Exhibition of Japan, the first Taiwanese artist
- 1929 — Went to Shanghai to teach; joined the Juelan Society; directed the I-yüan Painting Research Institute
- 1933 — Returned to Taiwan and settled; helped establish the Tai-yang Art Association
- 1935 — Created masterpieces including Sunset over Tamsui
- 1946 — Joined the Kuomintang; elected to the first Chiayi City Council
- 1947/3/25 — Arrested while serving as a negotiator at Shuishang Airport; shot dead in front of Chiayi Railway Station, age 52
- 1947 onward — Chang Chieh hid paintings in the attic and burned frames to fake their destruction
- 1979 — First "Chen Cheng-po Posthumous Works Exhibition" held; Taiwanese society publicly encountered his work for the first time
- 1993 — Chang Chieh passed away; Dusk over Tamsui sold at Sotheby's for NT$11 million, a record
- 2007 — Sunset over Tamsui sold at Christie's Hong Kong for NT$220 million, still the record
- 2025/3/25 — Grandson Chen Li-pai donated over 2,000 surviving works to the preparatory office of the National Museum of Fine Arts in Tainan
Chang Chieh's attic was low, damp, and infested with insects. Inside, she gently dusted with a brush, over and over, not knowing where the waiting would end.
Now those paintings hang in art museums, where people view them, study them, and pay NT$220 million for one.
Chen Cheng-po's Clear Stream was designated in his will as a "family heirloom." That painting still exists.
References
- Chen Cheng-po — Wikipedia (starting point)
- Chen Cheng-po — Ministry of Culture National Cultural Memory Bank (primary)
- Taiwan's Disappeared Elites of the 228 Incident: Chen Cheng-po — 228 Memorial Foundation (primary)
- The Woman Who Hid Paintings (and Words) — Chang Chieh — GJTaiwan
- 1947.3.25 Painter Chen Cheng-po Executed by Firing Squad — Taiwan Memory Expedition
- The Bloodstained Painter, the Brave Life — Taiwan Panorama
- Grandmother Hid Paintings in Attic for 30 Years; Chen Li-pai "Bare-Donates" 2,000 Chen Cheng-po Works — United Daily News (2025)
- Chinese Aesthetic Consciousness in Chen Cheng-po's Painting Style — National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts Journal (academic primary)
- Deep Longing for Home: Chen Cheng-po Memorial Exhibition — Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts
- Chen Cheng-po — Art Emperor
- Chen Cheng-po Culture Foundation (primary)