Huang Tu-shui: A Modern Taiwanese Sculpture That Returned from Disappearance

30-Second Overview: Studying Western sculpture in Tokyo, Huang Tu-shui gradually found Taiwan through the gaze of his foreign surroundings; when Ganlu Shui (Sweet Dew) reappeared after some seventy years missing, a severed chapter of Taiwan's modern art history was reconnected.

In 1921, at the age of 26, Huang Tu-shui's marble sculpture Ganlu Shui was selected for the Imperial Exhibition (Teiten) of the Imperial Art Academy of Japan. In 2021, after roughly seventy years missing, the work reappeared from the home of a private collector. In 2024, it went back to Tokyo University of the Arts — the very school Huang had once attended — for exhibition.^{1 2 3 4 5}

This could easily be written as a story of "the genius artist finally being recognized." But the real question Huang Tu-shui left behind is not whether he succeeded. It is: how did a Taiwanese man studying Western sculpture in Tokyo learn to be seen, be misunderstood, in a foreign land, and ultimately carve "the East" step by step into "Taiwan"?

From Mengjia to Tokyo: First, Learning to Be Seen

Huang Tu-shui was born in 1895 in Mengjia, today's Wanhua District, Taipei. In 1906, he first attended Mengjia Public School, and later transferred to Dadaocheng Public School for family reasons. In 1912, he entered the Engineering/Teacher Training Section, Division B of the Taiwan Governor-General's National Language School. After graduating in 1915, he briefly taught at Dadaocheng Public School; that same year, his work Li Tieguai passed review, and he entered the Woodcarving Division of the Sculpture Department at Tokyo Fine Arts School without sitting an entrance examination.¹

This path does not resemble the artist biography people later imagined: it was not a matter of growing up in a well-off household and then turning a hobby into a profession. Instead, he first entered modern education and then crossed the sea through his work, recommendations, and scholarships. Research by the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (KMFA) points out that Huang's family was not wealthy. Growing up in Taipei, where modern education had taken root, gave him the chance to connect his talent to the colonial education system.³

Once in Tokyo, he did not find a ready-made position of "Taiwanese artist" waiting for him. Tokyo Fine Arts School was the core institution of modern art training in Japan, and Huang was the first Taiwanese artist to study in Japan during the Japanese colonial period. He had to master the techniques of woodcarving, modeling, and stone carving, while also bearing the weight of the gaze that came with "where are you from."^{3 6}

"No matter how I sharpened the carving knife, it wouldn't cut. It was frustrating. Every day after everyone went home, I was still sharpening my knife until dark." — Huang Tu-shui³

The weight of those words is not only about diligence. They show a student who had never received complete sculpture training, using hours of knife sharpening to squeeze himself into an art world that had not originally reserved a place for him.

Curator's Note: Huang Tu-shui's first work was not a statue, but a path into the institution. He first had to prove that he "could learn" before he could speak of what he wanted to carve.

After The Indigenous Child, Taiwan Was No Longer Just Others' Imagination

In 1920, Huang Tu-shui's The Indigenous Child was selected for the Teiten for the first time. KMFA's research reminds us that this was his only work on an Indigenous Taiwanese subject. The following year, he challenged the Teiten with the life-size marble female figure Ganlu Shui.³

Placed side by side, the two works reveal a turn that is not immediately intuitive. The Indigenous Child could easily be absorbed into the existing imperial imagination of how Japan saw Taiwan. Ganlu Shui, by contrast, no longer places "Taiwan" plainly on the figure. It is a woman born from a great clam shell, her body facing the viewer, legs crossed, shells scattered at her feet.^{2 3}

Catalogue records at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (NTMoFA) note that Ganlu Shui is made of marble, created in 1919, and measures 172 × 80 × 38 centimeters. The catalogue also notes that it is often associated with Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, but that the shell in the work is closer to the clams familiar to Taiwanese people. In Taiwanese folk parlance, it is therefore nicknamed "the clam spirit."²

It looks like a Western nude sculpture, yet it does not copy Western mythology. KMFA's essay reads the figure through two lines: one is Botticelli's Venus, the other is the East Asian legend of the Clam Guanyin and the Clam Beauty. The work's name, Ganlu Shui ("sweet dew"), and the English rendering "Daughter of Nectar" in the Teiten catalogue, weave these two lines together.³

Curator's Note: Ganlu Shui's Taiwanese-ness is not carved into the pedestal as a place name; it hides inside a clam that Western art history had not pre-named for it.

A Female Figure Standing Between Three Gazes

What gives Ganlu Shui its power is not whether it "resembles Venus." Explained by imitation alone, it misses the real work Huang did: he put the Western nude, Eastern legend, and actually observed Eastern female bodies into the same block of stone, then let that body stand before the viewer in an almost frontal posture.^{2 3}

KMFA's research describes her as a woman of corporeal strength, not a graceful ideal made only for viewing. The difference is subtle, but it decides the work's temperament: she is neither a goddess drifting in from the waves nor an exotic specimen arranged at a distance, but a person with weight who occupies space.

Extended viewing: Huang Tu-shui's *Ganlu Shui* marble sculpture, collection of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts

Image: Huang Tu-shui's Ganlu Shui, official collection image. The frontal posture and clam shell form make the simple answer "like Venus" insufficient.

The "Taiwan" Huang faced in Tokyo was likewise not a stable concept. KMFA's essay records that Japanese society's knowledge of Taiwan at the time was often stuck in one-sided images produced by colonial newspapers, magazines, and postcards. The questions Huang met abroad even included "Do you eat rice in Taiwan just as they do in the mainland (Japan)?"³

So Ganlu Shui is not a completed national symbol. It is more like an experiment: when Western forms, Japanese schooling, and Taiwanese experience all inhabit one body at once, how does an artist produce a figure that is not merely "a Japanese student's work" or "exotic Eastern flavor"?

From Oriental Subjects Toward the Water Buffalo

Technique Is Not a Neutral Tool

Calling Huang Tu-shui "the first sculptor to study in Japan" is accurate, yet still too fast. Because the study abroad was not a one-way ticket to modernity: every technique he learned carried with it the school's institutions, teachers' lineages, and the yardsticks of modern Japanese art. The Tokyo University of the Arts exhibition placed Huang back in the artistic environment of 1915–1930 and hung his work alongside that of Takamura Kōun, Takamura Kōtarō, Ogiwara Morie, Kitamura Seibō, and others. This juxtaposition does not dilute him into one among many; it lets us see how he found his own voice within a ready-made vocabulary.^{6 7}

Marble is also more than a symbol of "prestige" or "the West." It demands long hours of chiseling, grinding, and waiting. Once struck, an error cannot be erased like a pencil line. KMFA's essay records that Huang had no stone-carving teacher in Tokyo, so he watched Italian sculptors working marble in their studios and went home to teach himself.³ Ganlu Shui is therefore not merely the result of being selected for the Teiten in a certain year; it is also the process by which he brought knowledge from outside the institution into his body, and then into the stone.

This process also frees "Taiwanese-ness" from being shrunk into a few symbols. It can be the shape of a clam, the bearing of an Eastern woman, the weight of water buffalo repeating themselves, or an artist's homesickness in his Tokyo dormitory. When these elements stand side by side, they do not automatically fuse into one pure answer. The friction between them is why the work is still alive.

Extended viewing: Tokyo University of the Arts official exhibition poster, 2024 Huang Tu-shui works exhibited at his alma mater

Image: Poster as shown on the 2024 exhibition page of the Tokyo University of the Arts Museum. The exhibition places Huang alongside the modern Japanese art environment of his student years.

In 1922, Huang returned to Taiwan. In 1924, his Outskirts was selected for the fifth Teiten. NTMoFA's artist biography page also records that he began Group of Water Buffalo in 1928 and completed it in 1930.¹

During those years, the direction of Huang's subjects gradually shifted. KMFA's research points out that after 1923, the Taiwanese water buffalo became a theme he returned to repeatedly. Compared with the East–West hybrid female figure of Ganlu Shui, the water buffalo pulls the gaze back to Taiwan's land, labor, and rural experience.³

This does not mean Huang suddenly found a pure, contradiction-free "Taiwanese style." A water buffalo can also be looked at, beautified, and placed inside a national narrative. What matters is that Huang began to push the question of his work from "can I create with the language of modern sculpture" toward "with this language, where do I look?"

Curator's Note: Huang Tu-shui did not first hold a Taiwanese aesthetic and then fill it with technique; his Taiwan grew out of repeated choices of subject and medium.

The Vanished Work Did Not End the Story

Preservation Itself Is Also a Piece of Taiwanese History

If you only look at the white marble in the gallery, Ganlu Shui looks as though it never left art history. But its real history includes wooden crates, dirt, moves, private keeping, and a blank stretch that cannot be immediately verified. KMFA's research writes that when the work reappeared, the white marble surface had accumulated years of grime. Only after restoration could viewers again see the form left behind a century ago.³

This detail changes the reading of "the masterpiece reappears." Reappearance is not pulling the original untouched out of time; it is admitting that the work was affected by environment and institutions, then — through restoration, research, and public collecting — restoring it to a state that can be viewed together. The accession number, medium, and dimensions listed on NTMoFA's collection page look like administrative data, but they are also building a new public identity for the work.²

When introducing the album Taiwan Soil, Water of Freedom: The Resurrection of Huang Tu-shui's Artistic Life, the Ministry of Culture's Government Publication Information site specifically lists exhibition works, documents, exhibition records, curatorial essays, and a chronology. These materials that seem subordinate to the artwork actually show that an artistic life is not sustained by a single statue alone: exhibitions, catalogues, researchers, preservers, and viewers reconnect it to history.⁸

Extended viewing: Images of *Ganlu Shui* in restoration and exhibition, as published in the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts research essay

Image: Images of Ganlu Shui as shown in the KMFA research essay. The preservation history of the work is as important as its formal history.

Huang Tu-shui died in Tokyo in 1930 of peritonitis following appendicitis, at the age of 36. In 1931, his widow Liao Qiugui brought his posthumous works from Tokyo back to Taiwan. Yet even after the artist's death, his reputation and his works gradually slipped out of public view. The album preview on the government publication site notes that Huang's artistic achievements once fell like fragments into a historical fault line after the war, and were only reassembled through later research, exhibitions, and biographical writing.^{1 8}

The fate of Ganlu Shui was especially concrete. KMFA records that it was missing for about seventy years after the 1950s, and only reappeared from a collector's home in 2021. In 2022, the collector's family donated the work to the Ministry of Culture.³ KMFA later framed the matter as a "search notice," folding it into a larger question: why do artworks get dispersed and lost, and who keeps searching for them?⁴

There is a part of this that must not be romanticized: the work did not survive because it was "meant to be." It was able to return to public collection because someone kept it, someone researched it, someone identified it, and someone was willing to give a privately held work back to society. NTMoFA's records show that the marble sculpture later entered the museum's collection, and in 2024 traveled to Tokyo University of the Arts with other Huang Tu-shui works for exhibition.^{2 6 7}

Art history is therefore not just a ranking of famous people and famous works; it is also a preservation system. When a sculpture goes missing for seventy years, what disappears is not a single object but one entrance through which readers could understand Taiwan's modern art.

What He Left Behind Is Not an Answer, but a Direction

Huang Tu-shui once wrote:

"There is only one way to never die, and that is spiritual immortality. At least for us artists, as long as the works created with our blood and sweat have not been completely destroyed, we will not die."³

It is easy to read these words as prophecy. But the reason we can read them today is not that the work automatically preserved its own life; it is that later generations kept retrieving the work from private spaces, exhibition archives, research essays, and memory fault lines. The research postscript on Openbook therefore places Huang on a longer line: he was not only a genius who died young, but also a forerunner who allowed later Taiwanese sculptors to emerge in groups.⁹

In 2024, the Tokyo University of the Arts exhibition brought Ganlu Shui back to Huang's alma mater. The exhibition did not merely display his works; it also presented the modern Japanese art environment he inhabited between entering the school in 1915 and his death in 1930.⁶ This arrangement matters because it refuses to seal Huang inside a glass case of lonely genius: his work must return to the intersection of school, institutions, peers, the colony, and Taiwanese society before one can see why it is so restless and so powerful.

Huang Tu-shui did not leave behind a single correct form for Taiwan's modern art. He left a direction: one can start from foreign technique without remaining forever in imitation; one can be seen in a foreign land and bend that gaze back toward one's own soil; and one can let a vanished work reappear, reminding later generations that culture is not a heritage passively waiting to be preserved, but a relationship that each generation re-identifies and re-cares for.

Seeing Ganlu Shui today, neither should we elevate it into a seamless national allegory. It was once made visible through the institutions of the Japanese Imperial Exhibition, and it once vanished from postwar public memory. Its form borrows from both Western art history and East Asian legend, and turned, in Huang's hands, toward Taiwan's bodies and land. These competing sources are exactly why it is hard to conscript into a single label.^{3 6 5}

For creators today, Huang's value may not lie in offering a replicable "Taiwanese style." What is genuinely inheritable is his working method: first admitting that one stands inside others' techniques and institutions, then using time to grind foreign vocabularies until they can carry one's own experience. When a work is no longer merely proving that "Taiwan can too," and begins asking "how is Taiwan to be seen," modern art changes from a qualification contest into its own question.

This is also why the return of Ganlu Shui is more than exhibition news. It connects several moments that are usually kept apart: in 1915, a young man from Mengjia entered Tokyo Fine Arts School; in 1921, he left his name at the Imperial Exhibition with a marble female figure; in 1930, he died in Tokyo; after the 1950s, the work lost its trace; in 2021, it was recognized again inside another family; in 2024, it returned to his alma mater.^{1 3 6 5}

Each moment changes the meaning of the work. The Imperial Exhibition made it an artwork identifiable by institutions; the disappearance made it a memory that must be asked after; re-collection let it become public culture once more. Huang's life was short, but Ganlu Shui reminds us that the time of art is not decided only by the creator's age, but also by whether later people are willing to keep searching, preserving, and viewing.

If someone stands before this female figure today and only sees "Taiwan's first nude sculpture," they have not finished looking. What is more worth pausing on is the inconsistency she carries: Western posture and Eastern legend, Tokyo training and Taiwanese land, a short-lived creator and a long preservation history. Huang did not smooth these differences away; he let them stand together in the stone. That is why the sculpture still has something to say a century later. It does not turn Taiwan into a closed answer, but lets Taiwan keep generating through overseas movement, learning, misunderstanding, and preservation. What readers take away should not be only "who is Huang Tu-shui," but a harder and more art-like question: when we say a work represents Taiwan, are we describing its origin, or describing how it has been re-seen by generation after generation?

More precisely, Huang Tu-shui's artistic legacy is not a tradition already paved; it is a site still being continued: someone writes his name into a chronology, someone removes grime from the stone, someone brings an exhibition back to his alma mater, and someone else sees that slightly upturned face for the first time today. The work therefore not only preserves the past, but also demands that people of the present answer: which memories are we willing to make room for? That is the most important pause when reading Huang Tu-shui.

Image Sources

This article embeds only hot-linked images provided by official institutions and does not download or store images separately. The image hot links are, in order: the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts collection image (https://collections.culture.tw/files/12/JPG640/111009430000.JPG), the Tokyo University of the Arts Museum exhibition poster (https://museum.geidai.ac.jp/exhibit/file/Huang-Tu-Shui.jpg), and the image carried in the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts research essay (https://www.kmfa.gov.tw/FileDownLoad/PageSections/20220711092128070318.jpg). The works' information, exhibition context, and page sources follow the article pages cited in the footnotes above.

Further Reading

To go deeper on Huang Tu-shui, cross-read NTMoFA's artist chronology, the work's collection page, the KMFA research essay, and the Tokyo University of the Arts exhibition page. For English readers, The Reporter's English edition offers an in-depth feature on the preservation history and artistic significance of Ganlu Shui.

References