Text / Ho Hui-hsuan · Photography / Lin Mao-sheng
It had rained across Taiwan for so long before the interview that we half feared the day itself would be wet. As it happened it was bright and clear, the damp of those grey weeks burned off, the sun almost too sharp. Perhaps it is what the city does to a person: arriving at the artist Lo Chan Peng’s home in Sanzhi, even a few breaths of air from beyond the city felt clean.
After many winding lanes the way at last opened out. We reached a community where artists have gathered, and found Lo’s home. One of the more closely watched Taiwanese artists of recent years, Lo has twice held residencies abroad and has also brought his work into popular culture — serving as lead visual artist for the concept album of the band Mayday, and as art director of its music videos.
Nothing about Lo at first sight answers the cliché of the ‘dissolute’ artist. He is sunlit, dressed like a boy-next-door fresh from exercise, and received us in his studio — which is also his home.
An artist’s castle
The place, Lo tells us, was bought three years ago: two villas knocked through into one, three storeys and some 150 ping of usable space. He calls his own house a ‘ruin’, a ‘castle’, and by constantly rearranging it he keeps himself perpetually pleased with how he lives. He took a thirty-year-old house, opened the two units into each other, and remade it inside and out — a doorway and a hoist large enough to admit his big canvases, and an interior built entirely to his ideal. Across three floors, Lo is, in his use of space, frankly extravagant.
The plan is in fact very simple: a living room, dining room and studio on the ground floor; bedroom and bathroom above; and on the top floor a store for finished paintings. Because his life is so plain, he has left the space largely undivided. “If you have the chance to decide your living environment entirely, why not do it your own way?” he says. “So of course my own home should follow my own ideas, all the way through.”
He gave those ideas to his designer, and through endless discussion and revision a home full of vision, invention and personal character was born. To achieve the castle atmosphere he is so fond of, he had the place stripped and refinished throughout — the old paint removed first with a water jet, then scraped, then sanded — his fastidiousness and his eye together producing a house unlike any other. He even built furniture by hand, shaping the home into exactly what he had imagined. His aim, he says, was the air of a thousand-year-old European town: a few exquisite things set within a deliberately weathered setting, sunlight falling in like so many traces of time, the whole space alive to touch and sight.
The charm of old things
Out of a love for antiques, and to satisfy both eye and design, he reworks existing tabletops with legs of his own making, marries them to an old sewing machine, and once spent three years weathering a single plank in the sun. So total is his making of this house that, wanting to rearrange it at any moment, he once fitted the furniture with castors so it could be moved at will. “After a while it started to look a bit odd, so I took them off again,” he laughs — an artist of action indeed. Because he rearranges so often, every room but the kitchen has been ‘tampered with’.
Step through the door and you meet him on several registers at once: a surfboard on the shoe cabinet for his love of sport; his bookshelves for what he reads; beyond them a table he built himself, and finally his rack of paints. In a plain space, ingenuity shows in the details — a suitcase carried back from abroad, a collection of lamps, an antique typewriter — and all of it, piece by piece, assembles into the whole of him.
Standing at the centre of the living room, sunlight pouring down through the light well, the extravagance of the space fully expresses Lo’s ideal of ‘realising the space of one’s dreams’. Up on the first floor a cruciform corridor divides the master bedroom, guest room and bathrooms; up again to the store, where a custom-made hoist lets the paintings come and go through the great door.
The self, inside and out
As an artist, what I most wanted to understand was how he regards himself, his paintings and his home. From his talk it was plain he is content with every corner of the place, and that he sees himself, his work and his house as one and the same.
“Home, art and the self — they are all me,” he says, working at an unfinished painting as he speaks. “A person’s sense of beauty makes a different self, and this is mine. I won’t change the style of my paintings, because this is the finest self I have so far become. If a hundred people advised me what to do, I would still be faithful to myself. You could call it a constraint — but when I decide life should change, I begin to change.” For him art is the interpretation of the self, and he is forever thinking, in conversation with himself.
When people told him the house was too dimly lit, for instance, he changed all the lighting one day — and from that, the colours of his paintings began to shift. He is thinking lately, he reveals, about the relation between painting and canvas, and setting out on an entirely different way of working: he wants his art to break free of fixed habits of mind and find a wholly new expression. At the same time he attends earnestly to life, grateful for every turn it has given him. I ask what his dream is. He hopes to become a truly remarkable artist, he says, and through his work to offer people new directions of thought, and a visual feast unlike any before.
As the interview drew to a close I could not help asking the question buried deepest in me: would he never want to move into the city? He smiled. “I would. I’ve always thought of myself as a city person — in love with art, yet at home in solitude.” To present oneself truly: this is who Lo Chan Peng is.
