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View Images Taiwan South Pacific

, Hung Tung 1920-1987 Paintings

Information: Born in a village of poor fisherfolk and growing up illiterate, Hung Tung worked as officiant in a Taoist temple while doing odd jobs to maintain his family. He did not start painting until 1969 when he was 50. But his standing as a non-traditional artist together with the detailed and fantasmagoric nature of his art gave rise in the 70s to a lively debate in Taiwan between admirers and detractors of his work, in a country in which naive art and art brut had until then been quite unknown concepts. Nevertheless, whatever the public or the art world felt about him, Hung Tung remained, from beginning to end, obstinately attached to his work, even though he had to rely entirely on his wife, an itinerant pedlar of incense, for the financial support of their household from 1969 onwards. Throughout his life Hung Tung only ever had two shows (in 1976) . Despite the enormous stir that they created in Taiwan he went back to live in his little fishing village, sending away visitors who, attracted by his reputation, arrived outside his shack. There is a story about a now well-known Taiwanese dancer who when young wanted to go and see Hung Tung. Hung Tung locked himself in his house but finally replied to the visitor's pleas by shouting through the closed door 'If you can make sense of the poem written on the front door I'll let you in!' Hung Tung who could neither read nor write had of course no idea of the meaning of the very approximate copies of Chinese ideograms which he had drawn on the door, but the dancer had the presence of mind to recite a poem which he knew by heart. Hung Tung, delighted, let him in. The dancer was then astonished to see that Hung Tung was in the act of using his penis, dipped in black ink, to draw on sheets of paper! Considered one of "50 Classic Outsiders", Raw Vision Sourcebook, 2002" Raw Vision

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Bibliography: Museums Collection de l'Art Brut, Lausanne Tainan District Cultural Center, Taiwan References "17 Naifs de Taiwan", exhibit catalog, 1998 "An Eccentric World of Hung Tung 1920-1987", exhibit catalog, 1996 "50 Classic Outsiders", Raw Vision Sourcebook, 2002" "Vernacular Visionaries: International Outsider Art" by Annie Carlano, Caterina Gemma Brenzoni, and Susan Brown McGreevy, Yale University Press, 2003.

Credit: Raw Vision

Self Portrait Credit: Raw Vision

Untitled, c.1973-1974, oil on board, 60 x 125 cm Credit: Raw Vision

Untitled, c.1978, red paper scroll, poster colour, oils, ink, 175 x 83 cm Credit: Raw Vision

	Credit: Raw Vision
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