Journey back to Taiwan in the 1980s: Fang Yan is a reporter for the art edition of a newspaper, and Wang Mingzheng, her husband, is a painter struggling to find a place in the market. One day, a stranger comes to their home and makes them an offer they can’t resist; asking them to repair the painting of an unknown artist. The young couple thus embarks on an incredible artistic adventure through time and space…
The Tan Ting-pho Code, the first-prize winner of the Third Taiwan Historical Novel Award, is the debut novel of Ke Zong Ming, a veteran practitiomer in screenwriting and directing. He is the first to win the Award with 案an absence of winners in the first and second editions. Thanks to his experience in screenwriting and directing TV documentaries, cultural programmes and theatre, Ke has done solid background research on the subject of his novel, Taiwanese artist Tan Ting-pho.
The story adopts the perspective of the husband as the longitude line and that of the journalistic wife as the latitude line, to connect different phases in the life of Tan Ting-pho through the involvement of an ensemble of key historical figures such as Lin Yushan, Yuan Shu-Jen, Liu Shin-Ruh, Yang San-lang, Lee Shih-chiao and Chen Shigemitsu. It outlines the life journey of the early Taiwanese painting master and the evolution of his artistic creations in terms of style and skills.
Tan Ting-pho is an important figure in the history of modern art in Taiwan. However, few people know about his story due to political reasons. Reading The Tan Ting-pho Code is like taking a lesson on “Appreciating the Works of Tan Ting-pho”, enabling the reader to have a deeper understanding of the artist, and also a general knowledge of the art history of Taiwan in its early days (from the period of Japanese occupation to the Retrocession).
With the interweaving of time and space, and the innovative form of historical novel combining art and suspense, the novel presents a strong sense of tableau and offers detailed descriptions of the emotional entanglements and political struggles of Tan Ting-pho at different stages of his life.
The most thought-provoking theme in the novel is the persistent identity confusion of Taiwanese people at different times. “Who am I?” – The seemingly simple question is not easy to answer at all. The tough choices of ideologies, “-isms” and national identities faced by Tan Ting-pho and his contemporaries can still provide a good reference to today’s Taiwan, and even Macau.
The Tan Ting-pho Code is a very intriguing novel. And more enviable is the fact that Taiwan still has a rare space for literary creation, which encourages and accommodates such unusual historical novels. Although the number of works and their influence are limited, I believe that they can gradually advance and continue to create and expand the narratives of Taiwan’s local history. But when we reflect on the case of Macau, we see almost no such similar works. It is truly a great pity for a place with such rich historical resources.
