In 1542, sailors on a Portuguese ship heading to Japan spotted Taiwan and named it Ilha Formosa, beautiful island. Driving along the coastal road from Taipei to the Ju Ming Museum, it's easy to understand how the sailors arrived at that name. The coastline, studded with rock formations, is dramatic and forbidding. It may have also served as inspiration for Ju Ming, Taiwan's greatest living sculptor.
Ju opened a museum in 1999 to display his visions in bronze, stone, clay and wood. The focus is on his own work, but other artists from the east and west are also exhibited. The works of Taiwanese painters such as Chang Wan-chuan, Lee Cher-fan and Liao Chi-chun share the space with that of artists such as Henry Moore, Andy Warhol, Joan Miro, Pablo Picasso, Bernard Buffet and Robert Rauschenberg. The closest western equivalents to the gallery would be the Rodin Museum in Paris or the Picasso Museum in Barcelona.
Born in 1938, Ju began sculpting as an apprentice at the age of 15. For the next two decades he viewed himself as nothing more than a talented craftsman and sought teachers such as sculptor Yang Ying-feng to mould and shape his skill into true artistry.
In 1976, Ju's work, including his Tai Chi series, was featured at Taiwan's National Museum of History. His Living World series furthered his reputation internationally. In 1994, his work was featured at the Hakone Open-Air Museum in Japan - its first exhibition by a Chinese artist.
The entrance to Ju's 11-hectare museum is through an angular white building, down a flight of stairs and along a white hallway. The hallway is like a birth canal leading to the outdoor exhibition just beyond the glass doors and a new way to see a world. Mist rolls over the works, alternately obscuring and revealing them. The diffuse sunlight dulls the colour of the grass and the grey milkwood trees, but gives the works more gravitas as Ju's tai chi figures (right) push at each other and the oppressive sky. They seem to be observing as well as observed, like actors in a tableau. I'm dwarfed by the largest of them, which at 15.2 metres wide by 6.2 metres high is the size of a small house.
There's a series of pieces on Taiwan's military. A platoon of life-sized sculptures of soldiers marches, exhausted, along a path. In another piece, soldiers stand at attention as an officer addresses them. There's an eight-storey-high, bare metal frame of a naval ship, its mast lost in the fog, with a crew ready for inspection. Ju's parachutists (above) drift down towards a landing zone beneath a bridge that connects the two sides of the museum grounds. Pilots stand impassive beside a mock-up of a fighter jet. His military men are less enshrined heroes than people worn down by duty and obligation.