At just 14 years old, Taiwanese artist Lin Yu Hsuan has already won acclaim for her oil paintings. In 2019, at the Fifth NTD International Figure Painting Competition (NIFPC), she won a humanity & culture award for her painting “Worldly Journey.” Most recently at the Sixth NIFPC, she won an outstanding youth award for her painting “Merciful Encouragement.”
Both of her award-winning paintings highlight the plight of Falun Gong practitioners in China, who have been systematically persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since 1999. Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual discipline and meditation practice with moral teachings based on the principles of zhen, shan, and ren—or truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.
Hope and Hardship
In “Worldly Journey,” she depicted a determined Falun Gong adherent delivering informational materials in the dead of night to expose the CCP’s persecution of his faith. A silver moon peeks through the clouds and lights up the scene. Under the Party’s rule, the man risks arrest, yet nothing deters him from defending his faith. His shirt is soaked through from a downpour as he wades through a waterlogged road carrying his bicycle on one shoulder and his sleeping baby son on the other.The informational leaflets shown in “Worldly Journey” probably included reports of Falun Gong practitioners who were persecuted in China.
In July 1999, Chinese regime leader Jiang Zemin ordered a brutal persecution campaign against Falun Gong and its estimated 100 million Chinese adherents. On July 21, 1999 the couple traveled hundreds of miles to Beijing to appeal the persecution. For nearly a month, they slept in cement drain pipes in the city to evade arrest.
In August 1999, police arrested Zhen. When the police van she was traveling in approached Tianjin City, she and another practitioner tried to escape and jumped from the vehicle to their deaths. She was only 28 years old.
Police arrested Tian three times, but he escaped each time. When he returned home to his family, he saw people gathering around his house. They'd come for his wife’s funeral—yet he had no idea that she’d died.
‘Merciful Encouragement’
Ms. Lin was moved by the couple’s plight, and inspired by how they kept moving forward despite their challenges. She recreated that feeling in her painting “Merciful Encouragement.”In the center of the painting, Tian rests one arm on his wife’s open, empty, casket. Unlocked handcuffs dangle from his wrist, reminding us that he escaped capture. In grief, anger, and disbelief at his wife’s death, he clenches the cloth he sits on. He stares at a lit candle, a motif often found in Baroque vanitas paintings (a type of still-life painting) to indicate the passing of time and the transience of life. The candle also indicates faith and devotion, with its smoke connecting earth to the heavenly realms. On a bookshelf beside Zhen’s body is a family photo taken in happier times, and the vivid blue book cover of “Zhuan Falun,” the main text of Falun Gong. She’s dressed in white, the Chinese color of mourning. An open curtain reveals a heavenly realm and three cherub-like beings descending with heavenly blessings for the couple.
Whether she’s depicting tragic or joyful stories, hope is at the heart of Ms. Lin’s paintings. The title of her painting “Merciful Encouragement” reaches beyond highlighting the persecution of Falun Gong in China. “Mercy” means to show a kindly forbearance toward a criminal, an adversary, or authoritative figure. Ms. Lin’s “Merciful Encouragement” with its heavenly beings, demonstrates how any of us can overcome the greatest of challenges with faith and kind forbearance.
She says: “I want to use my painting to show people that even though things may not go well on the human level, we can still have hope, and look at the future positively despite it all.”
