Detailed Introduction
Try taking a few steps left and right in front of a temple gate, and you will find the door god's eyes seem to follow you, looking right at you the whole time — this is called "making the gaze come alive," the hardest test a temple painter faces and the skill they are proudest of. Temple painting is the most vivid artistic expression in Taiwan's traditional temples, spanning door-god paintings, murals, and beam-and-purlin paintings; more than decoration, it carries rich religious meaning and folk tales. Every stroke of color, every composition, is a cultural cipher the artisan tells with a brush.
Door-God Painting
The door gods are the most representative paintings of a temple, and the first art a worshipper sees on stepping through the gate. Different kinds of temples pair different door gods:
● Martial temples: Qin Shubao and Yuchi Gong (military door gods), in full armor and bearing weapons, standing guard in awe-inspiring majesty.
● Mazu and civil temples: civil-official door gods (bestowing rank and emolument), in court robes and holding a ruyi scepter or peony, symbols of honor and wealth.
● Wangye and Tianhou temples: eunuch or palace-maid door gods, holding flower baskets, treasure vases, and other auspicious objects in elegant poses.
● Buddhist temples: the Four Heavenly Kings, or the guardians Weituo and Qielan.
A fine door-god painting depends on "making the gaze come alive" — from whatever angle you look, the door god's eyes seem to watch you, the supreme skill of the artisan. The god's face, the patterns of the costume, and the details of the armor all demand exceedingly fine brushwork to complete.
Murals and Beams
The paintings on temple walls and beams span an all-embracing range of subjects:
● Historical tales: the Romance of the Three Kingdoms (such as the Three Heroes Battling Lü Bu, or the Solo Ride of a Thousand Li), the Investiture of the Gods, the Generals of the Yang Family, and more.
● Religious themes: the Twenty-Four Exemplars of Filial Piety, the Eight Immortals Crossing the Sea, Guanyin delivering people from distress.
● Auspicious motifs: dragon-and-phoenix harmony, blossoming wealth, pine-and-crane longevity, magpies on plum branches.
● Antiquities compositions (bogu): still lifes of old objects (vases, scrolls, the zither and chessboard) symbolizing refinement and prosperity.
Each painting's placement follows rules: the dragon side (the left hand as one faces the deity) bears the dragon, the tiger side the tiger; the subjects on the main-hall walls must relate to the enshrined deity. Composition observes the principles of "honored above, humble below" and "honored left, humble right," with the important scenes placed at the visual center.
Techniques and Pigments
Traditional temple painting uses mineral pigments (such as azurite, malachite, cinnabar, and ochre), whose colors last and do not fade, still bright and lustrous after a hundred years. The main techniques are:
● Gold-rubbing painting (leijin): patterns drawn in gold powder over a black lacquer ground, glittering and magnificent, often used on the inner side of door panels or in shrine decoration.
● Flat coloring: laying multiple flat colors over a ground and then outlining the contours — the most common technique.
● Raised-paste gilding (lifen tiejin): building up raised lines in lime plaster and then applying gold leaf, giving the pattern a three-dimensional, relief-like effect.
Before painting, the wall or wood is primed (filled, sanded, and undercoated); then the design is drafted with a brush, colored layer by layer, and finished with outlining. A complete mural may take weeks or even months to paint.
Master Artisans
Taiwan has produced a steady line of master temple painters, forming a distinctive artisan lineage:
● Chen Yufeng (1900-1964): hailed as the "Painting Immortal," with representative works at temples such as the Kaiji Tianhou Temple in Tainan. His flowing, expansive brushwork and lifelike figures made him a grandmaster of modern Taiwanese temple painting.
● Pan Lishui (1914-1995): Chen Yufeng's outstanding disciple and a master painter of the old capital, with works throughout the major temples of Tainan; his door-god paintings are especially superb, and he was designated a preserver of important traditional art of the nation, his "living gaze" technique still spoken of with admiration today.
● Liu Jiazheng: a renowned contemporary temple painter, devoted to passing on and teaching traditional technique.
The works of these artisans are regarded as the highest achievement of Taiwanese temple art. Next time you visit a temple, look up and study the painted stories on the beams, and feel the cultural treasure these artisans have handed down through the brush.
Preservation and Succession
The greatest challenge for temple painting is "restoration" — old paintings weather and flake away over time, and restoring them requires an artisan of the same caliber as the original painter; otherwise the restoration can destroy the original's value instead. In recent years the Ministry of Culture has advanced a "traditional architectural painting restoration program" to cultivate a new generation of restorers, and has used digital photography to record precious originals, leaving a lasting record of this fading traditional art.