Lee Tse-fan

Lee Tze-fan was a Taiwanese painter and art teacher. He studied at Taihoku Normal School when he was 14 years old. His painting career began in 1924 when he was introduced to art by his teacher Kinichiro Ishikawa. He was selected by the Executive Yuan Council for Cultural Affairs (CCA) as one of ten distinguished senior Taiwanese painters in 1983. Lee Tze-fan was also the father of Yuan T. Lee, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1986. He returned to teach at Shinchiku First Public School after graduation and co-founded the Hsinchu Art Research Association with He Te-lai in 1933. He later became a teacher at Hsinchu Teachers College in 1938 and became the first chairman of the Hsinchu Art Association when it was established in 1971. Lee lived and worked in Hsinchu his entire life, leaving behind many watercolor works featuring the natural and cultural scenery of Taoyuan, Hsinchu, and Miaoli using his singular watercolor technique, the "rubbing and wiping method", which consisted of repeated wiping and modification. In 1994, Lee’s family converted his former residence into the Lee Tze-fan Memorial Art Gallery.