Throughout the history of both Chinese and Western art, portraiture has remained a consistently popular genre. The clothing worn by the people portrayed, and the background scenes, help to give as a feel for the era in which the portrait was painted, and portraits from the past give people living in today’s world a window onto what life was like for the portrait subjects and their contemporaries. In both the Chinese and Western portraiture traditions, realism gradually became a core aspect of portrait painting; in the West, the Renaissance ushered in a new era in which portraiture grew increasingly popular and portraits grew ever more realistic, while in China the portraits painted during the Tang Dynasty may seem somewhat expressionist, but they still feature precise, detailed depiction of facial features.

Chiu Ya-tsai’s artistic talent derived in no small part from his own sorrows; he once commented that all of the figures depicted in his paintings had something of himself about them: the struggling artist, the rootless wanderer, or the unsuccessful businessman. These lonely images provide the viewer with clues as to the artist’s own inner world. A lover of literature who also wrote as a form of self-expression, Chiu was able to condense his feelings into a series of portraits. The individuals shown in these paintings are never wholly broken down by life; although sorrow or sadness may appear on their faces, they always maintain a steady calmness in the face of the problems that the world throws at them, and the overall effect is one of refined, gentlemanly bearing. The artistic lexicon of Chiu Ya-tsai’s paintings reflects in microcosm the life of the artist himself. Through his brushstrokes, Chiu was able to express his own identity, becoming a “storyteller” whose own tale is told through the figures in his portraits. It was precisely this lonely, unique spirit that gave Chiu Ya-tsai’s art its power.