The soft-spoken, iron-willed Liu Siu-mei has put her tenaciousness to work driving the development of Civilian Arts, which is bringing a new aesthetic and new social movement to Taiwan. (photo by Jimmy Lin)

For the last several years, the so-called Civilian Arts Movement has been encouraging people without any training in the arts to take up painting. These budding painters include gray-haired senior citizens, divorced victims of long-term domestic violence, young prostitutes, workers disabled by occupational injuries, and immigrant brides from Southeast Asia.

These economically and socially disadvantaged artists have escaped the bounds of traditional painting to give direct expression to their own feelings and experiences. Their work depicts a variety of subjects: the terror of an air-raid at the end of World War 2, childhood memories of a grandmother making offerings to the spirits of the dead, a disabled worker's pain at the loss of an arm, and even a woman bathed in blood during her menstrual period. Their realistic portrayals of subjects we've seen before or see now in the world around address topics historically overlooked by Taiwanese art while simultaneously helping their creators heal themselves and reclaim their right to interpret their culture for themselves.

Liu Siu-mei, who became involved in Civilian Art education in 1992, argues that art makes people strong. Having herself benefited from the arts, she continues to sow their seeds around Taiwan, in the process earning acclaim from both the art world and society at large.

Artist Liu Siu-mei, who founded the Podong Dance Company in 2008 and Taiwan's first art school for girls in July 2009, traces her notion of Civilian Art to her mother, Chen Yueh-li, herself a renowned painter.