In the north of Tanshui, overlooking the sea, there is a terraced place called Hsiakueijoushan. Along the narrow roads that wind up it are a number of abandoned factories. After they fell into disuse, artists moved into some, taking advantage of their open space for setting up studios. Six years ago, sculptor Yang Mao-lin moved his studio here from his small apartment in nearby Chuwei.

The 650-square-meter space costs just NT$5,000 a month, but is in bad shape. The sky is visible through holes left by broken roof tiles. Ill-fitting windows and doors let in cold winds. Wood and plaster are scattered everywhere. Since the start of the year it has been wet and cold, and nighttime temperatures have fallen to 10°C. Yang persists through the wind and rain, maintaining the schedule he's kept for years. He only takes three days off a year for the Lunar New Year holiday. He starts around two each afternoon and works until five or six a.m.

Ah Chiang Deva II (2002), based on a character from the Japanese cartoon series Mazinger Z.

Fairy tales and gods as company

In the middle of his chaotic workspace stand two life-size Peter Pan figures made of bronze. The boy who never grows up stands atop a dragonfly, soaring through the air.

Yang picks up a plaster of a mermaid that has been sawn in half, saying that it was originally embracing a prince but it was too heavy to move so he cut it into two pieces. It will be put together again at the foundry, and made into a mold. Molten bronze will be poured in and take the form of the whole piece.

"When I was a kid and read fairy tales, I saw how the little mermaid gave up her life of freedom in the sea and her tender voice. Though she could live near her beloved prince, she couldn't confess her love to him and could only watch in silence as he married another. In the end she killed herself over her broken heart. I felt so sad when I read it," says Yang, who retains a childlike innocence despite his 55 years.

Yang has been creating for 30 years, going from oil paints and digital images to wood, bronze, and steel sculpture and challenging his creative and physical limits. Each work has been more massive and complex than the last.

"With me, it's always 'out with the old, in with the new.' I don't have any patience, so I have to rely on learning to stir up new passions," says Yang. While working, he'll often be putting color on a bronze statue one minute and shaping a steel one the next. When he wants to let his mind rest, he works on a cabinet he made for his wife from camphor, teak, and Formosan michelia wood. All the pieces are jointed and no nails are used. He is completely self-taught but his craftsmanship is flawless.

His Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is an example of the complexity and size of his work. Half-size Snow White and the prince stand on a metal table with the seven dwarfs in front of them like guards. There are 13 pieces in the work, which altogether weighs 300 kilograms. To move it from the studio in Tanshui to the gallery in Taipei, he needed to hire a team of workers to take the pieces and reassemble them on site.

Little Bodhisattva of Thought Riding a Giant Wasp on display in a museum.

East and West in Taiwan

What made him make the leap from oil painting to three-dimensional sculpture 12 years ago? Pure chance, he says.

In 1996, Yang completed his "Made in Taiwan" trilogy that he'd been working on for ten years. It had one piece on politics, one on history, and a final one, Inviting the Immortals: High Officials' Record of Cultural Mating, on culture. To commemorate its completion, he put on a folk religious ceremony to send the deified cartoon characters depicted back to Heaven. He bought some driftwood, carved it into a cartoon image, and made an altar for it. He found the process of creating the image to be a simple pleasure, like putting together models, and never tired of it.

Before performances in Taiwanese folk temples, the performers will dress as immortals and put on a raucous show to please and thank the gods. Yang thought to himself, if people can dress up as immortals, then why not cartoon and comic book characters like Superman, Pikachu, or Astro Boy?

The meeting of these American and Japanese creations in Taiwan is part of Yang's memories of raising his children.

Born in 1953, Yang belongs to a generation of Taiwanese who lived through martial law, street protests, and social unrest. His early oil paintings were full of angry shouting, flying bricks and police batons, and other symbols of the popular mood reaching the boiling point.

For example, Behavior of Game Playing-Fighting Section shows a giant, taut fist waving, composed of stark reds and yellows. It's a forceful and direct indictment. The "Zeelandia Memorandum" series depicts Taiwan's colonial history with a longhaired, blue-eyed Dutchman using ships and cannons to take the island. His Culture from the aforementioned "Made in Taiwan" series employs characters from Hollywood and Japanese cartoons popular in Taiwan like Pinocchio, Superman, and Mazinger Z to ask the question, "Where is Taiwan's culture?"

Yang painted the internationally known label "Made in Taiwan" as if it were a poster or a billboard, as a satire on the social atmosphere of localization of the time. His work was seen as representative of Taiwan's post-martial-law "New Symbolism" movement. "He painted a map that compresses all of Taiwan's experience into an all-revealing plan, cross-section or surface, and takes the position that 'this is Taiwan' in order to express the territory created and staked out by his art," says art critic Lu Kuang.

The 126-centimeter-tall Black Ox Bodhisattva in Pure Land of Maha, 2005.

A decade of honing skills

Yang, who graduated from Chinese Culture University's Fine Arts Department in 1979, decided in his first year of university that he wanted to be an artist.

Thinking back on his youth, Yang says he was simply "hyperactive." He always talked in class and couldn't concentrate. He was often beaten by the teachers. He changed junior high schools several times, and only graduated from the night school division after six years.

Afterward, he entered a vocational school's arts department because he thought it would be easy. He wouldn't have to sit in a classroom every day-he could go out and do sketches. He was older and more mature than the others in his class, so he seemed smarter. He often represented the school in art competitions, and regained his confidence.

After graduating from Chinese Culture University, Yang watched as most of his classmates and friends got jobs and tried to eke out some extra time for art. He didn't want this for himself.

"I suppose I'm an unorganized, ineffectual person. I'm not suited for most jobs, and I don't believe I'd still have time to develop creatively after work," he says. With the help of his wife, who was one of his classmates, he decided to minimize his five-person family's expenses and use the extra time to work on his art.

Before 1986, he had economic problems. When he was short on money, he'd borrow from relatives. Finally, he'd borrowed all he could borrow and was heavily in debt, so he had no choice but to go out and sell things on the street. He went to Hong Kong and bought handmade accessories and images of gods of wealth and Buddhas made in Nepal. He'd take them to Nanking East Road in downtown Taipei every morning before 11, and close up at one in the afternoon.

"At the time, the Taipei stock market would close at 12 a.m., and there would be a lot of people out at noontime. People buying Buddha images often think of themselves as 'providing' for them and don't haggle over the price, so the profit margin was high. In three years, I made NT$3 million," says Yang. Selling on the street wasn't difficult-however, being over 30 and having to run from the police was an indignity. Also, the basic requirement for artistic creation is free time. "You need so much time that you can waste it on a whim," he says, so you can think about this and that or just stare into space. Now he was spending time ordering and setting out merchandise, the opposite of what he wanted to be doing. He decided to go home and dedicate himself to painting.

In the 1990s, the contemporary art market was not flourishing in Taiwan and there were few outlets for younger artists to exhibit in. Yang spent all his time working. He painted two or three hundred large-scale pieces.

Yang is not an antisocial artist. To give like-minded individuals a place to meet, in 1982 he invited fellow Chinese Culture University fine arts graduates, including Wu Tien-chang, Lu Hsien-ming, and Lu Yi-chung, to form the 101 Modern Art Group. When there got to be too many members (there were 30) and the quality of their work was uneven, he helped establish the Taipei Modern Painting Group in 1984.

They advocated art that reflected the times, and they were young and daring. Their works made brave points on politics, history, and ethnicity. Their air and their mission was of the engaged intellectual. These young artists rode society's raging tides to become today's leading contemporary Taiwanese artists.

"It was tough in those days. It took two or three years on average to scrape together enough to put on an exhibition. Work didn't get enough exposure and nobody knew who you were," he says. The groups were nothing more than a way of getting more chances to exhibit and sharing costs.

In 1991, Yang took a prize in the first Hsiung-Shih Art Creation Awards and finally won public recognition. In 1995, he signed a representation deal with the Lin and Keng Gallery and he's had a solo or group exhibition almost every year since. He finally had the chance to show the fruits of his long, lonely labor, and when he went out and met people he felt he had an identity to be proud of-artist.

Yang's latest stainless steel sculpture, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, weighs 300 kilograms.

Artistic hyperactivity

Yang's friends, who have seen him full of vitality as he's worked all night every night for more than 20 years, all say he must be a bit manic. Yang himself says he often doesn't know why he feels so excited. His mood while working is always passionate and full of emotion. But he is in deep concentration while working as well-he can sit in one spot for six hours, wearing protective glasses and a face mask and enduring the piercing noise as he does painstaking welding work on a steel sculpture.

Comparing wood, bronze, and steel as media, he says, "Woodwork is subtraction. With every cut, you feel the shape coming out. Bronze and steel work is addition. Every part of the figure can be welded on and put together."

"But steel is five or six times harder than bronze. Once you polish steel until it's like a mirror, you find it reflects a lot of light and it's tough to see details like eyes and mouths. You have to adjust the integration of the light. It's hard to get your 'brush stroke' (the angle and position of the welding torch) right so you can see. That's where the skill is," he says.

Years of moving pieces of bronze and sheets of steel and holding the welding torch has given him chronic tendinitis in his arms and shoulders. He can only give a wry laugh as there's no chance of recovery and it doesn't bother him. What does bother him are the acidic chemicals that spray around like acid rain when he paints the bronze. He sighs that while his hair is still black, it isn't as full as it was.

For 30 years, Yang hasn't punched a clock or taken a salary. Looking through a catalogue of his works, he feels gratified: "My life has been fantastic, every step of the way."

Yang's Tanshui studio is spacious but old and dilapidated. Molds, boards, and tools are scattered everywhere. He works alone, with only four rescued stray dogs for company.

If humans can play the part of immortals, cartoon characters can become immortals too. Here they are gathered together in the wooden sculptural work Ceremonies before Rewarding-Inviting the Immortals.