Artwork Appreciation
Artist Chien Yun-Ping believes that the popularity of digital photography has made the difference between “photographic art” and “photography” disappear, so he began to look for the possibility of “unique originality” and “the touch of the brush” in the art of photography. He traced back to the source, starting from the “developer” fluid (or photosensitizer). In his Long Conversation, he used the “gum oil transfer print” technique: he first applied gum arabic with dichromate salt on watercolor paper, irradiated it with ultraviolet light, and then painted over it with oil paint after the glue hardened. Because the strokes of oil painting are non-reproducible, it breaks with photography’s characteristic feature of large-scale reproducibility. The dark blue exudes a restrained, melancholy atmosphere. Under a cloudy sky, two people—one in a suit, the other in long coat—walk by the sea, but keep a certain distance from each other. It is like silent theater.