Artwork Appreciation
Artist Chan Wen-Fu’s Dwell in Peace: Houses Printed with Money is a series of six paintings with the railroad tracks by Tainan Railway Station running through at the bottom. The houses were originally built next to the railway, but they were expropriated in order to move the tracks underground. After selecting the houses that were to be demolished, he rearranged them along the railway tracks in the picture and used gold-colored aluminum foil card stock to print them out. This weakened the colors of the house images and highlighted the black tracks, house structures, and brick and tile lines. Chan Wen-Fu uses the anti-oxidizing, anti-corrosive properties of gold aluminum as a double metaphor, of the negative impression people had of those who were unwilling to relocate, and of the imprint that was left by the people who had lived here for so long.