Artwork Appreciation
The artist Huang Yuan-Yu is good at recording life’s various situations and attitudes through photography. Immortal Recycling - Famous Painting Series (Venus) is the first of Huang’s “Immortal Recycling – Famous Painting Series,” which tries to explore what is the essence of an immortal work. What is beauty? What is art? The photo was taken on the seashore near Hsinchu. Huang used the garbage there to reconstruct the scene from the famous fifteenth-century painting, The Birth of Venus, in which Botticelli depicts the goddess Venus, a symbol of love and beauty, being born from a clam shell. Her beautiful face and toned figure made this work an immortal masterpiece. Huang’s reconstructs it by a process of appropriation and satire: the goddess was born in never-deteriorating marine waste. Everything that can be recycled and reused achieves “immortality.”