Artwork Appreciation
While the novel coronavirus pandemic was raging around the world, the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan came to be regarded as the source of the outbreak, due to the sale of wild animals there. The artist Ho Huey-Chih used what is recorded in the book of Leviticus in the Bibles to reexamine belief cultures, eating habits, and methods of avoiding contagious diseases such as leprosy. This painting thus illustrates the dietary rules of the Old Testament. Ruminants with cloven hooves, chickens, ducks, flightless birds, fish with fins and scales, crickets and other locust-like insects were deemed edible. However, in the New Testament, such dietary restrictions no longer exist. God thinks that food is not what defiles individuals, but the spoken word, so in this painting, he asks Peter (standing in the middle of the picture) to change his mind and start preaching the gospel to the Gentiles. The artist uses the past to describe the present and hides many details in the work, including the logos of the Lo-Sheng Sanatorium and the Ministry of Health and Welfare, an image of the coronavirus, and so on, which the viewer can check one by one.