Artwork Appreciation
What I Learn from the Mountain and the Sea was created when Artist Wu Chuan-Lun went to live in Taitung in 2021, just as the COVID pandemic escalated in Taiwan. He had to postpone his original plans, and his accustomed fast pace perforce became a slow one. Feeling anxious, he picked up his camera, walked to scenic natural spots, and took photos of stones of different shapes and textures. He did the 3D modeling directly on-site, then used digital drawing to re-compose his perceived experiences of humidity, heat, and wind. In this series of seven digital prints, we see what look like bright mineral crystals and cross-sections of warm, lustrous stones like polished jade. During the creation process, he also added ink washes and the pigments used for green and blue landscape paintings on top of the virtual, non-realistic images. As a result, the work hovers between abstraction and representation, the virtual and the real, so it opens up new vistas of the imagination in contemporary landscape painting. What Taitung’s mountains and sea taught Wu Chuan-Lun was, “Do not be deliberately aggressive and ambitious, and do not be in a hurry to make drastic changes.”