Artwork Appreciation
The artist Wu Yi-Tze’s paintings are often based on local landscapes in Taiwan, but transformed into the artist’s sacred inner place. He is inspired from daily life and a prolonged time away from his hometown, when a long distance separated his hometown and his workplace. This has enabled him to depict the scenery of his hometown from a detached perspective and create a series of works. Just in Time is the first work in this series. Here, behind the chain-link fence on the low wall, is an out-of-focus world; only green farmland and a grayish-white farmhouse can be seen vaguely. He conveys two different points of time, present and past, through the contrasting change between in-focus and out-of-focus spaces. The barbed wire is a symbol of the present. The chain-link fence had been erected by the artist’s father just before the artist first returned to his hometown. The scene behind the fence represents the past, a period of his family history in which he was not able to participate, and the childhood days spent there that had become increasingly blurred in his memory.