Artwork Appreciation
Artist Chien Yun-Ping believes that the popularity of digital photography has made the difference between “photographic art” and “photography” disappear, so he began to go back to the source, starting from the “developer” fluid (or photosensitizer). By doing so, he returned to the “handmade” features of photography and explored the artistry involved in the medium. In his work, Old Wall, he used “gum oil transfer printing.” That is, he first applied gum arabic with dichromate salt on watercolor paper, irradiated it with ultraviolet light, and then painted over it with oil paint after the glue hardened. The earthen color makes the derelict building recede into the background, and the traces of time on its old walls seem to tell a story; the green trees are also painted on dyed nonwoven fabric. These colors are freely painted on by Chien Yun-Ping, so each version of this work is unique, and photography’s characteristic feature of large-scale reproducibility is broken.