Artwork Appreciation
Chao Nan-Kai uses flat glass as his creative medium and uses the warmth of matte-surface opaque glass to break most people’s traditional impression of glass as being cold and transparent. He thinks that the most interesting quality of glass is its uncontrollable contingency, so in the creative process, he deliberately omits some steps of the composition process in order to allow features in the glass that occur inadvertently or naturally to remain in the work. In Cross the River, he began with the idea behind Japanese rock gardens, an abstraction of Eastern spiritual thought, so that the composition remains simple and poetic. Chao chose to use black and white, the two colors with maximum contrast, to form cold, hard structures that would strengthen the work’s visual volume and weight, and also produce a clearly layered spatial depth. He built an abstract, inclusive world that echoes the infinite possibilities nurtured by the compatible regeneration of all things.