An Elegant Harmony of Black & Gold

作品賞析

LIOU Yi-Lan is a self-taught artist. Selling pickled cabbage in a traditional market, she used her free time after work to paint. Never formally trained in the arts, she has a distinctive style, unrestrained in form and bold in composition. Her painting An Elegant Harmony of Black & Gold is a metaphor of money politics in Taiwan, pondering the crises lurking in society. In this piece, the lonely island of Taiwan floats in the Pacific Ocean. A woman holding gold ingots symbolizes a politician or a tycoon, while the mal figure clutches a knife in his hands, signifying a gangster. They sit on a precarious branch, maintaining a graceful bearing on the surface, but beneath them the land is covered with cactuses and the sea is filled with piranhas: once the balance is disrupted, disaster will result. Liu uses unique aesthetic ideas and the language of painting to provide a perspective for examining the social phenomena of greed and being lost.