American Highway

作品賞析

Artist Liao Zen-Ping selects his materials from the everyday scenes around him. Sometimes a work may be an urban landscape, other times it may be a natural scene. Through a compositional approach like that of photography, the abstracted areas of color and lines form what may appear to be an ordinary, unremarkable scene, but under his brush he makes it exude a quality that may be endlessly savored. American Highway 4, 5, and 6 are part of a series of works completed by Liao in 2019 that reinterpret an earlier 2012 series on American highways. All three use a horizontal composition, suggestive of movement at high speed, but if we compare these with his 2012 works, there are different and more plentiful concrete clues in the pictures. Besides the pure horizontal lines, in one picture there are trees and houses with varying degrees of blur, and in another picture there is a part of the shadow of cars and highway facilities. These clues further convey what the artist saw and felt, and they invite the viewer to stare again at those often overlooked moments in daily life.