Food Chain

作品賞析

Food Chain depicts a very different underwater world, without brilliant colors, blue seas, or blue skies. The picture is dominated by black and white. The artist, Lin Zih-Yin, uses the reductive woodcut technique to depict the delicate marine textures and interpret the most primitive features of the ocean—but the marine environment is being destroyed, the corals are bleaching, and the color of the ocean is gradually disappearing. In the painting, a jellyfish is floating by leisurely, and a sea turtle with fishing net in its mouth is swimming toward us, though its main prey in the food chain are jellyfish. Although sea turtles’ skin can resist the various jellyfish toxins, their eyes cannot, so they always close their eyes when they close in on their prey. As a result, they often mistakenly eat the plastic bags drifting about in the ocean instead. Although humans are at the top of the food chain, often casting nets to catch sea turtles, who, in the end, are being trapped? The sea turtles or the human themselves? The sea turtle’s wide-open eyes look toward the viewer, as if accusing us of everything happening in the sea.