The Eight Trigrams of the I Ching - Mountain

作品賞析

The artist Tseng Mei-Chen is very adept with wood engravings. Using hard wood, she uses delicate techniques to carve pure lines in simple black and white, but she can also use these to produce infinite changes of light and shadow and complex compositions, in a style that is unparalleled. This is one of the eight prints in Tseng Mei-Chen’s “The Eight Trigrams of the I Ching” series, one for each of the divination classic’s trigrams, which symbolize eight of the world’s most common elements: sky, earth, water, fire, wind, thunder, mountain, and marsh. Here, the trigram gen symbolizes mountain, which, as the divination classic explains, means “stopping, not moving,” or “care and cultivation.” Tseng Mei-Chen was living in Italy when the COVID-19 pandemic forced her to isolate at home, so she used the I Ching to cast a divination on the future direction of the pandemic and completed this work. The world, like the mountain valley in the print, has come to a stop, but the valley is actually like an inverted heart that beats with the blood of life, which follows winding paths through the valleys into the distance.