Landscape Remains – 03

作品賞析

Lee Jo-Mei is skilled at working on the ordinary textures of objects, so that, by detailed observation and repeated drawing, she can conjure up poetic memories of landscapes. In Landscape Remains – 03, she depicts the frond from a royal palm tree growing outside her bedroom window. Quite often, when a typhoon is approaching, these fronds are cut from the palm, and they become dried husks on the ground. She uses pencil and charcoal stylus on watercolor paper to create a three-dimensional dry palm frond, but the work also captures the memory of its past. It should be noted that the royal palms one often sees in Taiwan today were imported during the Japanese colonial period and used as shade trees along sidewalks. Under the policies of the colonial government, roadside trees were seen as an adornment for society and a symbol of civilization and progress. These tall trees were in line with the colonizers’ imagination of what their tropical colony should look like, but they were very popular. Nowadays they are submerged in a concrete jungle, like remnants of history left in our life.