Watching the Mountains in Summer

作品賞析

When Hsiao Chu-Sheng picks up his brush to depict the vitality of Taiwan’s mountains, he uses many layers of light-colored natural mineral pigments in a way that brings out the mistiness in the atmosphere between the sky and the earth. The haziness of the scene is such that it becomes hard to grasp the mountains’ relationship with us mere humans. Hsiao created Watching the Mountains in Summer in 2020, when, as a result of Covid-19 ravaging the world, everyone was beginning to rethink the relationship between man and nature. Some people kept asking why the pandemic occurred, and others were surprised by its impact. Perhaps the question mark and exclamation mark are the best punctuation marks for the present moment, so he painted the exclamation marks, question marks, and the rectangles symbolizing face masks in the grey block along the right side of the painting. This long string of garbled symbols is a deconstructed text that reflects current social phenomena. At first glance from a distance, it looks like the stitched edge of a facemask. In this way, Hsiao added contemporary artistic vocabulary to an ink painting in order to bring in his own unique observations on society.