Silent Mountain

作品賞析

What is the color of silence? The artist Chang Chih-Chia records Taiwan’s landscape purely in black and white and seems to be a black-and-white photograph, but the brushstrokes have the strong flavor of Oriental ink painting. Chang applies the brush repeatedly, piling up layers of wash, and reorganizes the messy ideas into a reproduction of a silent world. He remarks, “Traveling is letting yourself get to known the world, and at the same time, come to terms with yourself.” Most of Chang’s creative themes are developed during his travels, and mountains, roads, and trees often appear in his works. His Silent Mountain is an impression of Mt. Huoyan as he was driving past Miaoli. In the lower left corner we can vaguely see the figure of a small deer, which, like the viewer, looks at the mountain. The scenery as seenpassing by on the road is thus mentally deconstructed in the artist’s mind, since what he wants to express is not just the superficial magnificence of the scene, but rather the nuances and the tranquility of the mountain purely in black-and-white tones, after discarding all the busy colors.