Over the Mountain

作品賞析

Hsu Yu-Ting created Over the Mountain when she was invited to be artist-in-residence at Chishang, Taitung County. It depicts the scenery of seedlings and irrigation channels around the time of the Qingming or Tomb-Sweeping Festival. At first glance, we viewers will automatically tend to search for a stable horizon in the painting, but we find that our past experiences of looking at landscape paintings will not work. But Hsu uses a bird’s-eye view to record the landscape, when a strong wind blows over the seedling fields. The “coarse” mineral pigments such as pea green, chocolate (known as kogecha or “burnt tea” in Japanese), and ultramarine blue (powdered azurite or gunjō in Japanese), and the Japanese tin foil that she uses in addition to the softer Eastern gouache pigments impart both a visual and tactile experience. To add variety to the work, the tin foil will, over time, darken and give the whole composition deeper tints. When we walk through nature, the body’s experience of it is very subtle. What Over the Mountain wants to convey may be the touch of the wind, the aroma of rice seedlings, the light and shadow of the channels—all these tiny but real fragments of memory.