Tattoo on the Earth - 1

作品賞析

When the artist Chang Chih-Ta looked down from the Taipei 101 observation deck, he discovered that there was a special beauty to roads and road markings that seemed unremarkable and ordinary in everyday life. So he spent two years traveling to almost all of the towns in western Taiwan, searching for these traces. Although the “tattoo” in the title of this work refers to graphics drawn on human skin, Chang was recording the markings on Taiwan’s roads, like tattoos on the earth, with an aerial camera. In road-building there is much digging and leveling, so the earth can only passively accept such intrusions and lose its original contours. The S-shaped curves at the bottom of the work are repeated and superimposed over each other. An abandoned driving course was also recorded during his anthropologist-style investigation. The occasional traces of smearing on the surface represent these features’ exposure to time. On these surreal lines, parked training cars pull us from endless fantasy to reality and strengthen the impact of the work.