The Habitat

作品賞析

The artist, Peng Kai-Teng, grew up beside Keelung Harbor. After the harbor declined, he felt as if he had become a wanderer living in a strange land. After leaving his hometown for many years, he looked back on his past and created works reexamining his relationship with his hometown. In The Habitat, he reshapes his impressions of his hometown through flat coloring and hyperrealism. The iron fence, concrete barriers, and the container functioning as a worker lodging in the painting are elements of the scenery that he could see everywhere when he was a child. In the distance, there are the kind of large cranes that can only be seen around harbors, for which they function here as a metaphor. Peng Kai-Teng uses a “deserted scene” style to present a construction site where “no one is present, but signs of human presence are everywhere.” The painting depicts changes to the environment caused by human economic activity, as well as the compromises made for the purposes of making a living. The sleeping stray dog echoes the main theme—its condition as a stray is manmade, and it has no choice but to live in a construction site.