The Summer Castle Guarded by the Holy Grail

作品賞析

The Summer Castle Guarded by the Holy Grail is from the series “Dream Travelers,” which the artist Chen Shinn Horng has been creating since 2011, inspired by Shunji Iwai’s 1996 movie Picnic. In this painting, the four characters who continue wandering in the dream are self-projections of Chen Shinn Horng and his yearning for worlds of fantasy. In this painting, a castle is surrounded by a huge labyrinth, and the Holy Grail floats close to the castle, near the center of the painting. Right below it, one of the four travelers sleeps, and the other two chat, seemingly as if they have finally reached their Utopia after a lot of hard work. In this scene filled with detail and story, the viewer also enters the dream while follows the artist’s complex vision. Chen combines nocturnal dream and daydream imagination in creating a tranquil but lonely world where the deserts and labyrinths are often endless. One can get lost in them, but there is an indescribable peace here. The quest to transform dream into reality through paintings also seems as if it can go on forever.