The Story of Mechanics

作品賞析

Artist Sun Chih Hsing is good at telling stories with images. His work, The Story of Mechanics, uses black and white to horizontally divide the picture into two worlds. The black space above shows a scene from a car back seat, looking out through the windshield a policeman is standing in front of the car, looking in, and there is a reflection of a parrot in the rear-view mirror looking at the viewers. The white space below describes more of the scene outside the car window: two drug lords, one frowning, one grinning, are facing the policeman. The work is based on an actual event, in which a shootout occurred between two drug lords and a policeman who inspected their vehicle. A parrot in the car became an eyewitness to the shootout. The artist insists on drawing with a mouse instead of a brush as a means of deliberately making the lines seem clumsy and imprecise and in order to cool down the original violent scene. For him, art is not about showing off skills, but about allowing viewers to reconstruct their own exclusive stories from their own perspectives through pictures constructed by simple, unelaborate lines.