Spring, Ssummer, Autumn and Winter

作品賞析

The artist Chiang Wen-Ying was born in Japan and studied art in Taiwan. Her creative style is influenced by popular art and Japanese anime. Her works also incorporate formal traditional decorative Japanese aesthetics as represented by the artist Ogata Kōrin (1658-1716). The repeated images in this series create their own rhythm. Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter has four panels with the same human face and very similar composition. Chiang uses the four seasons to interpret human birth, growth, aging, and death, and she brings out the connotations of different stages of life through the changing seasons. The medium is Eastern gouache. For Summer, the colors are layered on, giving a three-dimensional effect. In Winter, “Platinum Pearl” mica is added to give the snowflakes a metallic texture. The box-like, deep wooden frames are handmade and has metal decorative brackets at each corner. They, too, have different colors according to the different seasons, suggesting the idea of “the world in a box.”