Stranger

作品賞析

The artist Shao Shi Ming takes pictures of mysterious scenes he sees in daily life, and then recombines and paints them. His Stranger is based on a scene near a gazebo in a mountainous area that has long been in disrepair, though it has always been in use. In this painting, the wall becomes a dominant feature of the composition and shows a sense of self-limitation; there are contrasting tonalities, and the thinly applied ink gives the picture a hazy, gloomy atmosphere. Shao pastes aluminum foil, with its tiny cracks and pores, on the back of the paper, to create the mottling in the wall. The scene in which a local resident calmly moves about in the dilapidated setting is very self-contained. The “stranger” in the title is not the figure we see, but the artist, who is the outsider looking in.