Fossil 10

作品賞析

The work Fossil 10 is an imaginative creation on the theme of changes in time scale by the contemporary ink artist Wu Shang-Wei. He observed the traces of time on thousand-year-old trees in alpine forests and began to think about the forms of plants after death. Using fossils as inspiration, he used superimposed ink dots of different sizes and tonalities to create images of things that are both tree and stone. They look like trees, and they have surface cracks as stones do. The lines of petrified trees are presented in a partially abstract way, mostly in one corner of the painting. Tiny specks can be seen in the blank spaces, which enhances the impression of stone. At the same time, the artist has applied bits of gold foil on the petrified trees, suggesting that the fossils are undergoing further weathering. In his “Fossils” series, Wu Shang-Wei constantly changed the angles, orientation, and degree of fragmentation of the petrified trees and varied the composition and the proportion of white space in order to give viewers different perspectives for appreciation.