Fossil 3

作品賞析

The artist Wu Shang-Wei derives his inspiration from fossils, imagining some living thing from the past that goes through a slow mineralization process through the eons to transcend death and become eternal. His “Fossils” series contains his reflections on the linearity of time and the vicissitudes of life. When observing nature in forests, he senses the scale of time and thinks about what the centuries-old or even millennia-old giant trees he sees will look like in the future. In Fossil 3, he drew the images with a dotting technique, superimposing dots of different sizes and tonalities to create the textures of petrified trees. They are “tree-stones”—simultaneously trees and stones, appearing like trees and with the texture of stones. They are presented in a partly abstract manner, mostly on one side of the painting. The white spaces are also filled with tiny granular dots that strengthen the impression of stone. Wu Shang-Wei also applied gold foil in various places to suggest the appearance of the fossils after weathering.