Fossil 9

作品賞析

From the alpine forests that he often comes into contact with, artist Wu Shang-Wei sees many trees that are thousands of years old, and from these old trees he can see and feel time’s scale and trace. He cannot help but imagine what the trees will look like in the future, so he uses this as creative inspiration. When painting the works in his “Fossils” series, he uses a dotting technique using ink dots of various sizes and tonalities to gradually build up the texture of these petrified trees. The images are both trees and rocks—they have the appearance of trees and the cracked texture of rocks. The bits of gold foil attached here and there hint at how Wu Shang-Wei imagines the fossils’ weathering and mineralization processes. In each painting, he attempted various changes of angle, direction, degree of fragmentation, and so on, to let viewers appreciate a variety of perspectives, compositional arrangements, and proportion of white space. Fossil 9 and Fossil 10 can even be hung side-by-side or one over the other in order to create new possibilities for viewing.