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作品賞析

In international diplomacy, one practice has been to exchange gifts of rare animals and plants; another has been to assist in the construction of buildings with the characteristics of the mother country in the territory of the other. This inspired Artist Chen Li-Ying to do a series of paintings depicting the Asian-style garden architecture that one can find in countries around the world; these were shown in his solo exhibition, “Tea House.” He first searched for these characteristic buildings through Google Earth, and then “copied” the screen images of these “ready-made landscapes” on canvas with acrylic paint. This work shows the Chinese Garden and its buildings in Zürich; the title gives the site’s coordinates. The distinctively bent lines and color blocks in the painting are the results of his faithful rendering of the screen image, rather than brushstrokes supposedly reflective of the artist’s personality. The artist conveys the cultural homogenization phenomenon through bird’s-eye views and pictures that can only roughly show the architectural features. The original complex, inner cultural meaning no longer exists.