The Immortal Seeker of Herb Picker

作品賞析

The Immortality-seeking Medicinal Herb Picker is the artist Chen Kuei-Yen’s attempt to depict “the gods in people’s hearts.” He used low-saturation tones such as earth tones and grays to create a time and space where time seems to stand still. The scenery in the painting is composed of rough lines of similar colors. Chen Kuei-Yen used tools to grind away the boundaries of these lines to blend the colors together, which gives the work a chaotic atmosphere and makes it seem like it came from some time in the past. In the painting, a white-bearded old man stands in a deep forest, holding a basket full of “lacquer bracket” (Ganoderma lucidum) in one hand and a curved knife in the other. He has a long-stemmed pipe in his mouth. The forest is realistically depicted, with rough brushstrokes, but the cold tonalities turn it into an imagined scene, into which he places a figure that combines the stereotypical qualities of what the artist and many other people today believe make up a spirit-being. Chen Kuei-Yan believes that the so-called “gods” actually live in our own imagination, and that the final destination of “immortality-seekers” is actually a reflection of their own inner desires.