Classical Tale no.40

作品賞析

Classical Tale No. 40 belongs to the artist Cheng Nung-Hsuan’s “Classical Tale” series. These are based on the images from mythological narrative that appear in classical paintings, but the artist then uses fast, intuitive brushstrokes to cover, displace, and distort the images, or disassemble and transform them, so that one must look at these mythological tales from a modern perspective. Cheng habitually paints several works at the same time. When creating, he pays attention to the rhythm of the pictorial elements among each of the works. This is a relatively small, freely composed work with a realistically depicted hand waving a sickle as its focus, but there is no complete narrative here—it is more like an episode from a larger work, or a short chapter in a story, so it leaves more room for the viewer’s imagination. The white and yellow colors of the sickle transform outward into many twisted cursive lines that spread throughout the painting, highlighting the complementary effect of the colors.