SEA

作品賞析

For the artist Chen Poh-Sin, the sea is like the earth’s mother, sometimes gentle and sometimes awe-inspiring, so whenever he feels depressed, he goes to gaze at the sea. During the COVID pandemic, when people were in a gloomy mood, Chen was the same way, and facing a creative impasse. One day, he went to the southernmost tip of the Miura Peninsula in Kanagawa Prefecture to look at the sea and regain his energy. The work that resulted, Sea, was not intended to depict the sea’s likeness but to repeatedly stack layers of lines and colors. After applying one layer and washing it off, adding another layer and washing it off again, a different sea was depicted—the energetic one in Chen’s heart. The painting is presented in gray and white tones. It shows the milky white sea after noon, with a very faintly red-tinged band like an umbilical cord to mother earth, or like a beacon seen faintly through the clouds, implying that the pandemic will eventually end, and life will go on.