Mount Whale Spine

作品賞析

Whale Ridge Mountain is a plaster relief print from artist Chou Yo-Chen’s “Big Fish (Detail)” series. She developed the painting after obtaining an image of a small section of the spine from the huge body of a whale. Using a dark technical pen to imitate the creasing method used to draw mountains in traditional ink paintings, she depicted continuous lines of mountains in detail on the plaster. In plaster relief printing, however, when conceiving the layout, the layers of ink and color painted first on the plaster are reversed when they are transferred to the paper, and this tests the artist’s layout ability. Chou Yo-Chen uses layer-by-layer techniques to create colorful images. Colorful little fish swim leisurely in the sky, on or between mountain peaks, and the mountains and sea blend into a beautiful illusory realm. The continuous mountain ridges lead the viewer to mentally outline the image of the mountains extending outside the painting, which achieves one of the two issues that Chou has discussed: “infinity in the picture” and “extending the image beyond the frame.”