La Foret Urbaine - No.3

作品賞析

In the process of creating her “La Forêt Urbaine” series, artist Chi Pei-Chen’s uses a dual-lens medium-format film camera to capture street scenes, then scans and digitizes the landscape photos, developed in a professional photo studio, and then she uses a computer to draw and piece the sign images on the street scene. Since the photos taken were square, the final work is also output as a square. The scene presented in La Forêt Urbaine—No. 3 was shot in a city near the sea in southern Portugal. The hot, humid weather there gave Chi Pei-Chen the illusion of having returned to her hometown, so naturally associated southern Europe in her mind with southern Taiwan. The fruit painted on the eye-catching yellow signboard is wax apples, which are produced mainly in southern Taiwan. The various advertisements—the water caltrop sign at the alley’s entrance, an advertisement for a shrimp fishing pond, a mom-and-pop grocery, and on the telephone pole, a street sign for “Zhongzheng Rd.” and two advertisements for houses on sale—imbues the whole work with local Taiwanese flavors.