La Foret Urbaine - No.5

作品賞析

Artist Chi Pei-Chen’s “La Forêt Urbaine” series of works combines photography and painting. She 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. In this series, she takes Taiwanese advertising signs she has drawn herself into actual European street scene to create one after another virtual cityscape. It provides viewers from different cultural backgrounds an angle from which to escape from existing frameworks of beauty or ugliness and see their own cities in a new light. The scene in La Forêt Urbaine—No. 5 comes from Strasbourg, France. Chi Pei-Chen adds to it various signs advertising Sisi cold capsules, Datong electric pots, Wei Lih Instant noodles with Jah Jan flavor, HeySong soft drinks, and other products with a very pronounced local Taiwanese flavor on the roofs and walls of Strasbourg’s historic buildings. It makes a strange montage city scene, simultaneously contradictory and harmonious.