Artwork Appreciation
Artist Wu Mong-Jane is good at finding themes from everyday landscapes, discussing how “form” builds familiar impressions and how cultural imagination is established on the visual level, and rethinking the aesthetic methods of photography. During her daily commute, she realized how varied the roof shapes were on the buildings on both sides of an elevated highway. This became the inspiration for Tower City #1701. These decorative roofs, used to cover the water towers, show different styles in line with the overall design of the building, and one can often judge the age of the building based on its style. Wu photographed these scenes, simplified the images into lines, dismantled the images and reorganized them again to build a composition that seems romantically exotic, when all the materials are derived from local Taiwanese architecture. She does this to think about Taiwan’s special situation while exploring her own culture.