Artwork Appreciation
The “THEY Shanshui Series No. 57” began in 2007. Ink artist Yuan Hui-Li was facing a major turning point in her life which prompted her to think about taking a path different from that of the past. In her creative work, she started exploring her inner feelings, using the female perspective as her path. She transformed emotions into various points and lines, turned thoughts into thin lines, tears into dots, and anxiety and distraction into curved or tangled lines. Different shades of light and dark or curved, twisting lines reveal subtle changes of mind. In her works, mountains and rocks are not just mountains and rocks, but the traces of her emotions, thoughts, and life. THEY Shanshui Series No. 57 uses the color blue as its base, when blue is a relatively rare color in traditional ink painting, and the use of different rock structures in this composition gives it a mixed, varied appearance. The yellow curly ferns emerging among the unusual mountains and rocks are a special image belonging to Taiwan—and the artist uses this to show the distinctiveness of the island culture.