Artwork Appreciation
Chinese brush and ink artist YUAN Hui-Li is skilled at using large mountains and rivers as a theme. She uses the language of traditional landscape painting to give voice to her own ideas about the environmental issue. In Taixu Series No. 15, YUAN uses the traditional brush and ink texturing method to meticulously depict the lines in rocks, making a pastiche that forms mountains.
Some of the mountains are round and smooth, some angular and steep, and each mountain is different. The background is gold in color, presenting a gorgeous landscape scene. The artist blends man-made actions into a naturalist scene, symbolizing the fact that with modern science and technology urban construction is expanding without bounds and that evidence of this is often part of the natural scene. This has led to the breakdown of the ideal of a unity of Man and Nature. The relationship between mankind and nature has experience distorting changes and the balance between the two has gradually been lost. YUAN Hui-Li has broken through the established aesthetic view of traditional landscape painting and has turned visual creativity into a language for actual social introspection and has given voice to the meticulous questioning and criticism of a female artist.