Artwork Appreciation
YUAN Goang-Ming’s City Loss of Urban Elements combines traditional photography with computer technology by overlapping images from different time and space. People and cars are removed from the composition, leaving only trails that hint to their existence while emphasizing the ravages of time. The same approaches were employed in Reason to be a Leaf. Leaves were first scanned. The scanned images were digitally processed to remove all the leaf veins. Although the leaves retained their original forms and aesthetic textures, their identifying characteristics and features have been removed. YUAN Goang-Ming narrates in simple question and answer: “Why is a leaf a leaf? The idea behind this is similar to how our own identities are defined.” The end result is a unique vision where original truths were distorted, serving as a metaphor of the modern, globalized world where the means of individual identity in an increasingly uniform remain a standing issue.