Artwork Appreciation
The artist Mia Liu once drew in pencil on her grandmother’s ink bamboo studies and several albums of paintings to create more than a dozen works that were like dialogues across time and space. As a result of this “experiment with painting,” she began to think about the relationship between painting and framing or mounting. She found four unmounted ink paintings at a flea market in Seoul and asked a restorer to mount them on larger sheets of paper. Then she used pencils to enter into a “dialogue” with the paintings. Through the repeated lines and geometric patterns drawn by her pencils, combined with the landscape of the original ink painting and changes in the shades of ink, Drawing Dialogue in Seoul: Four Landscapes becomes both concrete and abstract, both realistic and sketchy. In cooperation with restorer Lin Huan-Sheng, fabrics with modern, popular, and geometric patterns and mirrored stainless steel were used as mounting materials and integrated into traditional mounting, so that the mounting and the paintings echo each other, presenting the complete form of the work.