Category: Artwork

In the early spring of 2015, Mr. Ni Tsai-Chin, a prestigious artist and art critic in Taiwan, died of disease. When learning the news, I recalled a summer vacation more than 10 years ago some friends and I served as assistants of Mr. Ni. We experienced a memorable summer in Mr. Ni’s dormitory in Tunghai University. Being indulged in calligraphy and ink art all day, we often chatted extensively from southern transition of Chinese landscape paintings in Song dynasty to the western art made in Taiwan. His expanded horizons, insightful arguments, integrated knowledge of traditional and contemporary arts, and persistence in defending cultural subjectivity have nourished my art development since my novice periods. To commemorate Mr. Ni, I present Cyano-Collage in a form of ink painting collage, what is Mr. Ni’s conventional method, combines with wrinkled-texture cyanotype. Rice papers with photosensitive coating were wrinkled and exposed under sunlight to record the lighting and shading on the paper. A selection from dozens of pieces of cyanotype photographic paper was reorganized and edited before mounting on a canvas. The work is displayed in a style resembling Chinese Shan Shui and photomontage. Cyano-Collage substitutes ink and brush strokes used in traditional Chinese Shan Shui with experimental photography to interpret the imagery of landscape in Eastern culture.