Art Taipei 2017: ELEMENTS

ARTIST: Wang Jieyin | Liu Guofu

Venue: Taipei World Trade Center Hall One

Website: art-taipei.com/2017/

Art is elemental in its return to elemental language to discover new aesthetic principles and inspiration, to break existing historical convention, and to discover new pure language. It may set out from the natural imagery of the Chinese-style shanshui landscape painting, and end up moving towards a leisurely abstract writing, or it may set out from abstract brushstrokes, and end up moving towards the natural generation of infra-image. The painting aesthetic of Wang Jieyin and Liu Guofu shows us the contemporary significance of Chinese-style painting, which is the finding of a virtually impossible path between Chinese traditional imagery and Western abstraction integrating Eastern aesthetics and Western concepts between abstract compositions and natural smoke, between ancient elegant graphic memory and cursive ambiguity, between extemporaneous serendipity and noble refinement, between leisurely play and orderly construction, between an implied changing of the times, and the inframince texture of jade.

The works of Wang Jieyin and Liu Guofu featured in this exhibition are the successors to Zao Wou-ki on the path of Chinese oil painting to transform the properties of oil paint, bestow them with greater penetration and jade texture, to transform the concepts of abstraction to bestow it with more natural, empty growth, to transform visual logic to make it more infra-mince and transparent, and to transform the brushstroke, to make it pure and rich with polyphonic tension. This “infra-chrome aesthetic” succeeds Mono-ha in Japan and Dansaekhwa monochrome painting in Korea to become the most representative art of the East.