The nature as a subject of art has played important roles in the evolution of art for both the West and East, despite with different characteristics and historical meanings. In the East, landscape in Ink Painting has become a symbolization of the feelings or wills of the artist or scholar. In the West, once served as the background of mythological or religious paintings, landscape has evolved into a realm where people are allowed to immerse in the nature and contemplate the reality, and at the same time as the destination for the artist’s spiritual traveling. Either from the Western or Eastern point of view, landscape occupies a place which is not to be neglected. It not only reflects the ways people view or consider the world, but also reveals the process of people’s encounters with the nature and the essentiality for human being to keep a dialogue with the nature.
Investigating into a subject with a long tradition, “Dialogue with the Nature” reconsiders the role and evolution of landscape in the hopes of exploring possibilities and influences it could bring to the contemporary art after all the breakthroughs made at the peak of Chinese Ink Painting and the times following the Impressionism. Works from 13 artists are presented in this exhibition, which starts with YEH Shih-Chiang and YU Cheng-Yao, who had brought about important innovations of ink painting in the last century, followed by WU Yiming, who responses to the contemporary age through innovative use of ink and color. The exhibition further presents LIN Wei-Hsiang, whose oil painting displays exquisite shadings of color resembling that of ink painting; SHI Jin-Hua, who inherits Chinese traditional aesthetics while insists on practicing art with strong emphasis on concept and action; JHONG Jiang-Ze and TANG Jo-Hung, who have infused oil painting with Eastern aesthetics; Juin SHIEH, Marina CRUZ, Patricia EUSTAQUIO, and Hanna PETTYJOHN, who treat the nature with various feminine points of view; LEE Ming-tse, who reveals the unique cultural aspect of Taiwan through the re-creation of readymade folk objects; and Shinji OHMAKI, who implies snowscape with abstract lines. The exhibition is composed of four aspects, namely Revolution of Ink Painting, Inheritance and Transformation of the Eastern Aesthetics, Feminine Perception and the Nature, as well as Representation and Transformation of the Nature.
