The Texturizing Strokes (Cunfa) Project
皴法計畫
|
The Texturizing Strokes (Cunfa) Project includes series such as THEY Shanshui 類山水, The Manual of Yuan’s Texturizing Strokes袁氏皴譜, and PS. THEY. "Cunfa" is the most essential structural element in Chinese landscape painting. Over the centuries, Chinese landscape painters developed a variety of Cunfa and techniques to depict the forms of mountains and rocks, which became essential stylistic markers for identifying the artistic periods of landscape painting. “THEY Shanshui” expresses my abstract inner emotions. Each texture block (cunfa) is constructed from the shifting moods of feminine joy, anger, sorrow, and happiness—every emotion possesses its own distinct form. The composition of “THEY Shanshui” is not built upon a single texture technique, but rather through the assemblage of diverse and fragmented texture blocks. This hybrid visual structure symbolizes Taiwan’s complex history of multiple colonization, and the resulting multicultural hybridity and polyphonic voices of the world it inhabits. “The Manual of Yuan’s Texturizing Strokes” originates from my THEY Shanshui series, in which I distilled and codified thirty-two distinct types of cunfa (texturizing strokes). Each stroke is named and interpreted to articulate both its form and spirit as expressions of emotion. Rather than imitating natural landscapes, these strokes visualize the invisible—abstract emotions, energies, and perceptions—transforming inner states into visible gestures of ink. The video work “Displacing Guo Xi's Early Spring in THEY Shanshui” (one piece of “PS. THEY”) replace the texture methods in Guo Xi’s Early Spring (Northern Song) with my own modular “THEY Shanshui” texture blocks. By interweaving yin and yang, multiplicity, and the dialectics of ancient and modern, the work subverts the millennium-old aesthetic and formal system of Chinese landscape painting.
|
