A bstract art is notoriously difficult to appreciate because it dispenses with realism in favor of
nonrepresentational expression and often requires a deep understanding of an artist’s psychological or emotional state.
Although Yeh Chu-sheng’s (葉竹盛) oil and acrylic on canvas paintings can be said to fall into this category, the Leisure Art Center (悠閒藝術中心) presents his works in a way makes them easily accessible.
Entitled Infinity, the small exhibition displays 11 medium-sized paintings that Yeh completed in the past year, with two works dating from the 1990s, and provides a brief survey of the artist’s interests over the past decade: Taiwan’s natural environment and the natural cycle of growth and decay.
While abstract art’s visual language is sometimes frustrating because it lacks a clear visual reference to the phenomenal world, the center compares and contrasts Yeh’s works of patches and swaths of seemingly random lines to other abstract artists and supplemented the exhibit with a section devoted to Yeh’s preliminary sketches. These realistic studies of stems, seeds, flowers and other natural phenomena illuminate the non-representational canvases. It is advised that anyone visiting the gallery take a look at them first because they provide a solid starting point from which to approach the main works.
In Marine · Creature (海洋 · 生物), Yeh paints the canvas dark blue and creates texture by the addition, here and there, of blobs of ultramarine, pools of black and veins of peacock blue — as if to suggest different watery depths. Swirling within this aquarium of abstraction are elongated lines painted in cadmium yellow, some tinged with white. The shapes vaguely appear as an anchor, fish and cylindrical ocean creatures.
Marine Ecology (2) (海洋 · 生態 2) features fewer creatures, but continues the theme of ocean blues, with the addition of branches of purples and pinks that connote coral.
Other canvases move the action above the water’s surface. A small bird balances on the edge of a thick blade of dark grass that seems to have exploded from the center of a pod in Flower · Zen (4) (花 · 禪 4). The painting, which is the only representational canvas on display, is reminiscent of Chinese flower-and-bird painting both in its monochromatic use of color and the simplicity of its background.
In Flower · Zen (8) (花 · 禪 8), Yeh takes the viewer in a different direction in terms of the application of paint, use of color and mode of representation. A mass of dappled yellows fills the canvas, creating a dynamic rhythm between the malachite and emerald green background — a combination of color that indicates growth and decay.
Ecosystem (16) (環境 · 生態 16) reminded me of the cliffs at Yehliou (野柳), on the northern coast. A rectangle of red ochre color stretches across the lower quarter of the canvas above which is a large splat of black superimposed over a background of a tempestuous grayish-black wash, which forms the upper two thirds of the canvas.
The other third is given over to another rectangle that itself looks like a canvas, painted in a combination of pale yellow and brown. At the top of this canvas-within-a-canvas, yellow powder pigment is combined with red and blue twine and juxtaposes the black sun in the center of the canvas.
Like many of Yeh’s other paintings, he here uses powdered pigment as a means of replicating the texture of mountains while a thickening agent, applied here and there, ripples the acrylic paint in a manner reminiscent of waves.
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