The Blessed Mountains
Emily Shih-Chih Yang
楊世芝
Production date
2012
Object Detail
Media
ink on rice paper mounted on linen
Measurements
diptych 150 x 400 cm
Notes
In 1949, at the dawn of the People’s Republic of China, Emily Shih-Chih Yang was just six months old. Her father joined the retreat of Chiang Kai-Shek and the Nationalists, taking his family from Qingdao to live in Taiwan. As a child, she learned the traditional techniques of ink and brush painting. When she went to the United States to study, she discovered how abstract expressionist artists had been influenced by these eastern traditions. Returning to Taiwan, Yang developed an experimental practice that blurs boundaries between east and west, and between realism and abstraction. She works quickly, making spontaneous, gestural brush marks on xuan paper with Chinese ink. Then she turns them over and cuts them into small pieces, before reassembling them into a patchwork of new forms, until a shape or subject reveals itself. Finally, Yang applies more ink over this collage in sweeping gestures. Her brushstrokes recall the calligraphy she practised every day as a child in Taiwan. The Blessed Mountains is not drawn from any physical geographic location; rather it is a spiritual landscape of the artist's imagination, a poem of praise to the natural world. Yang says: ‘It is like a uniting of heaven and earth.’
Accession number
2015.061