Four Bliss Stones
Chou Chu-Wang
周珠旺
Production date
2014
Object Detail
Media
oil on canvas
Measurements
4 pieces, each 41 x 27.5 cm
Notes
Since 2003 Chou Chu-Wang has been selecting stones as still-life subjects, studying them carefully and developing an unusual painting technique to record their beauty and diversity. His subjects are often found on the banks of the Linbian River, close to its mouth at the South China Sea, near Chou’s hometown in rural Pingtung County, where he still lives and works close to his family’s farm. Walking by the river and along the seashore, he observes the stones in their natural surroundings, slowly deciding which to use in a painting. He brings the stones back to the studio, takes many photographs, and begins the laborious process of building up his surface of tiny dots, dashes and marks on the canvas, layer over layer, then carefully painting the negative spaces between them.
Apart from their intrinsic beauty, the stones hold personal histories. The artist often played on the river banks as a boy, collecting stones to construct towers and monuments. These are tactile memories, evoking the freedoms of childhood as well as its fears and anxieties. To hold a stone in your hand is to be physically jolted with a reminder of playing on the beach, or skipping flat stones across the water. As a child, Chou Chu-Wang’s chore was to help his farming family collect duck eggs at dawn each day. Thousands of fragile eggs had to be held and carried attentively, with great care, an action repeated day after day, year after year, until he left home as an adult. This taught Chou patience and rigorous concentration which he now applies to his painting.
For Chou Chu-Wang, art is a spiritual, rather than an intellectual, practice. Working slowly, applying oil paint to canvas with minute dabs of colour, is a kind of meditation. The series of paintings entitled 'Four Bliss Stones' characterises this practice. On each of four small canvases a stone floats peacefully over a blank background. They are painted with such meticulous hyper-realism that at first they appear to be relief sculptures, casting exaggerated shadows onto the empty space beneath the stones, which were collected by the artist, his wife, and his two sons, and are now filled with good memories. In fact, the painted stones are very slightly built up from the canvas with modelling compound, in such a way that the line between illusion and reality is blurred. On close inspection you see that every striation, seam, hollow and mark of weathering is built up with tiny dots of pigment, about three hundred and fifty thousand layered dots per square metre. Every subtle nuance of the colour, texture, light and shadow of each singular object is frozen in time at a particular moment. If the artist works without stopping for eight hours each day, it takes him forty-two days to cover one square metre of canvas. Chou’s act of painting is in itself a time-based practice; his brush marks the passage of the solitary minutes, hours and days in his studio.
Apart from their intrinsic beauty, the stones hold personal histories. The artist often played on the river banks as a boy, collecting stones to construct towers and monuments. These are tactile memories, evoking the freedoms of childhood as well as its fears and anxieties. To hold a stone in your hand is to be physically jolted with a reminder of playing on the beach, or skipping flat stones across the water. As a child, Chou Chu-Wang’s chore was to help his farming family collect duck eggs at dawn each day. Thousands of fragile eggs had to be held and carried attentively, with great care, an action repeated day after day, year after year, until he left home as an adult. This taught Chou patience and rigorous concentration which he now applies to his painting.
For Chou Chu-Wang, art is a spiritual, rather than an intellectual, practice. Working slowly, applying oil paint to canvas with minute dabs of colour, is a kind of meditation. The series of paintings entitled 'Four Bliss Stones' characterises this practice. On each of four small canvases a stone floats peacefully over a blank background. They are painted with such meticulous hyper-realism that at first they appear to be relief sculptures, casting exaggerated shadows onto the empty space beneath the stones, which were collected by the artist, his wife, and his two sons, and are now filled with good memories. In fact, the painted stones are very slightly built up from the canvas with modelling compound, in such a way that the line between illusion and reality is blurred. On close inspection you see that every striation, seam, hollow and mark of weathering is built up with tiny dots of pigment, about three hundred and fifty thousand layered dots per square metre. Every subtle nuance of the colour, texture, light and shadow of each singular object is frozen in time at a particular moment. If the artist works without stopping for eight hours each day, it takes him forty-two days to cover one square metre of canvas. Chou’s act of painting is in itself a time-based practice; his brush marks the passage of the solitary minutes, hours and days in his studio.
Accession number
2015.086