Summer Shade
Tai Ming-Te
戴明德
Production date
2014
Object Detail
Media
acrylic on canvas
Measurements
200 x 200 cm
Notes
The imagery in Summer Shade (2014) is derived from childhood memories of small-town life in Taiwan. It was inspired in particular by a 1994 film directed by Wu Nieh-Jen, ‘A Borrowed Life’, which shows the narrator as a child, remembering how men from his rural coal-mining village climbed onto roofs to sneakily peer at women taking an afternoon nap. This film brought back the artist’s own memories of long hot summers in his southern fishing village. Tai says, ‘I remembered how I peeped at people’s secrets through the gaps in the roof windows.’ He quotes a Tang Dynasty love poem, ‘Bamboo Branch Song’, by Liu Yuxi:
Green, O green is the willow, placid the river flows along;
Hark and I hear on the river my love, singing a song,
The east sun rises, the west is shroud’d in rain;
They say it’s raining, I say my sun ne’er shines in vain!
The painting is a dreamy fantasy: a naked woman lies languidly in a hammock slung between stands of bamboo, one leg dangling. She’s outlined in Tai’s characteristic expressive black against blocks of stencilled cool and warm grey, but her nipples are a startling lolly pink. On the right of the canvas, an ascetic scholar sits under the shade of the bamboo, oblivious to her allure. Above, though, three larger figures the artist describes as ‘naughty boys’ hang upside down or perch in the trees and stare lustfully. Despite the voyeurism, there is an air of innocence to the scene: the female figure is not a passive object to be gazed upon but rather is actively enjoying her own sensuality –– she seems amused by the antics of the boys looking at her. She sways in her hammock while they shake the leaves and bending branches of bamboo above her head. It’s a somnolent afternoon idyll, and a dramatic contrast with the anxiety revealed in Tai’s Paris paintings. Tai Ming-Te describes his process of image production as like two axes on a graph –– the internal world of his personal memories, and the external world in which he lives. The task of the artist is to bring those two elements together seamlessly, just as he combines the sharply delineated marks of woodblock printing with his own painterly language of form.
Green, O green is the willow, placid the river flows along;
Hark and I hear on the river my love, singing a song,
The east sun rises, the west is shroud’d in rain;
They say it’s raining, I say my sun ne’er shines in vain!
The painting is a dreamy fantasy: a naked woman lies languidly in a hammock slung between stands of bamboo, one leg dangling. She’s outlined in Tai’s characteristic expressive black against blocks of stencilled cool and warm grey, but her nipples are a startling lolly pink. On the right of the canvas, an ascetic scholar sits under the shade of the bamboo, oblivious to her allure. Above, though, three larger figures the artist describes as ‘naughty boys’ hang upside down or perch in the trees and stare lustfully. Despite the voyeurism, there is an air of innocence to the scene: the female figure is not a passive object to be gazed upon but rather is actively enjoying her own sensuality –– she seems amused by the antics of the boys looking at her. She sways in her hammock while they shake the leaves and bending branches of bamboo above her head. It’s a somnolent afternoon idyll, and a dramatic contrast with the anxiety revealed in Tai’s Paris paintings. Tai Ming-Te describes his process of image production as like two axes on a graph –– the internal world of his personal memories, and the external world in which he lives. The task of the artist is to bring those two elements together seamlessly, just as he combines the sharply delineated marks of woodblock printing with his own painterly language of form.
Accession number
2016.247