Imitating "Travellers Among Mountains and Streams" by Fan Kuan of the Song Dynasty
Chen Chun-Hao
陳浚豪
Production date
2011
Object Detail
Media
nails and canvas on board
Measurements
345 x 170 x 7 cm
Notes
For Imitating “Travellers Among Mountains and Streams” by Fan Kuan of the Song Dynasty (2011) Chen Chun-Hao appropriated an eleventh century masterpiece of the Northern Song period, a scroll more than two metres high. Fan Kuan’s painting focused on a towering mountain and tumbling waterfall, with a foreground of densely-leaved trees, boulders, and riverbanks. A minuscule human presence is almost invisible in one corner, where a mule train enters the composition. Unlike the western convention of fixed-point perspective, Chinese paintings have multiple vanishing points and complex compositions of shifting views; depth and distance are evoked by subtle washes of ink in varying viscosities. In a famous treatise, ‘Linquan Gaozhi’ (‘Lofty Record of Forests and Streams’), celebrated painter Guo Xi (c. 1020 – 1090) explained how these painterly techniques resulted in landscapes through which the viewer could physically and mentally ‘ramble’.
In Chen Chun-Hao’s adaptation of this misty landscape, almost twice the size of the original painting, the tonal variation is created by dense clusters of nails, imitating the specks, strokes and washes of ink in Fan Kuan’s work. The warmth of ink wash is replaced by hard industrial steel pins – 750, 000 of them. Viewed frontally, the landscape comes into focus; viewed from the side, or from an angle, the work becomes more abstract and sculptural, a twenty-first century version of the multiple viewing experiences that the classical landscape painters aspired to. Chen adjusts the density, firing depth and height of the nails to achieve the effects required for each artwork he re-interprets; the tiny nails cast angled shadows onto the canvas, varying in different lighting. Chen Chun-Hao’s laborious practice requires great patience as well as physical endurance. The dimensions of the original work are carefully measured before its image is projected onto the prepared canvas. Without any preparatory drawing, the artist begins punching in the nails, shooting them into the surface with his specially modified nail gun. In less than two years, Chen went through five million nails, twenty-five nail guns and broke two air compressors.
In Chen Chun-Hao’s adaptation of this misty landscape, almost twice the size of the original painting, the tonal variation is created by dense clusters of nails, imitating the specks, strokes and washes of ink in Fan Kuan’s work. The warmth of ink wash is replaced by hard industrial steel pins – 750, 000 of them. Viewed frontally, the landscape comes into focus; viewed from the side, or from an angle, the work becomes more abstract and sculptural, a twenty-first century version of the multiple viewing experiences that the classical landscape painters aspired to. Chen adjusts the density, firing depth and height of the nails to achieve the effects required for each artwork he re-interprets; the tiny nails cast angled shadows onto the canvas, varying in different lighting. Chen Chun-Hao’s laborious practice requires great patience as well as physical endurance. The dimensions of the original work are carefully measured before its image is projected onto the prepared canvas. Without any preparatory drawing, the artist begins punching in the nails, shooting them into the surface with his specially modified nail gun. In less than two years, Chen went through five million nails, twenty-five nail guns and broke two air compressors.
Accession number
2011.013