Person
Artist
Emily Shih-Chih Yang
楊世芝
Date of birth
1949
Place Of birth
Qingdao, Shandong, China
Biography
When Emily Shih-Chih Yang was just six months old her father joined the retreat to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalists. She grew up in Taiwan and later studied in the United States, where she developed her idiosyncratic expressionist style of ink painting. Returning to Taiwan in 1983, she spent ten years experimenting with the limits of traditional Chinese ink painting, resulting in a mature style that is based on layers of collage. Influenced by the calligraphy she learned as a child, Shih-Chih works freely with ink on rice paper before cutting up her spontaneous, gestural drawings and reassembling them into a patchwork of new forms. The Blessed Mountains diptych is not drawn from any physical geographic location; it is a spiritual landscape of the artist’s imagination.
