Embracing the Dawn—Discovering Transparency and Radiance in Su I-Jung's Landscapes
-by Lu Song-Ying (PhD of Fine Arts of National Taiwan Normal University)
Artists possess a keen eye for beauty, offering audiences unique perspectives. When Louis Daguerre invented the world's first camera in 1839, painters were profoundly impacted, realizing that realistic documentation was no longer the sole purpose of painting; it held different meanings.
Su I-Jung, born in Tainan in 1960, studied under masters such as Shen Che-Tsai and Huang Lian-Deng. He has exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Germany, France, and currently serves as the Dean of the Chinese Cultural and Arts Institute's Western Painting Academy and as the Director of the Qianhe Art Museum. He has also been active in promoting arts and culture, serving as an advisor to the Southern American Association and as the founding president of the City Portraits Society. His early landscape works such as "Sacrificial Rites Martial Temple" and " Chikan Tower (Fort Provintia)" inherited Shen Che-Tsai's external light-style colors and sketching foundation. Later, he became enamored with cubist techniques of segmentation and recombination, evident in works like "Sail" in 2016 and "Port" in 2018. His recent masterpiece "Dawn" employs a transparent painting technique to depict the translucent clouds and mist surging between mountains, vibrant with colors and vitality, presenting a harmonious composition of mountains, clouds, light, and hues.
Su I-Jung once mentioned in an interview that he dislikes using pencils for sketches during his creative process; instead, he prefers allowing brushes and colors to freely roam within his imagination. His transparent painting technique, unlike the classical glazing method, is used to create variations in light and shadow refractions, allowing colors to stack into different layers while retaining light and delicate stroke.
This pursuit of the changing hues of light and colors is reminiscent of the landscapes depicted by Impressionist painter Claude Monet. Monet once said, "For me, a landscape does not exist as a landscape, as its appearance changes constantly." The allure of landscapes perhaps lies here.
When an artist sees only art in their eyes, mountains are no longer mountains, and waters are no longer waters. It is hoped that through Su I-Jung's paintings, viewers can see different landscapes.
