Probably more of the artwork in other categories are mixed media, since more and more artists are exploring new medium mixed with a familiar one. Genres are also more fluid than they used to be.

Tetsuro Fujimori does a variation of the same theme every year using paper, nihonga paint (powdered pigments often ground from minerals or actual dirt in a binding agent), and push pins. He is concerned about ecology, particularly the hills and mountains near his house. He is recording how they decrease in size every year as people chop down the trees and mine them for gravel and dirt. Fujimori said that he must have several kilometres of these drawings. Wouldn’t they look great all lined up in a large gallery? You could walk into a changing landscape.

Yuan Chin-Taa is a Taiwanese artist and he participated for the first time in the show at the Annex.

Yuan’s recent works, The Books Series, contains a new interpretation of ancient Chinese books.   With the semiotics application, Yuan has reinterpreted text messages from the ancient Chinese Tao characters, Shang and Zhou bronze inscriptions, the Qin and Han bamboo Jane, Seal, and Li words to render contents of the books series such as the Book of Songs, the Book of Mountains and Seas, and the Book of Tea.  Inspired from the comprehension reading of Chinese ancient poems “FISH”, the Book of Song is as a carrier, showing the symbolic images and new interpretation text links on, to explore the erotic world of human nature. Corresponding the ancient text of the Book of Mountains and Seas, Yuan has created the ultra-modern mythological animals to visualize the fantastical world of ancient China.  He also focuses on ecological concerns and the cultivation of life aesthetic in the Book of Tea. To have more complex structures of casted paper art, he worked with local handmade paper mill and discovered new materials and fibers of the island plants. The partition layouts of the exhibition include handsheets, casted paper, stainless steel plates, ceramic series and Chinese paintings albums.  Three-dimensional paper arts, technical-hollowed finish with incense-burnt calligraphy, transforming the shape of space images and the light and shadow of the texts transmitting through with pages opened.

Taipei Cultural Center

Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York

All of these teapots look sturdy but are actually fragile.

Isn’t it interesting how both of these mixed-media artists are interested in using natural materials to record their changing culture and environment?