Wu Chi-Tsung's wrinkled landscapes borrow from contemporary techniques to achieve their signature style, retaining elements of traditional Chinese art forms in material and aesthetic.
Read MoreWu Chi-Tsung's 'Wrinkled Texture' series reinterprets Cun Fa, a traditional texturing method in Chinese landscape (Shan Shui) painting. Instead of using the traditional ink and brush, however, Wu uses cyanotypes, a photographic process that results in a signature shade of blue. In Wrinkled Texture 109 (2021), a cyanotype on Xuan paper, dancing waters come to life across varying folds that emerge from the rice paper's surface, creating soft waves that reflect light and motion.
Wu Chi-Tsung's 'Cyano-Collage' (2015–ongoing) series followed. To make these, the artist soaked Xuan paper in a photosensitive solution before exposing it to sunlight and crumpling the paper into varying shapes. The resulting image is marked with wrinkles and folds, retaining at once a record of light, time, and gesture.
Cyano-Collage 089 (2021), for instance, a cyanotype showing a portrait view of a highly textured mountain rendered a deep blue, strongly evokes The Great Wave off Kanagawa (1831), the iconic woodblock print by Hokusai. At the same time, a certain softness is retained in Wu's paintings, the fine texture of the Xuan paper acting as a neutral backdrop to the wrinkled mountains.
The same concern with light can be found in Wu Chi-Tsung's installations like 'Crystal City' (2009–2019), a series of large-scale light installations that filled dark rooms with translucent geometric shapes made from LED and plastic, replicating eerie electronic utopias.
Wastelands (2013), a successor to the first light installation, offered a dystopian alternative with entire rooms submerged in plastic waste—an ode to pollution and the realities we cannot escape.
