Artist: Wu Jian’An
Date: 2015
Museum: CAFA Art Museum (Beijing, China)
Technique: Cotton
“Tale of the Green Herring” is the prequel of the famous folktale “Legend of the White Snake”. Artist Wu Jian’an recreated a new myth with contemporary interpretation. The story begins with a herring’s cultivation, and the process of the green herring’s transformation according to Taosit methods is realized with freeze-frame images.All the 7 large images are made of countless small characters. There are 186 kinds of characters in total, each has its own name and identity. They either derived from religious classics or legends, or represent well known characters in historical events, or refer to certain state of life or social behavior...Together the pieces of image with its historical and cultural information and the artist’s imaginary act like cells, connecting or overlapping with others through different arrangements to form a complete picture. Put another way, the artist’s interpretation and expansion of “The Legend of the White Snake” is the result of his in-depth studies, summaries and comprehension on the literary classic. It is an attempt - at the ‘conceptual’ level - to ‘reinvent’ local traditions through the means of contemporary art. The artist’s combination of sketches, shadow puppets and paper cuts which are classical artistic styles with western anatomical style and contemporary aesthetic taste is “stylistic” in nature, and together they constitute an experiment on “metamorphosis” from local and global, traditional and modern cultural and artistic resources.
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