Interregnum Analysis

721 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Comparing artworks

China’s Double Edged Sword Interregnum, painted by the Chinese artist Hung Liu, is a massive oil painting created circa 2002. With the intentional application of several principles and elements of art in her work, Liu effectively depicts her late Asian culture’s traditional aspects while also exposing the harsh reality of China’s Communist society. Hung Liu incorporates a variety of styles into Interregnum while also utilizing color and line to visually communicate the subject matter to the viewer. In a formal interpretation of this work, the overarching theme of Interregnum will be explored and described, focusing on the particular values sought out by the artist Hung Liu. Liu integrates several artistic styles into her painting, creating …show more content…

Through the use of complementary colors, she achieves great contrast. Contrasting hues develop a theme of light vs. dark, or in Liu’s case, expectations vs. reality. Dark colors are used to suggest the harsh, chaotic conditions experienced by the workers; while light, less saturated colors illustrate the calm passivity of traditional Chinese customs and ideas. The sky surrounding the stylized women contrasts greatly with the surroundings of the exhausted men. The dark hues establish heavy visual weight below the figures and the light tones of the sky create a sensation of weightlessness and help to further distinguish the fantasy like qualities. Liu also includes the application of analogous colors, primarily to make the traditional figures less dramatic and to help unify the surrounding …show more content…

Hung Liu is successful in creating a juxtaposing image that tells a story about the many aspects of her Chinese origins. According to the painting, not all life in China is surrounded by beauty and elegance, like many believe it to be based on the traditional historical customs. Liu makes her point using a brilliant yet subtle progression, moving from the ideal to reality. Making use of the various principles and elements of art in her work creates a careful visual composition that benefit and support the painting’s achievements as a whole. This oil painting, being approximately 13 years old now, will hold a special place in Chinese history for the rest of its existence. The ideas Hung Liu portrays in Interregnum may help reform a social movement in the country by making her viewers socially aware of the cruel conditions the Chinese are facing under Communist rule, and this is all made possible through the assimilation of the principles and

Show More
Related

  • Wayside Madonna

    948 Words  | 2 Pages

    The painting is organized simply. The background of the painting is painted in an Impressionist style. The blurring of edges, however, starkly contrasts with the sharp and hard contours of the figure in the foreground. The female figure is very sharp and clear compared to the background. The background paint is thick compared to the thin lines used to paint the figures in the foreground. The thick paint adds to the reduction of detail for the background. The colors used to paint the foreground figures are vibrant, as opposed to the whitened colors of the Impressionist background. The painting is mostly comprised of cool colors but there is a range of dark and light colors. The light colors are predominantly in the background and the darker colors are in the foreground. The vivid color of the robe contrasts with the muted colors of the background, resulting in an emphasis of the robe color. This emphasis leads the viewer's gaze to the focal part of the painting: the figures in the foreground. The female and baby in the foreground take up most of the canvas. The background was not painted as the artist saw it, but rather the impression t...

    Read More

  • Mckeown Chapter 1 Summary

    851 Words  | 2 Pages

    Although still adopting a traditional literary form, the poetry writing can be regarded as an example of the heterogeneity and border-crossing of cultural-scape in globalization period. Those poems were produced under the brunt of the international mobility that is propelled by the capitalist globalization, but precisely and paradoxically, in a suspending situation caused by national regulation, a “state of exception” of this mobility. The juxtaposition of the frustration on foreign life and the flare of nationalist emotion (with the rhetoric emulating ancient barbarian-expelling heroes), may imply a paradoxical consequence in globalization: the international mobility undergirding the national awareness instead of undermining it. Following this thread, the publication of this kind of poetry in 1930s, the oblivion of it after war, and the subsequent re-discovery, recognition, and research of it can be all taken as symptomatic traces of the localization, articulation, and transformation of national consciousness (both as “Chinese” and “American”) in the continuous globalization. Needless to say, those poems are deeply flawed in terms of aesthetics due to the rather poor literacy of their authors. It would be invoking to put these poems beside those “high art” works also produced in globalization context, such as the works on the Eiffel Tower and the London fog by Huang Zunxian (黄遵宪), a late Qin intellectual caught in between the East and the West, the

    Read More

  • Chinese Terracotta Warriors

    915 Words  | 2 Pages

    I learned about many significant artwork and artist in this class. This class provided me with a better understanding of the history of the world Art, but also helped me understand the development of art style. However, among all of these precious pieces of artwork, there are two special ones that caught my attention: The Chinese Qin Terracotta Warriors and The Haniwa. Each of them represents the artist’s stylistic characteristics and cultural context. Although they represented different art of rulers, historical values, and scenes, there were visible similarities.

    Read More

  • Essay Comparing The Kneeling Woman And Two Women

    500 Words  | 1 Pages

    Spending time looking at art is a way of trying to get into an artists’ mind and understand what he is trying to tell you through his work. The feeling is rewarding in two distinctive ways; one notices the differences in the style of painting and the common features that dominate the art world. When comparing the two paintings, The Kneeling Woman by Fernand Leger and Two Women on a Wharf by Willem de Kooning, one can see the similarities and differences in the subjects of the paintings, the use of colors, and the layout

    Read More

  • Ai Weiwei´s Art and Censorship

    1742 Words  | 4 Pages

    “I don’t want to be part of this kind of denying reality. We live in this time. We have to speak out” (Klayman). Ai Weiwei is an internationally known Chinese artist as well as activist, and his motivation and determination can be summed up by this quote. In all of his pieces, Weiwei critically examines the social and administrative issues facing China today. Many of his works exhibit multiple themes that can be interpreted in various different ways. This lends itself to the universal appeal of his art and makes it a more effective medium of conveying his messages to viewers. Ai Weiwei’s activist artwork—and activist artwork in general—is important to society because it effectively forces the viewer to engage in a self-reflective process that makes the viewer critically examine his or her own beliefs and world. Nevertheless, censorship greatly hinders the dissemination of the critical and thought provoking messages of Ai Weiwei’s art and makes his artwork less effective. In order to gain a better understanding of the relationship of Ai Weiwei’s activist art and the Communist Party’s subsequent censorship, I will examine Ai Weiwei’s influential childhood, his specific brand of activist artwork, the censorship of the Chinese government and the effects of censorship on the effectiveness of Ai Weiwei’s art.

    Read More

  • Race In The Film: Do The Right Thing

    1088 Words  | 3 Pages

    The vibrant use of colors is meant to express the environmental conditions, as well as the character’s emotions. The main color during the whole film is red. The film uses red, yellow and orange to show me and keep reminding me about the heat. There is a scene in the film where three men sit against this bright red wall, and this shot isn 't just shown once in the film but multiple times. Even though the bright sun is never shown, I can tell how hot it is because of the colors. It also uses red to convey the character’s emotions such as anger, struggle, dissatisfaction, and frustration. For example, Jade’s apartment is red color to show Jade is a frustrated character in the film. It’s as though; colors were characters in the movie

    Read More

  • Rain At Auvers by Vincent Van Gogh

    479 Words  | 1 Pages

    The colours used in the artwork are earthy tones with various browns, greens, yellows, blues and some violet. These colours create a sense of harmony on the...

    Read More

  • Meditation in a Cave: Exploring Asian Solitude

    804 Words  | 2 Pages

    This work is represented with ink and color on paper which is a hanging scroll, with scale of 114.0 cm * 39.1cm. When first seeing this painting, most of its was filled with a jagged overhanging cliff, and Ren Yu used ink to represent it in a ink wash painting feeling plus clear outline of its shape. Therefore, he also used another practice in traditional Chinese arts, Gongbi, to represent the water at the bottom of this work and some plants. Other than black, white, gray, there are only two colors in the picture: use green to represent plants, and use orange-red to fill the color of the cloth on the person. By the strong contradiction of color, it is easy to catch people’s attention on the figure, which is on the right-bottom of this work. He is in red, relaxed clothes, sitting on the ground of a cave,

    Read More

  • Abstract Expressionism

    1363 Words  | 3 Pages

    Abstract Expressionism is making its comeback within the art world. Coined as an artist movement in the 1940’s and 1950’s, at the New York School, American Abstract Expressionist began to express many ideas relevant to humanity and the world around human civilization. However, the subject matters, contributing to artists, were not meant to represent the ever-changing world around them. Rather, how the world around them affected the artist themselves. The works swayed by such worldly influences, become an important article within the artists’ pieces. Subjectively, looking inward to express the artist psyche, artists within the Abstract Expressionism movement became a part of their paintings. Making the paintings more of a representation of one’s self.

    Read More

  • Salvador Dali And Surrealism

    1039 Words  | 3 Pages

    1), there is a blue sky with yellow tinted clouds in a desert landscape. There appears to be a storm coming into the painting on the left side due to the darkening of colors and added yellow tint. The painting is a skewed reality, but in the foreground there appears to be a head of a man on top of what looks like to be the bone of a leg morphed into a knife. Dali uses texture in the head of the man with the lack of detail and sharpness to make hair. There is also a smooth texture created on the bones from blending the oil paints gently. But for the neck and hands, he has sharp lines to show strains in the muscles. There are also other body parts and bones of a man conjoining into each other to create a geometric figure. The geometric figure formed from the body parts creates implied line from the sharp straight lines of the bones. The implied line puts an emphasis on the bone that is shaped like a knife. The color of the bones also matches the yellow tint of the clouds adding to the decaying and eerie mood of the artwork. On some of the bones there are also boiled beans, and the geometric figure appears to be resting on a box or shed. Stepping back, the viewer notices a balance in the painting from the geometric figure with having the head of the man on one side and a heavier part of a bone on the

    Read More

  • Zhang Xiaogang Analysis

    1788 Words  | 4 Pages

    It will define that Zhang used traditional Chinese charcoal drawing aesthetic to show the subtext of his artworks in contemporary Chinese art. By tracing the traditional Chinese charcoal drawing aesthetic in Chinese Painter Zhang Xiaogang artistic development in the past two decades, his art as a whole can be interpreted in presenting his concerns of the foregone society and showing his own feelings towards the public history with a unique form of expression.

    Read More

  • Shanshui Analysis

    766 Words  | 2 Pages

    Shanshui is a style of painting that has been practiced in China for one and a half millennia, it has a long history and it is part of world’s cultural heritage. It has always been more engaging to the hearts of the Chinese literati than flower-birds and human figure. Shanshui is not only for its own sake, but also as a vehicle, its because the it was never only about holding up a mirror to the landscape in keeping with dominant aesthetic tastes. It was always about reflecting on and negotiating the artists’ own position in relation to the world in that era – for centuries one with a majestic and noble nature of which humans were but a small and insignificant part. The other criteria were harmony, beauty and technique of execution.

    Read More

  • Art In The 19th Century Essay

    548 Words  | 2 Pages

    Art is something that many people have took advantage of for many years. Artist make paintings to express their feelings and to document historical facts that is happening in the world at the time. Each century has its own unique style, which leaves a mark on the world. The artists are the people who document the emotion during the time period. To let us gain a visual idea of what is going on. The nineteenth century is one of those century’s that set the world on its ears. Due to the fact, the world was seeing the rise of imperial empire come about and the formation of the United States. Nineteenth century is when art had a profound change. With the different movements there were three major movements in the art community. These movements are called the Neoclassicism, Romanticism, and Impressionism. Each one of these periods played a part in the

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Tim Parker's Nude Paintings

    756 Words  | 2 Pages

    These works may be labeled objectifying also because a male painter painted them. Today, these works could be seen as empowering to women. The first painting gives off an emotional ride of one duplicated woman or two women. The second painting shows an emotional journey of prayer and relaxation of a woman sitting in the lotus position. The third painting could represent a strong and empowered women respecting herself and her body. Times have changed and so have views of women in society which have influenced a change in how people view nude women in

    Read More

  • Symbolism In American Art

    236 Words  | 1 Pages

    Yet, when dealing with eastern society art forms (Chinese, Japanese and Indian) everything the individual is wearing in the painting had a meaning, from the robes, color of each piece, how they sit, their height in the picture, to even the most notable; their stare, basically, the person was the symbol, where in European art, the painter would have to add religious symbols in paintings. When viewing Emperor Shunzhi 1644 –1661 portrait, one can point out, that he has almost the same pinpoint stare as Pablo Picasso Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Also, to point out, even though, women were second class citizens as well, in Chinese form of art; it could be classified as pre-rape culture. Then contrasting this idea, they started showing portraits of

    Read More

More about Interregnum Analysis

Open Document