A Peaceful Reprieve Within Wu Chi-Tsung’s Los Angeles Solo Show, “Fading Origin”

A moment of artful serenity in Los Angeles, contemporary artist Wu Chi-Tsung’s solo show “Fading Origin” provides contemplative solace at Sean Kelly Gallery. Within the exhibition, the Taipei and Berlin-based artist presents pieces born of tactile experimentation and the manipulation of traditional and early photographic processes. The works not only act as a response to the prevalence of digital photography, but speak to the societal shift away from analog image capturing methods.

“Fading Origin” features new works born from a modification of the early photographic medium known as cyanotype. For this series, entitled Cyano-Collage series, Chi-Tsung washes sheets of Xuan rice paper in photo-sensitive materials, dries them, and then creases them by hand. They’re exposed to sunlight, leading to abstracted visuals which the artist collages together on aluminum panels. The results evoke serene landscape-like scenes. This same process informs the pieces in his Wrinkled Texture series at the show, where diptychs and quadriptychs are born from one sheet of cyanotype paper that becomes a negative for another portion of the overall vision. Here, visuals dissipate and emerge through the conceptual procedure.

“With these new works, Chi-Tsung focuses on the nuances and contrasts between digital and analog photography, exploring their unique qualities and the tactile beauty of analog techniques,” Thomas Kelly, partner and director, Sean Kelly Los Angeles, shares with Surface. “The exhibition also includes a new mechanical sculpture work titled Caligraphy Study 003, which features water-writing cloth attached to a motorized unit that is mounted vertically on the wall. Visitors are invited to turn on the machine and use a brush to write on the moving cloth, an interactive element that, for Chi-Tsung, symbolizes the rapid changes in society.”