Chao Er Tai

1989

未裱

POST WINGS

This work was completed when Zhao Erdai was seventy-two years old, marking one of his important late-life creations in the style of "sketching with ink wash." The scene is set on the basalt coastline of Penghu, where a solitary boat slowly sails across the distant sea, while the foreground features a clump of reeds swaying and inclining in the strong wind.

At this stage of creation, Zhao Erdai no longer responds to the world with a critical or dialectical stance but instead shifts towards an almost silent observation. Ink wash here does not serve as a tool for emotional projection but becomes a medium that carries a sense of time and the state of life. The reeds in the painting are not symbolic decorations but rather a natural existence derived from on-site sketching—their tilting, disorderly form, and repetitive brushwork directly respond to the environmental conditions of the Penghu coastline, which has long been shaped by the wind.

The reeds present a strong sense of "temporality" and "fluidity," symbolizing the ever-changing state of life as time progresses; they lack a solid form yet manage to exist in the wind, much like the artist's position in the passage of time. The distant solitary boat serves as a temporal marker in the viewer's line of sight, pointing to the continuity of life's journey while also implying a state of both departure and forward movement.

The overall composition does not seek dramatic arrangement but retains the asymmetry and emptiness of on-site observation, making wind, distance, and time crucial conditions for the emergence of the painting. This work embodies the core spirit of Zhao Erdai’s late-life "sketching with ink wash"—no longer articulating the meaning of life, but allowing nature itself, in its silence, to reveal the flow and disappearance of life.

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