Tian Rossana Wong

In Tian’s paintings the relation between foreground and background creates a narrative tension. Sometimes she’ll work on rice paper, which has an ancient and essential part in the history of Chinese painting and calligraphy. Rice paper’s many types absorb paint in differing ways. In Tian’s work there is always an awareness of how paint relates to various papers, directed to theatrical effect. Whether that of a mountain or tree’s structure within its environment, or the moment of dissolution when the singer hits the perfect note.

The rhythmic structure of the mountain in Tian Rossana Wong’s painting ‘Rite of Spring Part 1’ is at once taut and slack, like the spine of a semi-dormant animal. As this title referencing Stravinsky suggests, her most recent work has explored the relation between visual art and music. One way in which this is clear is how depth will be understood as a feature of surface. This is evident throughout various different scenes, palettes and brushwork techniques, and derives from the artist’s calligraphy skills. Take ‘Blue Trees’ where the tracing of the branches make a textured recess. They recall a poem – another medium for the meeting of the visual and music, or sound and image – by Sylvia Plath: “The wet dawn inks are doing their blue dissolve / On their blotter of fog the trees / Seem a botanical drawing”.  

They have something of the quality of Eyvind Earle’s fantastical illustrations – the artist of backdrops for the original 1950s Disney films, whose work is now collected by leading museums all over the world.