Boat Dwellers
A few freely strokes of ink come into view, neatly distributing the composition and the scenery. In Chung Chen Sun's "Fishing Village", the control over the picture is extraordinary. He subsumes the entire scene into a unified artistic language. Elements such as fishing boats and ferrymen, the water surface and houses, and the waterweeds emerging from the water are all integrated into the form. The whole painting is permeated with concise, powerful, and highly - generalized brushstrokes. The brushwork is unrestrained and bold yet precise and measured. It allows the viewer's vision to spread over the impressionistic strokes of the picture while also being able to focus on the image he intends to represent. For example, the calm helmsman on the fishing boat can be clearly discerned with just one horizontal and one vertical stroke.
Chung Chen Sun meticulously constructs the blank spaces. The composition of this painting, with a tight upper part and a loose lower part, still has a sense of relaxation within the tightness. The artist uses blank spaces to represent the water surface between the floating houses on the water. The structure of the houses inside is revealed through the overlapping of the gabled eaves. Such a design makes the houses, which should have been an integrated whole, not overly dense in the painting. Instead, there is a proper balance between density and sparsity, full of the charm of artistic principles. At the very bottom of the picture, a flying stroke is used to represent a fence, extending the space once again, dividing the inside and outside of the picture and bringing the outside into the picture. The texture left by the "flying white" and the cun strokes and the shapes covered by the thick ink form a collaged visual effect. This flat - treatment method endows the entire painting with a modern and decorative touch.
The theme of the fishing village is one of the typical themes in Chung Chen Sun's ink - wash landscape paintings. When this theme with unique Southeast Asian charm is combined with the brushwork of traditional Chinese painting, it gives rise to a distinct style under his brush. Through field trips and sketches, Chung Chen Sun has perceived the possibility of transforming reality into form in the simplicity and honesty of nature and human nature. He highly abstracts the objective images and restores them into the simplest and purest visual images with ink brushes.