ILLUSTRATED:

The cultural 80's is an era of "popular culture", the rise of public awareness, environmental protection movements, consumer movements, the prevailing of realistic movies, cultural publications, and postmodern thinking etc., all of them co-existed and developed a clearsighted room for the culture. The variety of society values has made art diverse and changeful, made art even more tolerable than ever. Besides Abstracts, there are also Surrealism, Neo-Abstracts, new development s , new mater ial s , new presentations, performance arts, and concept arts etc. Back in the 80's, Taiwan's art circle has already connected to western thinking, that unrestrained open space for creation has stimulated more and more new artists to step into the field.

Hwang Jyi had been through a period of mysterious aura pursuit and inner spiritdis covery, during 1984 and 1989, he began to try combining subjects like lovely females and deep ocean scenes or forests, the artist pushed complex and hard-tounderstand pictures to the background. This series represents Hwang's best oil paintings; he paints an imaginary world with elves or naked adolescent gi r l , somet imes three Graces, as if he is trying to express the desire of any boy for love. But if you look carefully into the picture, we might discover stupefied faces on those girls, because they are drowned in their own beauty or sometimes homo loves, hinting a sense of dispirited beauty. On the other hand, the artist also tried various techniques to present the picture, sometimes he first used printing press techniques, sometimes he used abstract brush strokes or pigmentations to briefly create the dimension in the picture, and later used thinner brushes to fill the empty spaces with shells, fossils, fishes or human faces to set off the main theme or subject.

"Fault in a Colony – Three Graces" is one of the works from the Sedimentary Rocks series, the artist used cloth or tissues with the printing press technique to present the grains or the rocks, he used shells, fossils, or fragments of animals or plants, as well as elves of rock figures to fill the apertures. Even though the Three Graces entwine, but the look and express on their faces aren't friendly, as if they look at the afar, with something on their minds, they are used by the artist to present humanity. The body of these women are attractive, but look carefully, they look as still a sfossils , as i f they have been in underground for bi l l ions of years , surrounded by shells, animals and plant fossils. The environment in the temple of Sedimentary Rocks is corroded and colorful; it's like what we might deep under the ocean. Their beautiful bodies, with their blinking eyes are downing in an environment of narcissism or homo loves, the whole picture is mysterious and imaginative.

When the artist looks back to the period when this paint ing was created, he mentioned: "My inner self was almost like a autistic depressed poet, I had financial difficulties, I spent only 2,000 dollars a month, my determine to paint was unshakable, but solitary was inevitable." (From The Window of Tranquilization, Huang Jyi collection, Galerie Elegance Taipei, 1996, p. 37) People prai sed Hwang as a sur real phantom of fantasies, his works touched the boundary between reality and surreal, yield various experiments. Full grains, active yet mature brush strokes, the rhythms of lines, the construction of the theme, the place between reality and nil had pushed the tension of how art could reach to an extent.