The passage of time in art seems to be something that Eastern traditions consider much more than Western ones. The hierarchical nature of landscape paintings as well as the method of reading a scroll both lend themselves to an understanding of time as a part of the elements of nature. Meanwhile, Western art tends to be more interested in the formal techniques of fleshiness. I can’t remember whether Yun Fei Ji mentioned this in our class talk or at his gallery talk later that afternoon, but he has been trained in western oil painting in addition to traditional scroll painting. The reason he uses the Eastern tradition to portray his work, excluding cultural factors, is because oil paints are too fleshy- they are meant to capture a single moment and all of its protruding, rounded, subtly colored forms. The gesture of ink, on the other hand is much more representative and plays with the universal understanding. In contradiction it both removes the object from the flow of time and places it within the context of a period of time. The object by itself is the universal representation- something that we saw emphasized in My Name Is Red. The object within the hierarchy of the landscape, puts that universal object within the context of a specific time frame. It is removed from the world that we experience everyday.
