Café Gallery

Van Chu: Photographic Brushstroke

I see an emphasis on emotion over illustration of traditional Chinese ink painters. I see the idea to give randomness a sense of order in the works of Jackson Pollock. I also see a journey to search for an ideal balance between aesthetics quality and conceptual idea in the photographs of Richard Avedon. Those ideas have come together and collided in Photographic Brushstroke, a series of photographic artworks that I have been working on since 2008. By using digital photography, a newborn art form, then combining it with the essence of Chinese painting, one of the oldest continuous artistic practices, I have created a body of photographs bringing traditions to the forefront again while giving them a breath of fresh air of the technological advances of the twenty-first century. A reminder that we are the intersection of what came before us and what is yet to come.