Chou Yu-Cheng Chou Yu-Cheng, His Professor Yen Ye-Cheng and His Painting, 2014 Acrylic on canvas 2 pieces: 80 x 110 cm Yen Ye-Cheng has been a mentor and a lifelong friend of Chou Yu-Cheng since Chou was an undergraduate. They carved out different career trajectories in art. Nonetheless, Chou has been admiring the introspective concerns of oriental literati reflected in Yen’s paintings. This project took a “transcendental” and “bi-lingual” form through “mentorship” and “imitation,” a typical way to learn ink painting. Chou firstly purchased Yen’s paintings, and then re-created those paintings into monochrome ones through imitation. The original and imitated works were juxtaposed in the concomitant exhibition. Adopting the traditional approach of “imitation,” Chou obviously expected to indicate not only a genre of literati painting that has long been veiled by Modernity in contemporary art scene, but also the interrelationship between a “mentor” and his “disciple” that is endemic in the oriental culture.
