In recent years, building on the foundations of contemporary landscape, secular themes, modern photography, and photomontage, Vinci Weng has travelled widely with camera in hand. Through his lens and digital post-production, he has developed the ongoing series My Wonderlands — images saturated with colour, dazzling in brightness, at once seemingly unreal yet convincingly true, and imbued with a lively, festive spirit.
In his early years, Weng specialised in ink painting, acquiring a profound understanding of the multi-point perspective space in Chinese art — from the monumental, stele-like vertical compositions of central hanging scrolls to the meandering narratives of horizontal handscrolls. Whether vertical or horizontal, these intentionally compressed, elongated formats evoke the visual language of classical landscape painting. Upon these frameworks, however, he collages scenes of contemporary life and festive subject matter. The result is a surreal and wondrous tension born of contradiction and juxtaposition, which, while eliciting admiration, gradually draws the viewer into the artist’s meticulously constructed fantastical realm.
As in Travellers Among Hills in Midsummer, the towering, stele-like composition recalls the monumental landscapes of the Northern Song, particularly Fan Kuan’s Travellers Among Mountains and Streams. Yet, on this upright hanging scroll, the artist layers the lush, verdant forests of subtropical Taiwan, animated by brightly dressed figures strolling leisurely across grassy clearings and beneath the trees, their demeanour entirely at ease. Notably, cranes, herds of deer, and cattle appear among the human presence, seamlessly woven into the scene. The cranes — long emblematic of an otherworldly, immortal realm — mingle here with the bustle of everyday life, producing a contemporary vision where reality and illusion coexist, and where the ancient and the modern are interlaced. The result is a secularised, modern interpretation of the immortal’s landscape.
By contrast, Oceanic Garden of Delights adopts the horizontal, scroll-like narrative format, rich in the lively elegance characteristic of the Southern Song master Xia Gui’s Pure and Remote Views of Streams and Mountains. The work draws on the dramatic coastal rock formations of Shitiping on Taiwan’s east coast, whose rugged surfaces, weathered over centuries by relentless waves, bear mysterious natural patterns reminiscent of the textured brushwork of traditional landscape painting, imbued with an underlying Eastern aesthetic. Yet, upon this once-barren headland, Weng introduces crowds of picnickers and revellers at play. Most striking are the vast, colourful hot-air balloons rising into the sky, and the paragliders descending gently to earth, amplifying the festive atmosphere and vividly articulating the artist’s vision of a dreamlike paradise.
In sum, Vinci Weng’s My Wonderlands series skillfully draws upon the spatial composition and modes of viewing inherent in traditional Chinese painting, merging them with contemporary landscapes and secular themes. Employing advanced photographic imaging and post-production techniques, and adopting a semi-directorial approach, he intentionally — and at times playfully — references the forms and subject matter of classical painting. While subtly evoking the aesthetic spirit of the Eastern tradition, he boldly engages with contemporary, worldly subject matter, seeking out scenes of collective festivity and joy. In doing so, he constructs visions of paradises that appear both illusory and real — fantastical realms that weave between reality and imagination, and metaphorically unite past and present.
An Illusory Eden, Where the Ages Entwine | text by Dr Shih-Wen Kung
Associate Professor, Department of Art and Design, Yuan Ze University
PhD in Art Studies, Osaka University, Japan