Abstraction has a name in every language. Scribbles, scrawls,gribouillis. Some sound similar to English, the Germans’ Abstraktionand the Spanish abstracción. Others are totally unrecognizable, the Chinese Chōuxiàng huà, Swahili uchukuaji or Vietnamese trừu tượng. Every culture needs a word to express those indistinguishable blobs of colors, lines, or even words and ideas that sometimes crop up accidentally (or purposefully) in the real world, or in the mind. Anthropologists suggest that thinking in abstraction was what allowed us to branch off from monkeys and all the other species to develop language and become so startlingly successful. Maybe that success came at a price though. Abstraction is the lack of specifics, the absence of meticulous planning or concrete facts and figures. It can be frightening. Its very definition means dealing with ideas rather than events or, freedom from representational qualities i.e.nothing totally discernable. Maybe this is why abstract art seems to draw such a split of opinion, the lovers and the haters. Perhaps it’s all just a matter of what you see in the abstractions, what you can pick out of the blobs of gribouillis.
| ARTIST |  |
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Liu Dao 六岛 |
| MEDIA | |
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RGB LED display, one-way glass, stainless steel frame |
| EDITION | |
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Unique |
| DATE | |
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Made in island6, Shanghai 2015 |
| SIZE | |
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44(W)×44(H)×7(D) cm |
To see the artwork in motion, visit our website at
http://www.island6.org/Gribouillis.html
