The Wild Asphalt

Oil colours blend smoothly into one another, which lets a painter work with delicate shifts of colour and fine detail in light and shadow. Some pigments, mixed with oil, form transparent or translucent films called glazes; spread over another colour, a glaze alters it without hiding it, and changing the thickness produces gradations of tone and an illusion of relief. At the opposite extreme, paint piled on thickly (impasto) holds the marks of the brush or palette knife, and light crossing the surface catches on them. In modern art, the texture of the paint and the shape of each brushmark came to be treated as capable of carrying feeling. According to the National Gallery in London, oil paint was already in use across northern Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries, on panels and walls alike, and the innovations of painters there reached Italy in the early 15th century. Wood panels had been the usual support, but were heavier and less portable than canvas; the earliest surviving canvases date from the late 14th century. On Korean museum labels, the medium is written 캔버스에 유화 물감, “oil paint on canvas,” as in the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art's list for its Lee Dae-won exhibition. Pace Gallery's text for its Seoul exhibition of Pam Evelyn speaks of vivid oil paint that the artist layers, scrapes, and drips.

Go close to the surface: where is the paint a thin layer that lets the colour below show, and where is it built up so that brush or knife marks stand out?

Collage names both a technique and the works made with it: bits of paper, photographs, cloth and other scraps are arranged and glued to a backing. The word comes from the French papiers collés, and began to be applied to artists' work in the early twentieth century. A collage may also include painting, drawing, or three-dimensional elements, and a photomontage is a collage built from photographs. Assemblage is art built from unrelated elements, often everyday objects the artist found or bought for the purpose. It goes back to the three-dimensional constructions Picasso began making in 1912; in 1918 the Dada artist Kurt Schwitters began making collages and assemblages from discarded scraps, and in the 1950s and 1960s the approach became widely used. Many artists today still gather found materials into large installations. At Piknic, the text for the Deborah Turbeville exhibition mentions her photo-collage work, and Pace Gallery's Pam Evelyn show includes works on paper made with collage among other media.

Look along the edges of the pieces: can you see where one piece ends and the next begins, and what each might have been before it was cut or found?

• Installation Art 설치 미술→Assemblage grows into installation when found materials fill a space.
• Collage 拼貼→Same topic in Taipei