Four Seasons

Four Seasons takes up the shiki theme — a perennial subject in East Asian visual culture in which spring, summer, autumn, and winter are condensed into a single composition or a coordinated set of panels. In the hands of contemporary Taiwanese printmakers trained in the Liao Shiou-Ping lineage, the subject is typically rendered through abstracted natural motifs, layered color fields, and symbolic rather than literal seasonal markers, departing from the narrative kacho-e treatment of the Edo and Meiji woodblock traditions. Lin's woodblock practice characteristically employs registered multi-block printing, with attention to flat planar color and the grain of the carved matrix as an active surface element. Within her wider body of work — which spans lithography, intaglio, and mixed-media print alongside relief — pieces like Four Seasons sit in the formalist current of late twentieth-century Taiwanese graphic art, where traditional Chinese and Japanese subject matter is reconfigured through the vocabulary of post-war modernist printmaking. The work reflects the institutional milieu Lin helped build through the Taiwan Printmaking Society and the Evergreen Graphic Art Association, in which woodblock served as both a medium of contemporary expression and a continuation of regional print heritage.