Min Chung Daily News, September 2, 1990
Seeing Richard Sloat's "Taiwan Mountain" Series of Woodcut Prints
by Wu Jin-Fa (excerpted and translated by Hung Su-Li)

In my first viewing of the American artist, the printmaker Richard Sloat's series of Taiwan Mountain prints, I was in deep shock. He, a foreigner, I would not expect to so exactly capture those aspects of Taiwan's landscape that I have mentioned above. The beauty of Taiwan's tropical and sub-tropical mountains are fully expressed. His pictures not only depict the beauty of Taiwan's mountains but get to the heart of Taiwan's mountains. In the picture "Edge of Dawn" he makes the mountain just like a rolled grass ball. We can almost hear the grass pushing up its stems and leaves, the voice of its growing. In another picture, called "Formosa Mountain", the pattern of grass, brush and trees makes a most beautiful design.

Richard Sloat can make pictures of Taiwan mountains so beautifully delicate, so moving, because his wife is Taiwanese. She is the artist and writer Su-Li Hung. I think perhaps more important is that he has a soft and loving heart for Taiwan and its landscape. It is this heart that those who close themselves in the studio, painting pictures of China's Yellow Mountains or Gwei Ling, feeling themselves as Chinese exiles in Taiwan, this heart they do not have.



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