Exhibition Dates: 2015.11.28~2016.2.14
Venue: Digiark, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts
Opening Ceremony: 2015.11.28 (Sat) 15:30 at Digiark of NTMoFA
Artist Talk: 2015.11.29 (Sun) 14:00~15:3, at Auditorium of NTMoFA
Curator
CHEN Jiayin
Artists
CHEN I-Hsuen (Taiwan) Meiro KOIZUMI (Japan) KUO I-Chen (Taiwan) Jonathan MONAGHAN (USA) Laure PROUVOST (France) TONG Yi Xin (Canada) WANG Tuo (China)
Curatorial Statement / Jiayin Chen
If “Reality” were a carpet, what would be underneath it?
The prerequisite for the discussion on “reality” is the courage to doubt current situation. Through the reflections of seven contemporary artists on conditions of life and the contemporary world — from real events in life to abstract philosophical dialectics — this exhibition attempts to present different perspectives, allowing viewers to unfold layers of thoughts between poetic conversion and cracks of cognitive contradiction and fragmentation to explore contemporary idea of “reality”
Artist Kuo I-Chen photographed immigrant workers in cartoon costumes at Time Square in New York City, asking to collect self-portraits illustrated by the workers. From the Statue of Liberty to Spiderman, their masking serves as a metaphor, presenting a realistic depiction of capitalism. Meiro Koizumi asked a Kamikaze pilot, who survived his suicide mission, to simulate a dialogue that transcended time and space, reflecting on history and war, as well as scrutinizing the ambiguity between manipulated emotions and reality. Oscar Wilde said, “Life imitates art more than art imitates life;” in artist Wang Tuo’s work, a man and a women unknowingly costar in a 19th century melodrama by answering preset questions. Jonathan Monaghan’s animation features frosty space, Baroque carving decoration, and capitalist symbol of merchandise, forming a strange Sci-Fi scene. Extravagant yet decadent images misplace values and perceptions. Laure Prouvost’s work features a collage of murmuring images between games: twisted, absurd, and whimsical, as the artist fuses DIY with repeatedly whispered objects of desire, wandering over the borders between reality and fiction, and rationality and insanity.
Languages are gesture and pose, shaping our imaginations of events and objects. Artist Tong Yi Xin utilized lingual hints to invent and construct a poetic world; through a fictional character, Claude, the artist reaffirms the existence of the mythical creature unicorn, embarking on a journey in exploration of answers. Chen I-Hsuen transliterated Nessun Dorma into “Ni Shi Dong Le Ma? (Do you understand now?)” in vernacular Chinese; the politicality of language just so happens to identify the state of aphasia in his own culture.
Slavoj Zizek told an old joke during the Occupy Wall Street movement: a man worries that his correspondence is monitored and tells his friend: “If my letters were written in blue ink, I would be telling the truth; lies would be written in red.” A month later, he writes to his friend: “Everything here is wonderful. Shops are full of gourmet food, theatres show great movies from the Western world and the houses are beautiful and spacious. The only problem here is that we have nowhere to buy red ink.” Lacking red ink to express we are “unfree” and this is perhaps the relation between our contemporary life and reality in present: Have we been already eliminated from the possibility of understanding for our ways of seeing?
https://www.ntmofa.gov.tw/english/showinfomation1_1.aspx?SN=4638
