2024 paradise - Solo exhibition of Ching-chih Chen

Kiln-fired glass, canvas, paper sculpture

There is a beautiful planet in the vast universe that is known as earth, the place where we live. There are also many unknown worlds in our beautiful home, but the human beings who claim to be the spirits of all things have made wars and plagues. In so doing, people are separated from each other and communication is stopped as the epidemic spreads in the world ... When human beings put masks on and their movements are restricted, the source of pollution gradually decreases, and the animals begin to rejuvenate.

The themes that artists focus on are inseparable from their own background and experience. Being a woman myself, women have been the conscious subject of my work. The creation of the little girl began in 2019, and no matter how old the woman or man is, there is always a little girl or little boy living in her/his heart. That little girl is the origin of my art work.

The games with animals in the story Little Red Riding Hood, for example, resembles joyfulness between the little girl and the animals in the Garden of Eden. The ‘circle’ is not only the entrance for the little girl to travel through the ‘space-time tunnel’ but also the exit for her return to reality. The animals have their own symbolic meaning, and there are various relationship between the little girl and the animals. For example, protection, love, fun, humour and irony. The characteristics of innocence, purity and the dream-state of the little girl are shown through the bright and strong colors of glass ... And the characteristic features of glass make the work look like bubbles, precious and yet fragile. They symbolize peace and warmth, and can go pop! at any time.
 

‘Circles’ are like bubbles or floating islands. They can pay random visit among the islands... This is a utopia of Ching-Chih's imaginary world. In there, the little girl can play as much as she wishes with different animals until being exhausted. In the virtual imagination, the little girl symbolizes coexistence between pure innocence and beauty of human beings with animals. Only then will the earth have a better future, and it belongs to the utopia (paradise) that the author is longing for.

The ‘Glaze Poetry’ is an experimental creation from kiln-fired glass. It uses the circle as the dominate feature, because such a shape can accommodate all things. In my experiment, I tried to imbed all sorts of imaginings in the glass, including my connection with land, and my daily activities. The glass contains soil, plants, moss, sand, seeds dug from fruits, woven metal, lace, zippers from old clothes, etc … these were brought back from my travels across Taiwan. The glass was fired and quenched in the kiln at more than 800 degrees. 

Yellow – Shaw Yan Chen Solo Exhibition

When our eyes open, at that moment, we see what is in front of us because of light. Vision arouses our desire, lead us to possess and to change our behaviours. The accumulation of life experience produces qualitative changes in our vision. Changes in society, science, values, beliefs, etc. have made visual language constantly innovate. This reminds me of the Impressionists of the nineteenth century. After the invention of easy-to-carry soft tin tubes of paint, painters began to leave the studio, the aristocracy, and memory. They turned to nature – in other words, they turned to their true selves. How should I put it? I think confronting nature means facing the original and unprocessed state, which is the instinctive and wild condition of human beings. So, the paintings after that stage begin to embrace human nature and truth; this also marked the origin of my interest.

With the development of science, the invention of photography and video cameras negated the point of realistic painting. With this has come a shift from objective realism to subjective realism. Painting creates a world, like a new realistic space. Painting began to become pluralistic, democratic. There arose a spirit of painting that relied on scientific and rational analysis, and there was also painting that reflected impulsive language that shows human instincts. With the changes and evolution over time, painting has been transforming with humans. For me, the biggest change in my painting, or the change in seeing, came from computer 3D animation, which I majored in at university. That kind of model is constructed virtually, in software, and at the same time it can be lit virtually, and textures can be added to make it look real. The process of creating an animated video through rendering is really amazing.

One second of video is actually made up of 24 or more still images – it is this that gives us an illusion of reality. Reality itself is always moving and changing, playing continuously like a cartoon, chewing on the meaning of time and space. The concept of continuous pictures can be seen in the construction of my paintings, with traces of lines and joins. Repeated points and lines also appear very often in my early works. The sense of dynamics comes from the repetition and continuity of slight changes. Arising from my research on visual presentation, I focus on the structure and inner psychological condition. Therefore, the colour on the surface seems to be torn apart by me, and painting with the most basic black and white is more realistic and authentic to me. Maybe because I lived in a city at the time, I thought grey was the colour of my surroundings. All feelings were eliminated by rapid flow, what was left to support me to continue was only the lowest spiritual structure.

In 2020, due to the pandemic, I moved back to Taidong, and my body, mind and soul were finally able to be recharged. It felt as if I had found a long-lost tranquillity. The scenery here has always been salvation. They are not big mountains and big rivers, but simplicity and tranquillity. Their saturated colours have diluted the original grey in my heart as time goes by, and the colours finally have a purpose: to be bright! When sun has just risen and shone orange light on the earth, as time goes by, it turns from yellow to white, and the slanted long shadows changed continuously. The appearance of the scenery continues to change over time, as if it is being sculpted, as if every period of time has its own peace. Indeed, the scenery in front of my eyes is composed of tranquillity.

What I paint and construct is not just a picture, but the free light and colour in the space through painting. The overlapping layers of brushstrokes and the splicing and combination of different colour blocks reflect the simple yet meaningful dialogue between the scenery and me, and the mutual balanced order in life. The simplified shape is a peaceful form for me. It is also a stable structure that I perceive from the environment. It is similar to the building blocks I played with when I was a child. I constantly find balance in the stacking. Through constant reassembly, landscape paintings allow me to see the light deep in my heart. The stable structure reflects the desire for existence and also regains the inner order. I think through landscape painting I have found a way of survival, especially in this troubled, anxious and conflict-ridden world, nature always manages to illuminate its original self.

Yellow, like the light of the sun, started my journey with colour. It did not only illuminate the road ahead, but also sowed the seeds and watered them with painting.

Shaw Yan Chen , 2024, August 1

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Photography Exhibition of Huang Sheng-Ming

By Chang Tsong-hsian

Existence precedes essence. What is the essential existence of photography? Is it a personal transcendental existence? Or is it a subjective existence? What this proposition may first need is to clarify the variability of real objects. In the process of viewing, selecting, cutting and then intervening in photography, and then giving new meaning to the world, what is the ultimate meaning that photography wants to present?

If we look at the essential characteristics of contemporary art, we must understand the invisible existence of images from a perspective which is divorced from reality. That is where the meaning lies, the visual language constructed by the photographer. The viewer must return to an exchangeable mind-set and realize that the image is not a single existence, but constantly generates meaning as the individual, time and perspective change.

What is the essence of photography? The traces presented by light are a form of being, a vision that translates the real world into a viewing perspective, cutting out reality and creating a new image language again. Whether the world really exists or not, for photographers Sheng-Ming, he was not concerned with immediate and visible meaning, but rather with the use of photography to express external imagination through personal imagination. In other words, it is a representational language. In a certain sense, it is the photographers profound internalized language from the external changes through the image. What is added to his photography is not just the moment of light and shadow, but the perspective of the spatial world, which gives the wholeness of what he sees through the writing of light. As Remi Hess said: ‘Space should be thought of as a whole’. Therefore, Sheng-Ming's works are more like a language of spatial transformation, a contemporary photographic sign and transformation, and a simplified and in-depth photographic practice.

Sheng-Ming's works create a ‘retention’ that can be remembered in the stream of consciousness of time. The display of such memorability along with his works allows us to awaken the consciousness of objects from viewing and to re-define the objects. In other words, the intensity of his images does not emphasize reality, but re-defines the essence of ‘being’ that once existed through the stream of consciousness experienced after seeing it. As to the technicality of photography, this is a kind of restoration – a return to the truth, a return to the forgotten self. In other words, photography restores the living world. The work only honestly grasps the artist's own description of reality and reinterprets his personal transcendental experience through images. Life and the world seem to be suspended. Just like Edmund Husserl's idea of the external view (Aussenhorizont), that he believed that the intuitive world cannot yet explain the world. But the inner horizon (Innenhorizont) can explain the essential world. Does this mean that the essence of photo is photography?

Sheng-Ming’s photography works have spatial characteristics and a shared present of time. The angle presented by his work transcends the obvious and becomes an imagination and extension of consciousness. If the camera were just a cold instrument, in this era of multi-digital imaging, the decisive moment is gradually banished to the edge of pretense. But Sheng-Ming still stays on the creative path of traditional photography. Perhaps we ask again, what else is needed for photography? If we look closely, we can see a kind of persistent affection in his work, and he uses his experience to give photography a warmth of light and shadow. In the field of imaging, ‘Huang Sheng-Ming’ this name marks the photographic vocabulary written with light. He became a real ‘being’ for himself in photography.

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I am a traveler. I use an ultra-self-oriented way to wander the streets and have dialogue with the space. Over my thirty years doing this, time passes and space changes. What remains the same is that I use lenses to reach the world, and I look at everything through the camera. Very often, while the lens is focused externally, I reflected inwardly. When the shutter is flashed/pressed/on, it races with unending time for 1/125 second. It seems as if I try to a find lost part of myself from somewhere in the world.

For me, filming is like creating a painting. Geometrical pattern has to come prior to a narrative. It has been my belief that a piece of creation has to have both form and content.  I want to provide imagination and visual impact for things of this secular world through filming. So I transform the image through poetic-style observation. This approach enriches my mind. In the process therefore I produce a narrative to record my own experience through capture of images.

The pictures of this exhibition sit between the real and the non-representational. Some of images were captured at right time by chance, turning moments into eternity. Some were the result of long-waiting: for ideal or desired light, people, locations. Waiting is a mindful practice. No matter it is an instant, or a long wait, it is instinct which determines whether to take the shot or not. An instinct called forth by the setting.

The works capture unplanned moments and planned waiting in many corners of Taiwan; the interesting scenes of the lobby of the Marina Bay Sands hotel in Singapore; a performance by the Golden Gate of the Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco; the romantic atmosphere when strolling on the street in Paris; net-like electric lines hanging above the streets of Neizu in Tokyo; and … Every photo, every work is a trip, a past, a memory. When selecting those works, it felt as if I was putting together the jigsaw of memory. All the good parts of travels revealed themselves again vividly.

Images are floating on the ocean of meaning; they were ever frozen in one corner. Roland Barthes said captions for images or this kind of text are like throwing an anchor into the sea, it stops the waves and tide of thought/mind/imagination, but fix the idea in one corner. What did I capture through my camera? Let the works speak for themselves. So I won’t provide any individual captions. What do you see? We shall leave the observers to decide for themselves, freely; though I hope there will be some sparks. This could be an experiment, a game, or a test