For the 2022 edition of Taipei Dangdai, TKG+ is pleased to present a group project titled Window, comprising the works of Chen Hung Chiu, Yu-Cheng Chou, Jam Wu, Kong Chun Hei, Jane Lee, and Sawangwongse Yawnghwe. Through the lens of contemporary art, each artist scrutinizes the myriad faces of life. Project Window aims to highlight the specific ways in which these six artists bridge reality and imagination with a diverse range of mediums and approaches. Just as a window is a portal between the internal and the external, these artists attempt to convey with the viewer on the outside from inside their minds, transmuting personal memory, mental projection, or inner perception into works of art. Together this eclectic body of work is a manifestation of our state of mind in these disconcerting and treacherous times ravaged by the pandemic.
Inspired by the environment of Taiwan, Chen Hung Chiu (b. 1983) casts his memory of living on the island into a window view permeated with temporality and experimentality. Daylighting (2021) is a window view with flora silhouette in an urban jungle, a fugacious moment cemented in white concrete. Part of this year’s public sector Node, and a continuation of Chiu’s previous series, large-scale installation Embroidered Swallows (2021) visualizes the obscure, albeit constant, changes in human society, and serves as a critique on the reckless abandonment of objects in the modern world. Yu-Cheng Chou (b. 1976) reveals the angst that underlies the seemingly regular routine. In his latest series “Moody” (2022), variously sized and colored planes seem to float against a neutral background composed of receding elements. Through a modulated shading, he creates a sense of space that enfolds the unfixed shapes, adrift and unanchored, evoking the indescribable state of everyday life and perceptual experience during the past two years upturned by the pandemic. Informed by personal history and tradition, Jam Wu (b. 1979) is known for his poetic work rooted in Taiwanese local culture. His paper works stem from papercutting, a centuries-spanning Asian folk art, through which he translates Austronesian legends into contemporary imagery that traverses heritage and invention. Pivoting on different motifs from nature, humanity, to society, these three artists examine the intricate fabric of society through their varying visual languages.
Kong Chun Hei (b. 1987) was born in Hong Kong, an international portal and a city rocked by civil unrest in recent years. Dispassionate with ominous undertones, his“Turn into its own loop”(2021) series of snarling wires irrevocably entangled instantiates his keen observation of his hometown under the thumb of the state. Singaporean artist Jane Lee (b. 1963) is intrigued less by replicating the external world or expressing her interiority than by what lies outside the canvas, by redefining the relationship between the canvas, frame, and paint. Her attempt to educe a three-dimensionality out of a painting rendered arrestingly sculpturesque, provides a new vantage point for the viewer to parse a new visual context. Sawangwongse Yawnghwe (b. 1971) comes from the Yawnghwe royal family of Shan State in Burma, driven into exile since the 1962 military coup. His work derives from political memory of his family, as well as the labyrinthine web of Southeast Asian politics and multi-ethnic history. Through the prism of their respective practices, viewers have a chance to reimagine Taiwan’s role and future as a key player in Southeast Asia and the world.
Project Window attests the six artists’ perceptions of contemporary phenomena, as they explore the molten core of being through their engagement with art making. TKG+ offers this diverse presentation of artistic creativity, in hopes that it will allow the viewer to delve into the immanence of these artists, into exquisite qualities in their works that resonate with us all as humanity.