Exhibition｜Images Creation: Contemporary Virtual Narratives
Date｜2022.12.01-2023.03.26
Veune｜Galleries 201-203, National Center of Photography and Images, Taipei
Curator
WANG Pin-Hua
Artists
HSU Chia-Wei, KAO Chung-Li, TAO Ya-Lun, WANG Ya-Hui, YUAN Goang-Ming
Introduction to the Exhibition
The National Center of Photography and Images (NCPI) is a vital hub to present the aesthetics of Taiwanese photography and image art. Images Creation: Contemporary Virtual Narratives explores the “creative” implication of Taiwanese image art as the central topic, and examines how artists have utilized photography, video, and image installation to reflect on the nature of image and expand the local context of image art since the invention of photography, turning artistic creation into a method of realizing “contemporary virtual narratives.”
What is the creativity in “image creation”? In the exhibition, the curator suggests to view “mental images” as the source of material images, such as photography and video. Memories, remembrances, dreams, flashes of inspiration, and even the thinking processes often surface momentarily as “mental images” in people’s minds. These images, with their transient appearances, also often denote the contents that people hope to capture and intend to express through words and visual vocabularies. In this case, artists are experts who excel at using “virtual” and “fictitious” imagination to construct narratives for the audience.
The “materiality” of image first emerged in the nineteenth century upon the invention of photography. Moreover, the filmic technology of moving images was also invented in 1895, following the emergence of photography. In the 1920s, during the stage of historical avant-garde, Dadaism already integrated the experimentation of moving images into its conceptual exploration of modern art. Around the same time, the technology of animation geminated, and began developing. After WWII and in the 1960s, video art, which emerged as a critical form of the television culture, entered the scene; and subsequently, the 1980s ushered in various forms of new media art, including digital image, computer graphics, and technological image.
Themed on “Images Creation,” this exhibition traces how artists utilize “virtual narratives” to bring about their “creation of images,” as well as how such creation substantiates the practice of individual existence. What the exhibition aims to investigate is the possibility of the “latent image” or “mental image” formed prior to the action of “seeing” and the production of “material image”
Denoting an aesthetic domain of discourse posited among art history, art criticism, and the study of the history of vision, what is concerned in this aesthetic domain of discourse is the process of “creative changes” that occurs before “images” are formed. This is the central topic of Images Creation. In fact, the creation of images refers to a complicated process involving memory, perception, feeling, inspiration, the subconscious, intuition, and affective activity. It points to the innermost process of the “formation of sensibility” and the “configuration of sensibility” in artistic creation, both of which the exploration relies on a foundation informed by the research of art psychology and neural science.
