Metaphorical Architecture
In the art world, aesthetic narratives organized through the application of symbols has brought fields of semantics and philosophy to guide in the experience of reading contemporary art. Artists poetically deconstruct historical, social and political contexts, translating distilled cultural symbols into visual elements and layering intertextuality according to interlocking mechanical effects. Hence, the growth of an artistic vocabulary is akin to the construction of a narrative structure within spiritual coordinates; selecting historical cultural symbols that distill the political context in which the viewer is located, building up metaphors by piecemeal into a narrative dialectical that amalgamates with the current society, leaving behind these Benjaminesque cultural relics in the spiritual dimension. TKG+ will showcase the intermedia works of Mit Jai Inn, Sawangwongse Yawnghwe, Chia-En Jao and Chou Yu-Cheng at the inaugural Taipei Dangdai Art & Ideas fair. Also, this is the first time for Sawangwongse Yawnghwe and Chou Yu-Cheng debute in TKG+ at an art fair, and will exhibit their newest pieces.presenting an artistic lexicon gleaned through the interpretation of painting, historical and political critique, deconstructing social symbols, and social mediation to unveil the metaphorical architecture assembled from accumulated cultural symbols.
Making a splash at Biennale of Sydney, and also active in the contemporary art sphere and political communities of Thailand, artist Mit Jai Inn (b. 1960) is best known for his vibrant abstract painting installations. Actively using art to explore socio-political influences, he transforms the relationship between the reading of art and spatial interventions through a dialogue between installation-style paintings and the spaces they occupy, a practice based in large-scale works that correspond to culture, society and even politics. Having made significant contributions to the development of contemporary art in Thailand, Mit’s work has been exhibited in Palais de Tokyo in Paris, National Gallery Singapore, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. He continues to make an impact on the Thailand’s arts ecology.
Sawangwongse Yawnghwe (b. 1971) was born in Shan State, Burma. His grandfather, Sao Shwe Thaik, was Burma’s first president after the country gained independence from Britain in 1948. Shwe Thaik died in prison following the 1962 military coup, and his family was driven into exile. His painting and installation practice engages in politics with reference to his family history as well as current and historical events in his country. Family photographs also provide the basis for a pictorial language through which he explores events in the country, suggesting that existing and available archives cannot reveal a nation’s entire truth. Yawnghwe’s work also collected by MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum in Thailand.
One of the participating artists in the group exhibition Tales of Our Time, Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York in 2016, Chia-En Jao (b. 1976) is rooted in the localized, his works center around issues of identity, marginalization, aesthetics, and political systems. His diverse creative forms often incorporate heterogenous cultures as a response to and critique of the values and perceptions of institutional rigidity and social symbols constructed between history, society, the public, and the personal. In recent works, he explores in-depth cross-cultural issues of colonial history within the Asian Pacific region, establishing disparate interpretations of history in the process of tackling these problematics as a response to and critique of the value and perception of social symbols constructed between history, society, the public, and the personal, as well as to interrogate the contexts established by the nation and the media.
Chou Yu-Cheng (b. 1976) has exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Edouard Malingue Gallery, Shanghai (2017) and Hong Kong (2016), China; Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan (2014); Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Kaohsiung, Taiwan (2014); and Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Colorado, U.S.A. (2008); as well as group exhibitions at the Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art, U.K. (2018); Art Basel in Hong Kong (Encounters sector) (2018); The Great Ephemeral, New Museum, New York (2015); Asian Art Biennial, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (2015); Queens International, Queens Museum (2013); and Taipei Biennial, Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2012). His works adept at executing the duality of social and aesthetic operations,emphasizes active procedures behind visual styles, providing the viewer with multi-layered interpretations within “atypical collaborations” that traverse installation, publication, performance and painting. His creative format often amalgamates the individuals, industries, and institutional organizations that he deems to be “subjects” from the role of an “intermediary,” creating a mutual dialectical between cause and effect through the operations of “work procedures.”
From the remnants of thoughts and language, these four artists project their senses and memories toward sutures in the social systems in which they are located, exposing critical coordinates sought from the poetics bonds of contemporary art. The artists dismantle and reconstruct cultural symbols that flow between aesthetics and history, enabling art creation to chisel together one metaphorical edifice after another within the contemporary context; enabling history, memory, and location to become segments with the capacity for dialectics, so that the audience may gaze deeply at the time and space within which they are located.