Home Haircut: Wang Ding-Yeh solo exhibition
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Overview
Dates
09 NOVEMBER 2024 - 18 JANUARY 2025
Reception
09 NOVEMBER 2024 (SAT.) 4:30 P.M.
Venue
TKG+ Projects 2F, No. 15, Ln. 548, Ruiguang Rd., Neihu Dist., Taipei, Taiwan
“I was crying in a very dark place,” Xiao Lu said. “Suddenly, a door opened, and a voice told me to come out. There was a very long staircase. At the end of the staircase was the Earth. I climbed down and eventually arrived at your house.”
This is something Wang Ding-Yeh’s son Xiao Lu said one night before going to bed when he was very young. From the moment Xiao Lu was born, Wang has come to see himself and the world through the eyes of his son. The 40-plus years he has lived and the enduring moments of his journey have been cast in a new lens upon the arrival of this new life. The past eight years became the bedrock on which his latest solo exhibition Home Haircut is based. Pivoting on the relationship between him and his son, this exhibition chronicles the fugitive moments and memories they share through video and painting.
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For Wang, memory comes in varying forms. Since 2017, the artist has begun to explore familial and personal history in his solo exhibitions, from Confronting Memories (2017), Monologue from Dust: A Flying Stone and a Floating Poem (2022), to Home Haircut (2024), where memory and relationship underpin his practice. Confronting Memories traces the absence of Wang Yuan-Fang, the artist’s grandfather, in the family memory with a question: Why do we choose to forget? The passing of his grandfather draws him back to the White Terror, a time when the Kuomintang government repressed Taiwanese civilians and political dissenters. Using social media, the artist collects memories from senior family members. The long-dormant feelings conveyed through instant messages are then encapsulated in his common mediums of video, black painting, and installation of romanized Taiwanese Hokkien text rendered in clay or dust. What was absent from memory begins to stir like drifting dust, and a story unspools.
Faced with ephemerality of the past, the artist experienced childbirth, and the arrival of his son Xiao Lu. Monologue from Dust: A Flying Stone and a Floating Poem, his 2022 exhibition, weaves together four stories — “Traitor,” “Dust,” “A Flying Stone,” and “Death” — connecting his grandparents, himself, and his son across three generations. These stories delve into the uncontrollable in life, where humanity — driven by an unseen force — confronts inevitability and evanescence, life and death. While Confronting Memories seeks to find and collect familial memories, Monologue from Dust introduces new meaning bestowed upon the world by Xiao Lu, suffused with the past of the artist’s grandparents, the present of the artist himself, and the imagination of the unknown of Xiao Lu.
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Wang Ding-Yeh | Home Haircut | 2024 | Single-channel video (color) | 6'32"
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After Xiao Lu started elementary school, he grew up quickly, and Wang felt like time became precious. Home Haircut, his latest solo exhibition, returns to everyday moments between father and son. Revolving around the idea of time, the exhibition incorporates childlike imagination to conjure the duo’s relationship: from doing a haircut, drawing, measuring height, to playing games, Wang and Xiao Lu dressed in all white against a stark white background in the video, form a strong contrast with Wang’s black painting rendered in oil, acrylic, and graphite on canvas. When black absorbs all visible frequencies of light, white becomes the combination of all colors in the spectrum. The video and the painting mirror each other, where the self thus portrayed is both the father and the boy, serving as counterparts to one another.
A palimpsest of time resides in the video and painting, where subtle physical changes in the son become a measure of temporality. In the video Home Haircut (2024), Xiao Lu in a barber cape, is having his hair cut — “Every so often, I cut this little guy’s hair. Watching him, carefully I cut his hair strand by strand. What’s being cut is not just hair, but segments of time, memory, and our relationship.” In the 24-hour loop of the video A Day in Our Lives (2024), the hair that had been cut is reassembled into the next minute as time passes: a clock made of hair; a reminiscence of father-son time.
Wang Ding-Yeh’s previous bodies of work are a look back on his relationship with the adults in his life. As an adult himself, he extends a loving gaze at his son. These day-to-day moments constitute the family life of Xiao Lu and him — “When this moment passes, all that remains is memory. Life experience is a layering of memories. In our daily life, I help him with his haircut; he helps me with my back rub. We do things together. Trading time for memories. These tender, fleeting days shape our fond memories.”
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Wang Ding-Yeh | A Day in Our Lives | 2024 | Single-channel video (color) | 24hr
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Works
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© Wang Ding-Yeh
