Quiet Riot: Curated by Chen Wei-Ching, Joanne

Quiet Riot explores how to engage in social practice in a nuanced and subtle manner, and to develop it into an art form of social intervention, in the face of the current social predicament of anxiety, uncontrollability, and threats. In a seemingly conforming, but in fact tactful and adaptable preparatory state, the works on view embody the artists’ observation of the encroaching global capitalism in today’s unstable political situation. The exhibition re-examines our familiar state of affairs and objects from diverse points of view, investigates the construction and camouflage of the everyday, as well as our perception of contemporary life and the inconsistencies therein. Featuring six (group) artists, respectively from Brazil, Korea, Taiwan and Japan, this exhibition adopts an indirect and lighthearted — rather than critical — approach in an attempt to identify disorder within order, to react and adapt, to manifest a tenacity and a reactionary spirit, in the hope of finding possibilities for systematic change, reasons for existence, and ways for coexistence.

In the covert corners of life, encroached by anxiety and disturbance, radical rebellion may lead to forced repression, but alleviated voices that resist flexibly could elicit prolonged thinking. Brazilian artist Cinthia Marcelle and director Tiago Mata Machado coproduced the video The Century, 2011, reflecting social injustice and lost ideals. In the video, countless everyday objects are thrown out from the street corner, to reveal the filthy and fragile sovereignty of our time through their violent beats and strikes. The video resembles a piece of music of social practice that condemns the rapid development of Brazil. James Ming-Hsueh Lee has long been known for his humorous revisits of objects in life’s surroundings and his new venture on established meanings and values. His work Imperceptible Violence studies the bounded seesaw relationship and tense situation of men and objects, of objects and objects in varied spheres. The new work of Liu Hojang, titled Premixed Cement, collects unresolved questions such as the substitution of artistic expressions, the beginning and ending of ecological collapse, and the unceasing uncontrollability of the material. The unset concrete is analogous to the restless equilibrium system, striving for final resistance before solidification. Chiu Chen-Hung’s new work light trail aims at enhancing the possibilities of encounter between everyday objects and space. The natural light in the exhibition space fuses with the light and shadow created by the artist, hiding our perception of the space underneath various temporal and spatial grooves. The work preserves a direct but gentle confrontation, mistily scattered around the exhibition area.

The artists investigate actions of social practice taken against Capitalism through everyday materials. They also expose how habitual thinking in contemporary life responds to the radical changes in society and then proceed to self-introspection in search of the value of existence. Nobutaka Aozaki’s Value_Added #240950 is an ongoing performance. It questions the daily system of consumption, trying to find a limited space of imagination within the mechanism through the artist’s intervention. The artist takes a can of corn to 110 supermarkets and repurchases it. In the hyper-marketed product circulation and the orderly structure, the system is severely ossified and we cannot identify where the item belongs. The selling price of the item at different locations reveals the economic structure of the city. Korean artist Euyoung Hong’s installation (Un)balanced explores the changing meaning and function of objects in particular relation to the system of value in the regime of capitalism. Commodities of equal price but unequal quantity are placed on two ends of the steel plates to achieve a fragile balance. The value of the products fluctuates according to complex social and economic factors such as wages, labor maintenance, technological innovation, the price of land use, and market conditions. The asymmetrical structure of economic domination and the unbalance of value system denotes the origin of social injustice in capitalist society.

Through different cultural upbringings and experiences of intervention into daily life’s mechanism, the five participating artists examine and respond to the social, economic, and political unbalances triggered by globalization. They counteract formalism and bring art into contact with our life at the moment through subversive and informal practices, various aesthetic operations, the appropriation of urban spaces, and the creation of new languages. In addition, they propose the possibility and necessity of systematic revolution, and the condition of our coexistence, regarding the privilege of philosophical expression and discursive language, as well as how to manifest our reflexive spirit outside of the existing discourse.

Nobutaka Aozaki

A New York-based artist born in Kagoshima, Japan. He completed his MFA at the Hunter College in 2012. He has been awarded the Artist Files Grant from A Blade of Grass Foundation, the C-12 Emerging Artist Award from the Hunter College, and the Artists’ Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. His work has been shown at Brooklyn Museum, New York; Queens Museum, New York; ISCP, New York; Temple Contemporary, Philadelphia; Varmlands Museum, Sweden; SPIKE, Berlin; and Statements, Tokyo. He has participated in the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Queens Museum Studio Program, AIM program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and LES studio program at Artist Alliance Inc. He is currently in the LMCC’s Workspace Residency program. Recent publications include Spike Art Quarterly, New York Times, Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, ArtAsiaPacific, and Cabinet Magazine.

Chiu Chen-Hung
Chiu Chen-Hung completed the graduate program in plastic arts at National Taiwan University of Arts in 2008. His works are primarily presented in the framework of installation and sculpture. Like conducting an archeological expedition, he is especially proficient in excavating remaining outlines and imprints from bygone time and space. Through his practice of abstraction and reinterpreting both designed and rationalized logics, he vividly reshapes these existed objects and thus develops a vast memory restoration.

Important exhibitions Chiu participated in include the Greater Taipei Biennial of Contemporary Arts, National Taiwan University of Arts(2016); Taiwan Biennial, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (2016); Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berline/Madrid (2015); Liverpool Biennial: City States (2012); ThaiTai: A Measure of Understanding, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (2012; Une terrible poetique, La Biennale de Lyon, Galerie Olivier Hong (2011); Arte da Taiwan, Museo di Arte Contemporanea di Villa Croce, Genova (2011); Taiwan Calling — The Phantom of Liberty, Mucsarnot Museum, Budapest (2010), among others. In 2012, he participated in the residency program at Cite internationale des arts Paris.

Euyoung Hong
Euyoung Hong, Ph.D. is an artist and researcher. Hong graduated in sculpture from the Ewha Womans University, Seoul in 1998, and was awarded an MA and MFA in sculpture by the University of Iowa, U.S.A. in 2002. She completed her PhD without any amendment at the Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2013. She received many prestigious grants and prizes, provided by the Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation, Gyeonggi; the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York; Second Prize, Premio Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, Milano; and Paradise Culture Foundation, Seoul. In 2018, she was selected for the Artist of the Year by the Korean Cultural Center in Washington, D.C. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, with Saatchi Gallery, London; Metropolitan Arts Centre (MAC), Belfast; Youngeun Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea; Gallery Hyundai, Korea; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea; CICA Museum, Korea; International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), New York, and many others. She was an artist in the 11^th term of the SeMA Nanji Residency, run by the Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul in 2017. She is currently participating in an artist residency at the Gyeonggi Creation Center, Gyeonggi. She published a peer-review book, The Spatial Politics of the Sculptural: Art, Capitalism and the Urban Space (2016). She is a part-time lecturer at the Ewha Womans University, Seoul.

James Ming-Hsueh Lee

James Ming-Hsueh Lee is the 2005 Taipei Arts Award First Prize winner and received his Ph.D in 2013 from the Loughborough University, U.K. He has rich experience in exhibitions both at home and abroad. Recently, selected exhibitions include “2016 Taipei Biennial” and “The Testimony of Food: Ideas and Food” in Taipei Fine Arts Museum, “RIVER— The Way of Living in Transition Asia Contemporary Art Links” in Gwangju Biennial Gallery 1, “Things Wholesale” in Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, “Other Landscapes” in La Rotonde Place Stalingrad in Paris, “0 & 1: Cyberspace and the Myth of Gender” in 501 art contemporary art center in Chongqing, “Simply Screen: In-between of Asia” in M.P Birla Millennium Art Gallery in London and Tanzfabrik Transart Institute in Berlin. James Ming-Hsueh Lee’s works often center on the objects found in the stores. He searches for alternative meanings in relation to art contexts. With a penetrating sense of humor, he reexamines and reflects upon the habitual understanding of ‘things’ indoctrinated by the media, education and society. Through reversing the usage of the objects, transforming their appearances or people’s perceptions of them, the artist is able to offer refreshing and amusing interpretations, creating relaxing feeling to asset other possibilities for the exploration of contemporary art.

Liu Hojang

Liu Hojang graduated from the Sculpture Department of Taiwan Academy of Fine Arts in 1994 and received an M.F.A. at Queens College, the City University of New York in 2002. Liu’s photographic works and projects is concerned with more than image making or technology quality. His peculiar artistic practice often reflects the social context and politics behind the surface — may it be an object, a place, or a community, his works shed light on their individualities and differences. By appropriating the relation between the visible and the invisible, he provides an authentic narrative to the social functions and sensibility of art to transform the values of human network into forces that sustains art in its becoming. He was featured in a solo exhibition at the Taipei Fine Art Museum (2017). His work has been exhibited at the Asia Biennial, Taiwan (2017); CCA the Ujazdowski Castle, Poland (2016); Taipei Contemporary Art Center, Taipei (2016), Queens International, New York (2013); and Taipei Biennial, Taipei (2004).

Cinthia Marcelle & Tiago Mata Machado

The Brazilian duo was formed in 2008 by the artist Cinthia Marcelle and the critic and filmmaker Tiago Mata Machado. In the same year they founded Katásia Filmes, with the curator and filmmaker João Dumans, a production company dedicated to the creation and study of cinema and art based in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Since this time they started to share scripts and filmings of collaborative solo projects as the video 475 Volver, 2009 and the feature film Os Residentes, 2011. In this same year they produced their first video Buraco Negro that was showed in the 29ª Bienal de São Paulo. In 2009 they received a prize from Rumos Cinema e Vídeo Experimental, Itaucultural, São Paulo to develop the vídeo Plataforma. In the following years the duo realized the trilogy of vídeos: O Século (2011), Rua de mão única (2013), Comunidade (2016) that was showed in important exhibitions such as Triennale New Museum, New York, 2011; Rochester Art Center, Rochester, EUA, 2012; International Film Festival Rotterdam, Netherlands, 2013; 13ª Bienal de Istambul, Istambul, 2013; IV Semana dos Realizadores, Rio de Janeiro, 2014; Festival del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano, Havana, 2014; Biennial of Moving Image, Swiss, 2016; and NGO: Nothing Gets Organised, Joanesburgo, 2016. In 2017 they produced a new video Nau/Now for the Brazilian Pavilion at Venice and their first solo show at the Logan Center Exhibitions, Chicago, with a group of previews videos.

Chen Wei-Ching, Joanne

Chen Wei-Ching, Joanne is an independent curator, widely published critic and founder of an art organization. She is the former Director of Taiwan Art Gallery Association and Art Taipei Art Fair from 2007 to 2010. Currently, she is the founder of inCube Arts, a non-profit art organization founded in 2012 in New York City with a focus on art from Asia, South Asia and a commitment to exhibition-led enquiry. inCube Arts SPACE located in midtown west side in Manhattan, provide regular exhibitions, supporting international emerging curators and artists. She is the organizer of inToAsia: Time-based Art Festival, the first and most important art festival that dedicate to Asian time-based art in North America. Chen has also curated international exhibitions such as No Cause for Alarm with Ying Kwok at La MaMa La Galleria in New York (2016), inToAsia: Time-based Art Festival 2013 — MicroCities at the Queens Museum, Stephan Stoyanov Gallery, the NARS Foundation and Residency Unlimited in New York (2013), Jenny Chen: Without End at the ISE Cultural Foundation, New York (2012), London Calling a touring exhibition (China/Taiwan, among others. She has written and published her articles in Artco, Art Investment, Art Collection+Design, Artitude Magazine, Art Taipei Forum Media, and the National Culture and Arts Foundation Online Media. She was a contributing writer for the Global Art Fair Guide in 2013, covering the North and South American art market. She is also the jury for the NARS Foundation residency program in 2016, an invited consultant for the New York Foundation for the Arts’ Doctor's Hours program in 2016.