Don’t Brush off What You See — 10 Ideas from Artists on Energy and Disaster: Curated by Esther Lu

Exhibition Opening: Don’t Brush off What You See—10 Ideas from Artists on Energy and Disaster

11 May 2011, Taipei   Don’t Brush off What You See is an experimental action as an exhibition about the energy issue of today. As the world is shaken by the nuclear crisis in Fukushima, artists join the dialectic social conversation to explore the possible strategies in dealing with energy, crisis and the status quo of existence. Their concurrent responses, reflections and imagination shall initiate different ways of looking and understanding of our shared reality.

This project attempts to study how to reflect cultural production timely on the practice of contemporary art exhibition. There seems to be many common strategies employed by both activists and artists. However, when the sociality of art is examined for its “effect” of social intervention, or “technique” of media manipulation, it is easy for art to be recognized as a bubble of representation for losing a corresponding political mechanism to address reality. What represented instead in this project is the relation that art and society mediated through seeing and composing each other—stimulating debates, conversations, and alternatives realities, in the hope to defend the individual freedom not to be restricted to a collective social consciousness in a movement, and to question directly: how can we live in the war of energy?

Most of the works in the exhibition are commissioned within one month. Chang Li-Ren translates the complex and not-to-be-control human factors from reproducing the nuclear power plant explosion on a homemade paper model. Huang Po-Chih invents a dye-sensitized solar cell with his The Red Eyes of Tom Boy tomato juice, which is imagined to suffer from genetic mutation caused by radiation. Wu Mali and her partners in the project of Art as Environment: A Cultural Action at the Plum Tree Creek will offer a proposal to Zhu Wei Town as an ideal low-carbon footage urban basin. Liu Chi-Yi revised a speech “Peace for Atom” of the former US President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered on a UN convention in 1953 into his personal letter to Obama, convincing him that world peace will rely on the development of sustainable energy. No Nukes presents their multi-media documents of the anti-nuclear power campaign works in the past two years.

Through the development of contemporary art curating, the form of exhibition seems to become the major criteria for exhibition criticism today. However, it is “attitude” that Harald Szeemann brought up before form. This project revisits the attitude of exhibition making and art practice by baring stances, reflections and imaginations of artists toward an ongoing social issue. Their ideas are public tools and a wild card to investigate contemporaneousness and open another dialogues as social practice of art.

Artists

Chang Li-Ren, Chiang Yang-Hui+Tsai Yu-Hsuan+Chen Chao-Ru, Fang Yen-Hsiang+Lo Shih-Tung+Xu Chiang-Yu, Huang Po-Chih, Liu Chi-Yi, No Nuke Action, Plum Tree Creek Environmental Art Action Team, Tu Pei-Shih, Wu Chi-Yu, We Create Power

Curator
Esther Lu

Opening
5/13 (Fri)   7PM  TKG⁺  No. 11, Lane 252, Sec. 1, Dunhua South Road, Taipei

Venue

5/7 - 5/22    MEME: 12^th Floor, No. 9, Sec. 2, Roosevelt Road, Taipei

5/7 - 5/29    One Year Gallery: No. 6, Lane 61, Ziqiang Road, Beitou, Taipei 

5/13 - 6/12  TKG⁺: No. 11, Lane 252, Sec. 1, Dunhua South Road, Taipei

Presented by No Nukes

Supported by One Year Gallery, MEME, TKG⁺, Cinema Secrets

More Info: http://dontbrushoffwhatyousee.blogspot.com/

Media Contact

Esther Lu 0926263730; estherover@gmail.com