Stillness

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Curator | Jenny Lee

Artists | Chen Yun . Christina Liu . Lino Lee . Wen Meng-Yu

Duration | 2020.9.26—12.12

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Things once close have become far away, and those once distant have become near.

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The outbreak of COVID-19 has impacted the lives of people around the world this year. It has changed the distance between people, as well as how we measure distance and our relationships. We no longer rely on our past ways of life and have indirectly broken away from old habits, which has made us reconsider our attitude towards life.

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The challenges brought on by the unpredictability of today’s modern life have honed our skills in being able to turn on the “autopilot” mode anytime to deal with an everyday life that is overflowing with information, people, material things, work, and family matters. The rise of the media, the Internet, and technology have led to great conveniences, and things taking place thousands of miles away can now influence our daily thinking and decisions. When a substantial amount of energy needs to be spent on routine tasks, a feeling of anxiety for not being able to keep up with contemporary pace of life repeatedly threatens to disturb our current existence, and we are faced with a situation where we must constantly adapt to look for a new state of harmony.

 

This exhibition features four female artists. Entering their 30s, they interpret their own trajectories in a nearly paranoid or obsessive way, using their respective creative works to present a dialogue between the self and the inner sense to fight against external tensions. Through different methods involved in their creation, they utilize various mediums to process their personal declarations in the pursuit of connecting with the past while facing the future and searching balance in the present society.

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Starting from scratch and then experimenting, endowing, repeating, adding on, taking away, defining, denying, and refining to regenerate, this cyclic creative journey reveals their inner ideals regarding the pursuit of life while reflecting the boundless changes of the world. Their works are sophisticated and may strike a chord and generate a dialogue with viewers, guiding us to settle down and process the various internal noises so that we can reorganize our inner chaos and regain the energy to face the external world.

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Chen Yun’s neat and organized paintings freeze time and space in a moment that has no past nor future. Like a never-ending story, you can savor and explore the details in a sense of loss or regret over a narrative that cannot be told completed yet faintly fills the paintings. The combinations of images resembles the split screens in movies where two or three different images are placed on the left, right, top or bottom of one another. Following the flow of thoughts and emotions, the artist projects her inner world onto the paintings to create a temporary tranquility, a brief but available respite; this is a window through which the artist connects with the world.

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Wen Meng-Yu uses objects such as curtains, furniture, and plants to create a living space that resembles a resort hotel or an unknown virtual scene in a mobile game. e neat space and lines combined with a unique perspective deliberately creates an overlapping of real and virtual elements. Her signature color scheme adds fluidity to the layered color blocks and lines. Wen has constructed on the canvas an open yet private space, a utopia that has no people and no noises; it is the meeting point of the minds and spirits of the artist and viewers.

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Ceramics is a material capable of textures and warmth. Christina Liu translates the imagery of mountain landscapes surrounded by ever-changing clouds and shadows and transforms it into an abstract work of ceramic tubes with varying heights and gradient colors, thus capturing a certain instance of viewing and turning it into an eternal scenery. In her ceramic works, she meticulously and relentlessly pursues her desired lines, sense of order, and variation of glazes so that every firing is an expression that inches closer to perfection. Through repetitive motions in the creative process, the inner energy is released, forming a path through which the artist digests and internalizes the disturbances of the external world.

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Brand Director Lino Lee of Fenko Catalysis Chamber has succeeded her family’s memory of “paper,” deciding to return from Australia to answer her calling of carrying on the family legacy and take on the challenge of exploring possibilities of greater diversity for the medium. Breaking away from the traditional approach to paper, this time, the artist creates a three-dimensional independent space with the medium, allowing viewers to explore the forgotten dimension and space beyond tangibility between the virtual and the real. In the monochromic and quiet space, viewers can strip away noises and let their guards down to openly and truthfully spend some quality time with oneself in solitude.

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These four female artists look for an overall harmony as they face current challenges and overcome uncertainties in the journey of life. A confidence of facing the world and realization of self-worth is refined through the process of being, pursuing, and realizing oneself, whether by dealing with the conflicts of the world through creation, building a virtual world in a scene, pursuing perfect aesthetics and precision through repeated labor, or fully unleashing the potentials of the most primitive medium. While fully devoting themselves to their creative practice, these four artists have also given the works life and character; this is a never-ending cycle of creating and letting go, a way the artists sustain the harmony between themselves and the world. At this pivotal point in time, they package and seal their lives’ histories in their works, extracting a slice of time and preserving it in a purified way, capturing the present and distilling it into eternity.

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TAO ART

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