Chi-tai Feng, Chairman of the CTBC Foundation for Arts and Culture, and Jen-chieh Kao, CEO of the CTBC Foundation for Arts and Culture, presented the awards. The winners Chih-hsing Sun, Mei-hui Lu, Ying-hsiu Lin, Yu-hao Huang, and Chiang-Tse Chung had their photos taken with Hai-ming Huang and Chun-chieh Wang, the judges who attended the ceremony.
The third place winner Chih-hsing Sun was given the award by Mr. Chi-tai Feng, Chairman of the CTBC Foundation for Arts and Culture.
Inspired by “We are Family”, the company’s enterprise spirit, we explored the concept of “home” in a broader sense of the word. As the concept radiated outward, it eventually reached “habitat”, that is, one’s native land. Artworks created around the theme “Habitat Patch” can be about love of family, love of the land, thoughts the artists associate with contemporary life, interpretations of Taiwan's natural landscapes or urban scenery, and even observations on remote communities or society issues. We encourage young Taiwanese artists to develop an international vocabulary, a sense of zeitgeist, and diverse ways to express creativity by giving them the freedom to interpret the theme however they want, so that they may present a personal observation of their environment as well as their hopes for it.
The theme for the first CTBC Arts Award is “Habitat Patch”.
It was inspired by “We are Family”, the company’s enterprise spirit; we explored the concept of “home” in a broader sense of the word. As the concept radiated outward, it eventually reached “habitat”, that is, one’s native land. Artworks created around the theme “Habitat Patch” can be about love of family, love of the land, thoughts the artists associate with contemporary life, interpretations of Taiwan's natural landscapes or urban scenery, and even observations on remote communities or society issues. We encourage young Taiwanese artists to develop an international vocabulary, a sense of zeitgeist, and diverse ways to express creativity by giving them the freedom to interpret the theme however they want, so that they may present a personal observation of their environment as well as their hopes for it.
The theme for the first CTBC Arts Award is “Habitat Patch”.
It was inspired by “We are Family”, the company’s enterprise spirit; we explored the concept of “home” in a broader sense of the word. As the concept radiated outward, it eventually reached “habitat”, that is, one’s native land. Artworks created around the theme “Habitat Patch” can be about love of family, love of the land, thoughts the artists associate with contemporary life, interpretations of Taiwan's natural landscapes or urban scenery, and even observations on remote communities or society issues. We encourage young Taiwanese artists to develop an international vocabulary, a sense of zeitgeist, and diverse ways to express creativity by giving them the freedom to interpret the theme however they want, so that they may present a personal observation of their environment as well as their hopes for it.
The first year of the CTBC Arts Award! Emerging artists present their idea of “Habitat Patch” with various mediums to conduct cross-generational dialog.
“This year is the first year of the CTBC Arts Award. We are amazed by the talent of emerging artists in Taiwan. In the future, we will continue to create a platform for young artists so that their creativity can be seen by more people.” Chi-tai Feng, Chairman of the CTBC Foundation for Arts and Culture, praised the emerging artists, and gave the new generation of creators recognition for challenging themselves with diverse mediums and perspectives, and brilliantly executing the theme “Habitat Patch”. One of the judges, Hai-ming Huang, noted that the theme of "Habitat Patch”, inspired by the corporate spirit of the company “We are Family”, is a universal value that is not only urgently needed in contemporary times but also more sustainable; Chun-chieh Wang, another judge, applauded the rigorous selection process for the CTBC Arts Award, which was held for the first time this year, and said, “The talent of Taiwan's contemporary artists is obvious to all in Asia. This competition allows us to see young artists display the unimaginable amount of creativity that they have. It is of great significance that CTBC Bank, as a private enterprise, was willing to promote contemporary art with eagerness. I hope that the CTBC Arts Award will become the most credible benchmark out there.”
In order to support new talents in the Taiwanese art scene, the CTBC Foundation for Arts and Culture established the CTBC Arts Award, and asked young artists to submit their works based on the theme of “Habitat Patch”. Leaders in the contemporary art circle were then invited to form an ace judging panel, which made many contestants exclaim “It’s like the Avenger!” The lineup included Hai-ming Huang, adjunct professor of art at the National Taipei University of Education; Chun-chieh Wang, professor at the Taipei National University of the Arts; renowned curator and art critic Chia-chi Jason Wang; Ping Lin, director of Taipei Fine Arts Museum; Chien-Hung Huang, director of Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts; and Hsiao-hsueh Pan, former director of Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei. After intense scrutiny from the judging panel, it was decided that there would be not be a first place nor a second place winner; a third place winner was selected out of 405 entries: Chih-hsing Sun's The Best Place: OOtopia. Four other works have also been selected for their excellence: Mei-hui Lu's Specimens of Memories: Planting Project, Ying-hsiu Lin's Where All Living Things Reside, Yu-hao Huang's The Sun Is Hotter Here, and Chiang-Tse Chung's The 60s: Doing Laundry by the River.
Telling stories with mathematics! The emerging artist Chih-hsing Sun became the third place winner of the CTBC Arts Award with The Best Place: OOtopia. Chi-tai Feng, Chairman of the CTBC Foundation for Arts and Culture, presented him with the award. The slugs slowly climbing the stairs, the car-tuning teenager yearning for speed, and the guard overwhelmed by boredom; all of them seemingly irrelevant elements that come together to create a “Habitat Patch” that surpasses stereotype in Sun’s video The Best Place: OOtopia. It seems to be a parody, but it exposes the situation of certain people in younger generations in a truthful way. The creative concept was highly acclaimed by the panel, and won Sun third place at the first CTBC Arts Award. Aged only 26, Chih-hsing Sun was influenced by his father, who is a math teacher, so his works“tell stories with mathematics”, earning him the first art award of his life.
▌ Artistic Concept
“The most down-to-earth American dream”
“OOtopia” is a misspelling of “utopia” and also a word that the creator has appropriated and recast. OOtopia maps the distance between us and the world of the future, and the misunderstanding caused by that distance serves to spark the imagination.
“The Car-tuning Youths in the West”, which is the main theme that runs throughout the video, portrays a group of teenagers who tune cars and yearn for speed, yet they are always going round in circles. Another theme “Slugs, Stairs, and Guards” is like a situation in a scientific experiment. The slugs on the stairs are always moving forward, but passers-by keep trampling them to death. After the guards do some calculations on speed, the slugs intertwine with the car-tuning teenagers.
OOtopia is a collection of many irrelevant elements: crawling (slow) and drag racing (fast); local (Taiwanese) and Western (extraterrestrial); nonsensical stories and rational mathematical computations; and moving time and stationary freeze frames. Contradictory elements are juxtaposed together, and attempts are made to make the nonsense believable through experimental thinking.
▌Selected for Excellence—Mei-hui Lu, Specimens of Memories: Planting Project
The creator regards life as a way of life, and created a personal, subjective record of her life from an objective perspective with which she viewed life in general. She projected the emotions she had for her hometown—Hualien—onto the image of the mountains, and used her body as the means to carry out her project. She made abstract memories of mountains concrete by sealing them in polyester resin, indirectly shaping her dialog with her hometown and her imagination of it.
The work has nothing to do with the regional nature of the mountains. Instead, the mountain serves as a collective term for the sentiment and sense of belonging that the creator feels for her hometown. The act of planting is utilized as a symbol in a personal, conscious creation that shaped the abstract emotions that the creator has for the place she grew up in, and she used the work to explore the relationship between herself and her environment, while also revealing how she has lived her values.
▌Selected for Excellence—Ying-hsiu Lin, Where All Living Things Reside
Taiwan is an island of diversity, abundance, and belonging. All the living things are like the moment in which birds take flight. The creator used a bird's-eye view to extract the spirit of mountains, terraced rice fields, flying birds, and walking creatures. She has translated the in-betweenness and constant change by which all living things operate within a spiritual dimension between power and generation, tangible and intangible, as well as concrete and abstract. Through abstract methods, she juxtaposed different elements, making them correspond and merge with one another to shape the overall image, just like how various cultures and groups coexist in Taiwan. In the artwork, many tiny elements are deployed throughout the vast landscape, roaming freely; it allows the tiny things in life to gather and blossom with the unlimited power of the place in which they reside.
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▌Selected for Excellence—Yu-hao Huang, The Sun Is Hotter Here
Beginning at Tainan’s Ho-Yo Space, the creator attempted to portray in his works a time and space that is independent of the exhibition venue and daily life, and to utilize the digital generation’s experience of video games to look at the surrounding space, time, events, and objects. He drew from events that happened in his life, the visuals of the virtual world, as well as his experience in working with traditional ink paintings, and had these different elements engage in a dialog with one another.
After leaving Ho-Yo Space, the creator continued to, in other venues, use images as a medium to expand and journey into his own virtual space through the same stories that he had created from events in his own life.
▌Selected for Excellence—Chiang-Tse Chung, The 60s: Doing Laundry by the River
The creation of images and their function as a record proves to be of interest for painting. The 60s: Doing Laundry by the River captured a scene in an old Taiwanese movie depicting life in the early days, a moment in which action and emotion are frozen: women wearing clothes of the period doing their laundry by the river─conical hats, hairstyles, and rice shirts. The image shown through a beam of light, as if it were on a screen, is refracted, color-casted, melting, and disintegrating; the peeling of old images is just like memory. Thoughts into long-term plans, historical significance, where we come from and where we are going become part of the process of searching the past through self-dialog and seeking self-identity through the history of images.
In order to give the general public more access to art and culture , the judging panel sent out invitations for additional outstanding works of art to be displayed alongside the five award-winning works in the CTBC Arts Award Exhibition. The mediums used for the sixteen artworks in the exhibition include video, mixed media, acrylic, and ink. More than 80% of them were created by emerging artists born in the 1990s, the youngest of which was only 23 years old, fully demonstrating the artistic energy of the new generation! Th CTBC Arts Award Exhibition was held in the Barry Room of the Taipei Artist Village from November 30, 2019 to January 5, 2020. Enter the “Habitat Patch”, and experience the wondrous worlds in the minds of emerging artists.
