Tsai Yi-Ju

Good Time – The War Without Gunfire – War No. 19

Created while COVID-19 swept across the world, this work recalls a playful mind by “telling the stories of the present with characters from the past” and expressing the shared empathy of people during the pandemic using memories from childhood. Doraemon, who travels through time and space to solve problems, symbolizes the god of dreams; Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck stand for laughter and hope; the character that originated from an app sticker represents the bridge for interpersonal interactions during the pandemic; and the image of a tank alongside the “finger heart” signifies fighting the war for love—the smokeless war caused by the pandemic. Reconstructing images from memory, integrating Western cultural icons with elements of ink wash painting from the East, and employing metaphors for absurdity and helplessness in the face of reality through joyous, humorous, child-like, and contrasting brushstrokes, the artist guides the viewer to savor humanitarian concerns within the expression of the painting.

Chou Tai-Chun

Island Stories: Past and Present

Striving to address the relationship between painting and image, this work focuses on Taiwan’s historical memory and ecological issues to draw comparisons with the digital layers of the modern world and to explore the methodology of painting installations, creating a collage of existing and non-existing scenery. Through a review of the island’s history, connections with the symbols of ancient paintings, and appropriation of old photographic images, the artist fabricates various states of migration—such as crossing the strait—that resemble historical images, map-like depictions of scenes, and people marching onto this unknown island as if walking bravely in the dark. The glass interface in the foreground reflects reality, and the interwoven reflections of the viewer, virtuality, and reality symbolize a situation no one can stay out of.

Hsieh Mu-Chi

The Scene on a Junk Boat

To the artist, the act of painting is similar to his sight without the glasses—a profound yet detached sense of confusion, as he tries to see what is in front of him clearly, yet feels like being in a dream. Examining the urge for painting, the elements in the painting come from the artist’s reading of Taiwanese art history and the scenery of the lives of the artists who came before him. Through tracing, the artist extracts the outlines of the referenced subjects, and through comparison and contrast, he fuses the themes of landscape and still life into a “junk boat.” Using this imagery, the artist examines the situations of fellow creative artists. The work shows no sign of the original works in the collage, as these have been internalized into new interpretations of the artist’s pursuit of painting.

Su Huang-Sheng

Cherish Every Moment Before Tonight

Through the transparent quality of ink and silk, the artist paints shadows projected on a thin curtain. Things that are blurry and hard to see often provide greater room for free imagination, and the artist changes the perspective and distance of viewing using a scroll format, creating an interwoven space of virtuality and reality. Today, it is difficult to tell whether images disseminated through the media have been edited or reproduced, and creators also doubtfully and critically examine the contradictions within. This idea is converted into a visual experience, transformed into the shadows that are formed by covering up the curtain, which is a metaphor for the complicated, yet mutually dependent, relationship between images and reality in society.

Wang Liang-Yin

Umbrella

This painting shows a father’s attachment to a mother’s umbrella. The viewer, as their child, gazes at the parents as they gaze back, each being both the object and subject, displaying the contradictions and boundaries of painting. The deliberately enlarged umbrella represents the entanglement and indescribable feelings between family members; it is enormous, embracing, yet full of pressure; it is both the pillar and the shackle.

Wang Ting-Yu

The Sea of Sky Market

The artist has long used maps and constellations as creative materials. This work presents a collage of the results of an online “picture search,” which were then scratched, polished, rubbed, and collaged against a monochromic background using a method similar to the stacking technique of classical tempera, resulting in a texture resembling maps or constellation diagrams. Faithfully presenting the textures of the materials, this work is an interpretation of the artist’s observations on painting and the characters of our time, yet it also leaves room for the viewer’s own analysis.

Lu Chiao-Chih

Work in Progress……Please Wait

If “painting” were not a finished work but an action in progress, what kinds of experiences would it bring? The title Work in Progress……Please Wait commands the viewer to stay to observe, while the seemingly “incomplete” status is itself an exhibition of endless repetition. Taking the concept of painting as the core of expression, the artist challenges existing visual experiences while also exploring the stretched boundaries of contemporary painting.

Li Bing-Ao

Fragment View

The techniques of flipping, reversing, and distorting destroy the images’ significance, leaving this painting that consists almost entirely of simple colors and lines. Deeply attracted to the various textures and materials embedded in life, the artist extends the idea of painting from that of creating on a surface to creating the surface itself; through collage and the conversion of materials and interfaces, the artist suspends and condenses all the dynamics in a single moment, expressing how painting captures and seals a moment in time.

Chang En-Tzu

The War Imprint

In this sewn, embroidered, and patched fairy tale, powerful needles have pierced the picture and have left behind entangled, freely dangling threads that symbolize the contradictory coexistence of beauty and violence. This series of works presents a princess in a fairy tale being damaged and patched up, the inner and outer wars faced as part of everyday survival, and the crisis implied by the concealed bullet holes; danger and sharpness are hidden in the soft materials to reflect hope, violence, and resistance.

Chang Hui-Ling

The Place

Realizing how little she knew about the places she once thought familiar, the artist re-examined the kitchen at home, the school dormitory, and her family’s snack restaurant. Expressing the contradictions between the environment and herself, this work is covered with lines that intuitively depict the silhouettes of the environment, and it presents the environmental colors she perceived at different moments under different lights, exploring the connection between her daily surroundings and herself.

Chen Yi-Ting

Wonderland

Wonderland is a pictorial interpretation of the duality of those things the artist experienced while observing white ibis eating litter in Australia. The artist’s instinctively awoken environmental awareness was challenged by interviews with local residents, which suggested that these birds—already living in an ideal natural environment—simply preferred to consume litter. Though we may be obsessed with protecting animals, is what we see the truth?

Fu Ning

Story Series: Life is also Beautiful, Broken Traffic, That Sentence

“Instagram Stories”—as the name suggests—were introduced by Instagram and were user-posted stories that disappeared 24 hours later. To the artist, the posted pictures were an archive of life and an invitation for others to intervene with own life histories. Compared to posts, stories are more pressing, limited-time invitations. For this work, the artist uses images originating from others’ life experiences, and through her own body and brushstrokes, the artist reshapes the feelings of viewing the images.

Peng Yi-Hsuan

Impermanent Marks 2016

The Impermanent Marks project takes advantage of the unique ability of a whiteboard to temporarily capture a memory, yet to also be easily erased, in order to create a comparison with people’s blurry memories of disasters through stacked layers of drawings and sliding tracks that highlight “forgetfulness.” The artist started making disaster images during Typhoon Herb in 1996 and has been reviewing and reassembling images each year to piece together fragments of memories of periodic disasters.

Tseng Shu-Fen

Simulacra

The artist attempts to expand the boundaries of painting in a contemporary context, transferring 2D visual images into 3D space and blurring the border between “readymade object” and “artwork.” Employing painting as a form of forgery, this work alludes to the trend of dissipating objective reality that has arisen in the digital age, pushing viewers to shift from passive reception to active exploration of fiction and facts and thus to re-understanding and redefining “reality.”

Huang Yen-Hsun

Artificial Relics 01

“Man will be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.” – Michel Foucault (Philosopher), The Order of Things.

This work uses historical events in mankind’s exploration of the universe as a prelude, leading the viewer to stumble onto a planet with life, only to miss its most glorious times; the viewer is in time only to gaze at the ruins of a civilization. The eternal silence of the stars and the universe is a cautionary tale, as are the artist’s imagination and the whispers of eschatology.

Huang Hai-Hsin

The Olympics 2020

The artist specializes in capturing comical and awkward moments, with a focus on strange stories or theatrical ambience. This work depicts watching the Olympic Games—one of the most uplifting, people-uniting activities during the pandemic—in which the television screen transported people to the other side of the world to watch exciting sports competitions during an exhausting time of pandemic prevention. This painting exudes the anxiety of deadlock, revealing a kind of joyous contradiction resulting from helplessness.

Huang Shun-Ting

(Blank)

This series of works inspects objects that are symbolic of desires commonly seen in daily Taiwan. The obscure blemishes in the painting create latent spaces in the composition, and the lines of the sketches—which were intentionally kept—mark the borders of these spaces. There is no narrative in this work, with blanks expressed as blanks and filled with blanks.

Liao Zen-Ping

Curtain and Mirror – 2

Drawing inspiration from observing and photographing moments in life, this work captures daily “scenery” using the “minimal intervention” of painting. Ordinary scenes are purposely elicited with intensified geometric aesthetics, creating an abstracted sense of alienation, leading the viewer to explore their inner self.

Ou Jing-Yun

The End of Landscape is the Imaginary Heath

This series of paintings depicts landscapes, animals, and plants; conveys mankind’s desire to perpetuate life and other matters by collaging and reassembling images with cultural implications or associations; and generates reimagined contexts within the paintings. The fantasy elements in the work draw from the artist’s personal experiences, and the creatures, both artificial and natural hybrids, are his reflection on the situations that mankind is facing.

Cheng Nung-Hsuan

Southern Feast

This work depicts a scene of wild beasts—symbolizing desires—fighting for food on a dining table. Rather than sabotage, this scene seems like a depiction more of a kind of resistance against convention or existing culture, during which new desires are nurtured. The extravagant and chaotic feast interprets greed and the darkness within, while the painting sparks the viewer’s imagination through the strange and absurd scene.