Chen Ching-Yuan, What am I? If I can’t be yours
and Charwei Tsai, Universe of Possibilities
September 24–November 20, 2016
Opening: September 24, 4:30pm
TKG+
4F&B1, No. 15, Ln. 548, Ruiguang Rd.
Neihu Dist., Taipei 114
Taiwan
Artist: Chen Ching-Yuan
Curator: Hsu Fong-Ray
In the world of art, what are the conditions of realism that equate a completeness of a work with a completeness of information? And what are the mechanisms that enable an exhibition to become a temporary reality? We must pay attention to the framework with rationality and concepts as its guiding criteria that incrementally hinders observation when shared experiences of daily life no longer provide easy clues to reality. This undermines the prioritization of aesthetic attributes, while the work becomes objectified and the shared language between the viewer and the artist becomes increasingly alienating. The viewer is left gazing at a work awaiting an artistry that grows more distant, and the ability to extract aesthetic elements as an object of perception is gradually lost.
In recent years, Chen Ching-Yuan has tended toward a neo-classical ambiance in his painting, partly as a conscious reduction of the explosive quantities of information in his previous body of work, and partly as an elevated attentiveness to the aesthetic elements in artistic creations. Narratives, perceptions, and symbols are consistently fragmented in his oil paintings, transforming his work from “information” into “perception” as it enters a bigger picture of his overall art practice. Most of the ambiguity within comes from an understanding that the struggles with reality are rarely simply about rights and wrongs, but are rather an access to an operational reality that further reveals ways in which contemporaneity affects one’s thoughts and perceptions. Here, his paintings harmonize and balance the real world. This realness does not merely exist in a shared reality; clues can also be found in the world constructed through his paintings.
The exhibition appropriates a lyric from the song “Thanatos: If I Can’t Be Yours” played over the end credits of the feature film version Japanese mecha anime Evangelion as a self-dialectic between the internal and external worlds of the work. This dialectical process is also a mode of observation that further examines the internalized perceptions within this temporary reality through the practice of exhibition production. Here, creativity is a behavior that reconstructs the thinking and perception of the subjective self. Ultimately, we see that through his paintings Chen Ching-Yuan has made perceptual adjustments to the real world, in another world evoked by the temporary reality of the exhibition. In the same vein that these words are not an interpretation of Chen Ching-Yuan’s solo exhibition, the mode of operation thus produced is only a path that leads to a contemplation and perception of Chen Ching-Yuan’s world of painting. This open-ended conclusion is but a method, and not a definitive statement of the exhibition.
Artist: Charwei Tsai
TKG+ Projects is also pleased to present Universe of Possibilities, a solo exhibition by Charwei Tsai. The exhibition marks the first manifestations of Tsai’s latest ventures in photography, video, installation, and publishing work within the experimental setting of the project space.
Central to Tsai’s practice is her use of ephemeral objects to reflect upon the transient nature of human perception. The exhibition extends this examination to the immense possibility of our human mind to reverse perceptions of seemingly permanent entities or situations. In the photographic series, “Universe of Possibilities” (2016), what at first glance appear to be planets turn out to be close-ups of off-casts that had been discarded in mass quantities by commercial fishing boats along the coast of Central Vietnam.
Bardo (2016) is a video installation by Tsai in collaboration with Tibetan filmmaker Tsering Tashi Gyalthang and was first projected in the Waiting Rooms of the Mortuary Station as part of this year’s Sydney Biennale. The video work was inspired by the Tibetan belief in the journey of the consciousness after death and is accompanied by a narration that elucidates the study of death and the sublimity of life.
At the opening event, Tsai will launch the tenth issue of Lovely Daze, a biannual curatorial journal that she publishes since 2005. This new issue “Travelers and Magicians” is inspired by a Bhutanese film of the same title and comprises interviews, writings and works by artists including Harold Ancart, Mark Borthwick, Tiffany Chung, Shezad Dawood, Cevdet Erek, David Horvitz, Lee Kit, David Lynch, Cristina Rodriguez, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Jun Yang and Zheng Bo. The journal will also participate in “The Editorial” event of the Taipei Biennale opening on December 10–11, 2016 at Taipei Fine Arts Museum. This event is curated by Kit Hammonds and Ingrid Chu in partnership with the Asia Art Archive and Vernacular Institute.
Born in Taipei, 1980, Charwei Tsai currently lives and works in Taipei and Saigon. Tsai has had solo exhibitions internationally, and has participated in international exhibitions and biennials including Sydney Biennale and Sharjah Calligraphy Biennale, (2016); Simple Shapes at Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2015) and Centre Pompidou-Metz, France (2014); Phantoms of Asia at Asian Art Museum of San Francisco (2012); Yokohama Triennial (2011); 6th Asia Pacific Triennial (2009); Thermocline of Art: New Asian Waves at ZKM Center of Art and Media, Karlsruhe (2007); and the inaugural Singapore Biennale (2006). Tsai has also published a curatorial journal titled Lovely Daze twice a year since 2005. The complete sets of Lovely Daze are in the library collections of Tate Modern, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Pompidou Center, Paris; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona.
