A+ Contemporary is pleased to announce our parallel opening at Asia Art Center Taipei on 23th July, 2016. The“□”exhibition is curated by Yuyun Chiang, featuring Chinese artists Cai Zebin, He Xun, Ju Ting, Song Jianshu, Miao Ying and Tang Kwokhin, Kong Chunhei from Hong Kong, Kim Jihee of Korea and Peng Yihsuan from Taiwan. Yuyun Chiang places her focus on how the young generation of artists critically questions the contemporary artistic practices and how they remain highly sensitive to our age in order to explore innovative intervening methods to break the existing boundaries.
Cai Zebin, He Xun, Ju Ting, Kong Chunhei, Peng Yihsun’s artworks will be exhibited in Asia Art Center Taipei I. While contemporary art has overcome the limitations in medium, how would paintings attain new momentum while continuing to play a part in contemporary art. He Xun’s paintings reflect similar poetic aesthetics as his poetries; he seeks for varying perspectives from images, concepts and language to achieve a holistic sensuality. Cai Zebin intercepts the mundane objects with his scrupulous observation and renders them satirically. Studied woodblock printing, Ju Ting incorporates layering and carving techniques in her work, which developed a sense of spatial dimensionality while preserving the handcrafted character. Kong Chunhei, on the other hand, sophisticatedly layers traces of the technical pen on object surfaces, documenting the reality of the objects, but not offering references to any meanings.
Meanwhile, in Asia Art Center Taipei II, Kim Jihee, Miao Ying, Song Jianshu, Tang Kwokhin each illustrate their individual perceptions to our living environment and cultural phenomenon. Kim Jihee identifies words that recall or resonates with her own experience from donated books and combines them with added images to produce a new culture and experience. Miao Ying focuses on the surveillance system that controlled internet in China; she borrowed the elements from internet to represent a black humor made of low techniques. Peng Yihsun marked the silhouettes of plants from Matsu on whiteboards. The transitory nature of images on whiteboards echoes with that of how we only see the appearances from now and often oblivious of what happened to it in the past. Grew up in the Walled Villages in Hong Kong, Tang Kwokhin is apt in representing the transient social phenomenon in Hong Kong through ready-mades while his background kept him doubtful towards mainstream culture. Song Jianshu employed abstract body senses to challenge the canon aesthetics through re-measuring the differences between object and standardized measurements.
Art cannot be established without history. How would the younger generation of artists find their individual coordinates before the precedents delineate an art history? The above mentioned critical spirit provided fuel to the procession of art history. The recently closed group exhibition“1960-The Origins of Taiwan Modern Art” in Asia Art Center, re-investigated how the Taiwanese artists had agitated the systems and escaped from academia thinking, eventually constructing a new path. After half a century, it is hard to perceive similar energy and the audacity in questioning in the younger generation, to compare and contrast is the paralleling art practitioners from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea. Perhaps the exhibition could be an insight that provides grounds for deeper self-inspection and critical awareness, so as to create a “contemporary”.