Sunday, 25 February, 2007
10: 00a m -- 6:00pm Access with art fair VIP cards, press pass
Reception:
Saturday, 24 February, 2007,10: 00a m-2:00pm Access with art fair VIP cards. Reservation requested.
Artists: Chen Chieh-Jen , Yuan Goang-Ming, Chen Chih-Jing, Peng Huang-Chih, Tsui Kuang-Yu, Kuo I-Chen
Information | Joanne Huang ,Phone +1/650-7403858, htpg@ms27.hinet.net
Organised by: Chi-Wen Gallery No 19, Lane 252,Tun-Hua S. Road Sec. 1,Taipei,Taiwan, Tel: 886-2-87713372 Fax: 886-2-87713421 http://www.chiwengallery.com
Artists
Chen Chieh-jen (born in 1960) a Taiwanese contemporary artist who lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan, Chen Chieh-jen creates primarily in the forms of digital imaging and video installation. His artwork reexamines the narrative form and meaning of images through a dialectic of image/power, filmer/filmed, memory/history, reality/artifice and blending/variation, exploring new possibilities for images and for narrative. In this manner, Chen Chieh-jen delves deeply into people and communities on the margins of contemporary life, in an attempt to convey their living experiences and inner spiritual states.
Chen's works have been exhibited at the Venice Biennale (2005, 1999), the Sao Paulo Biennial (1998), the Biennale de Lyon (2000), the Kwangju Art Biennial (2000), the Taipei Biennial (1998, 2002, 2004), the Shanghai Biennial (2004) and the Fukuoka Triennial (2005), the Sydney Biennial (2006), as well as photography festivals in Spain and Portugal (Lisbon), film festivals in London and Vancouver (Canada).
Yuan Goang-ming (born in 1965) has created a series of video installations exploring the feeling of existential hollowness that comes from a temporal displacement, through either a lapse or flashback in memory. They are also an articulation of the awakening of the self, together with his fears and sense of helplessness. Floating(2000) describes the loss of orientation and its fears, it is the experience of a young man at sea. Being adrift on the open sea is quite another matter than being adrift on a river, as one is not moving in a given direction ,but afloat directionless. This sense of loss that comes from facing the world alone is the anxiety buried in the heart of every pioneer.
Chen Chih-jeng (born in 1979) Date Line (2006) is the abbreviation of the International Date Line, a universal system of time zones devised by an international committee to overcome the issue of the sun shining at different geographical locations at different times as the earth orbits. Thus it is 8:00 PM in Taipei at the sane moment it is 7:00 AM in New York. This "now" is represented by different abbreviations in places around the world. Date Line expresses the artist's probing doubts on the universally approved definition of "time". Shooting a panorama of one specific urban site over the course of one particular day,24 hours worth of images are collected in a 360-degree collage, with each long, thin bar an archive of time's passage during one day. In this way, sun, moon, day and night mingle and overlap in an alternating order. With the collection of singular moments at one time and place, I generate a surreal image that allows the past and the present to coexist. Within this time and space, is the ?Date Line' we use and abide by in reality necessary? Real "time" has no boundaries, but if we absolutely must delineate, these 360 image bars can be our Date Line.
Kuo I-chen(born in 1979 ) works primarily on interactive units, single channel video and performance art. Drawn by the ever-shifting relationship between humans and the environment, his pieces play on the comfort and suffocation produced by our immediate surroundings, and re-interpret the dependence and anxiety of modern-day dwellers towards institutional cages. In 2005, Kuo became the youngest artist ever to represent Taiwan in the Venice Biennial; his works have since been shown in various international exhibitions. Kuo currently lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan.
Peng Hung-Chih (born in 1969) Excerpts from the Taoist Protective Talisman (2006) is the latest edition to the "Canine Monk" series. "Canine Monk" consists of a collection of major religious scriptures from different religions around the world. The scriptures are written from dog food on the wall, and then eaten by the artist's dog. The process is videotaped subsequently. The dog seems to be writing the religious scriptures in the videos due to the technique of rewinding and editing. "Excerpts from the Taoist Protective Talisman" is provided by Priest Lee Yun-Kun from the Formal Taoist Society. Most of the selected talismans are related to the matters of animals.