Curator │ CHEN Chiao

7/2 Sat
14:30-16:30 Curator Lecture
16:30 Opening

8/6 Sat
15:00-17:00 Artist Talk
‧ Host │Emerson WANG
‧ Presenter │ Artist TENG Pu-Chun & CHANG Chia-Ying

Landscape painting is not a specific genre but “a vast network of cultural codes.” How do artists as coders create an unknown, distant “inner landscape”? How do they employ involutionary, introversive forms and vocabularies of deconstruction and proliferation to embed human existence in an inner landscape, which is hard to define, without coordinates, and no longer follows familiar conventions? How do artists make use of existing cultural codes, while unlocking the enclosed existing order? How does such landscape become an event against the unknown, and which unfurls itself towards the strange unknown in a ceaseless state of constant emergence, elusiveness, renewal, and uncertainty, in which forces from different directions encounter and engage with one another?

 The mountains, waters, clouds and rocks in Teng Pu-Chun’s work, as usual, are delineated with the artist’s highly individualistic method of wrinkling strokes. However, in this exhibition, in addition to the glassy layers of mountains, which are portrayed in an increasingly dense manner, forming a tapestry of woven codes, the peculiar rocks are inlaid with an undecipherable sign – the mysterious panels of glass. Moreover, the unexpected mixture of the spiritual and the material engenders an effect of defamiliarization, and breaks the homogenous world that the spectator is familiar with: In the mistily deep and serene otherworld filled with clouds and mountains, a clear glass panel suddenly appears, materializing a rigidly cold materiality and creating a strong sense of impact. Surfaces of the waters are composed with a horizontal pattern that is reminiscent of the static noise of CRT televisions. Floating clouds neatly painted resembling computer graphic drawings drift playfully on a vast and quiet indigo background.

Through her way of coding, Chang Chia-Ying deconstructs existing signs, and creates an imaginative world interwoven with heterogeneous cultures and spaces. Ancient Chinese mythological characters taken out of the Classic of Mountains and Seas and figures extracted from Western classical paintings are freed from their original contexts to be mixed with the artist’s codes – her characters – to re-construct a hierarchy-free, diversely animistic world co-inhabited by gods, humans, and objects. Anthropocentrism is entirely banished from this world, which has been offered to be shared with objects considered “without world” and animal considered “poverty in world” in Western philosophy in this inner landscape.