Venue

Taipei CHINI Gallery

Forum

2019/10/27 15:00
Emerson WANG x  Jazz Szu-Ying CHEN

Opening

2019/10/27 16:30

Exhibition Introduction

The Garden of Love is the first collaboration between Europe-based Taiwanese artist Jazz Szu-Ying Chen and Chini Gallery. Her latest series, entitled The Garden of Love, is inspired by the poetry of British Romantic poet William Blake. Like a garden, love grows with freedom and promises but ultimately ends in symbolic death. During an artist residency, Chen was touched by the familial interaction of the residency program’s founder, Michael Behle, and drew inspiration from their backyard’s dogwood tree to create her latest series. In this new body of work, the dogwood tree is combined with the cosmic view of Nordic mythology and represented as the tree of life, a motif the artist uses to explores issues of social expectation and familial connection in different cultures. The representation of the motif is accompanied by the reinterpretation of the tree’s mythological guardian, the ouroboros. The snake’s shedding skin and biting its own tail symbolize rebirth and the circle of life and death; at the same time, it also beckons at the differences in Eastern and Western family relationship as well as a balance achieved through conflicts and sacrifices.

Having lived overseas for a decade, Chen has been exploring her own culture and identity through formal Western art training. Due to her enthusiasm for anatomy and her hope to pay tribute to French anatomist Honoré Fragonard, she continues her previous creative style while incorporating anatomic details of flora and fauna to create minute delineations of mythological creatures. With exquisite and unique artistic vocabularies, the artist conveys personal life experience from a gentle, feminine perspective, whispering stories of her inner world.