Tranquil Vastness: From Memory to History—YANG Pei-Chen’s Solo Exhibition
12 Jan 2019-19 May 2019
Information

Curator

張未  ZHANG Wei

 

Opening

2019.01.12  14:00

 

Venue

南投 毓繡美術館 Yu-Hsiu Museum of Art

Overview

Who awakens memory from its deep slumber? Who tightens the thread of the historical tapestry when it is being woven?

 

Yang Pei-Chen has collected the glimmers of memory through his carving knife and materialized them through his wooden sculptures—during the creative process, the artist, memory and history have had an encounter. Every one of Yang’s sculptures originates from a true story, a figure hidden behind the sculpted object. Therefore, every sculpting gesture or each of his hyperrealistic sculptures resembles the embodiment of another person’s memory on the artist himself through repeated manual labor, transforming his own hands to serve as the trembling voice behind the story.

 

Consequently, as we have felt amazed by Yang’s hyperrealism, we should ask the following question: is the authenticity originating from the distance between our real vision and the faking material, or is it simply rooted in the absurdity of memory itself? His hyperrealistic sculptures seem to have destabilized the certainty of memory.

 

From Yang’s work, we can detect the sense of vast history created through his knife as if each carving has voiced the tremors of life. His sculptures can never really be unfolded, and the vastness of history, as a result, becomes viewers’ pain and perplexity.

 

Therefore, what Yang attempts to express is not “history” itself but “the sense of history,” which is the man-made feeling of desolate vastness and melancholic illusion that enwraps history. Ingeniously employing the illusion and deceptive quality of hyperrealism, he has converted the deception into a metaphor for the countless “historical obsessions” in this world.

 

What the artist has captured through his sculpting knife is the paradox and absurdity of this world, the contradiction between the eyes and the tongue. Reality and illusion, sense and sensibility, eyes and ears have collided and sparked a light through his glistening knife in the dark and the bewildering contemporary era.

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