Super Penetrating—Chang Yung-Ta Solo Exhibition
17 Nov 2018-01 Jan 2019
Information

Opening: 11.17 15:00

Forum I: 12.01 15:00  王柏偉(藝評人) x 張永達

Forum II: 12.15 15:00  郭昭蘭(國立臺北藝術大學美術系副教授兼國際事務長) x 張永達

Venue: 采泥藝術 Chini Gallery

Overview

“The image in the artist’s imagination is not a picture, but the exploration of the invisible…”

 

 

Merleau-Ponty

 

The world today that constructed from technology symbolizes the extreme development of human intelligence and culture. The enormous volumes of data behind this are formed from zeroes and ones, and although the data is invisible, they are violently dominating the world, human actions and our modes of thinking. We continue expanding the scope of our awareness, consciousness and knowledge with the development and extension of technological assistive tools,; in the meantime, the underlying, invisible data, message and energy that accompany technology are steadily accumulating, bringing with them warnings of impending crises and a sense of anxiety. For me, this sense of crisis originated from 2011, when I resided in a Japanese village as the Tohoku earthquake and the Fukushima disaster struck the country. From Chernobyl to the Fukushima disaster, they are all results of technology backfiring on mankind, showing the arrogance of man in his manipulation of technology, yet at the same time being possessed by the fear of the uncontrollable radiation. At this point, the ideal technological society of human beings, that is, the perfect utopia between man, machine and nature that is interlinked and operating in equilibrium, is instantaneously upturned and disintegrated.

 

The name of the exhibition, Super Penetrating, was given in an attempt to return to the origin of all things; to detect and explore the invisible, the unseen substance and energy that hold super penetrative powers, which are able to influence things from as diminutive as DNA and cells in the human body, to the operation of cities, global activities, or even the galaxy and universe at large. From the formation of the universe till this point in time, the environment where we are in is being endlessly pummelled by cosmic rays that are of unknown origin and from tens of millions of light years away, while we are simultaneously surrounded by background radiation. As these things cannot be seen, there is no sense of their existence. Thus they can only be expressed as numbers detected by sensors and instruments. The artworks in this solo exhibition use technological micro-sensors to continuously detect and quantify cosmic rays, natural background radiation and manmade radiation over long periods of time. These invisible entities are detected and recorded as real-time data, transformed through different formats and their signal amplified, to create visible, sensible visual and audio installations. In the process of continuously detecting, monitoring, translation and reproduction of data, does that provide us with data of the ideal and safe range? Or is it simply the emergence of the anxiety and warning signs of crises in a technological world that has an uncertain future?

BACK