03.14 - 04.19
台南新藝獎
NEXT TAINAN 2020
CHANG Yu-Tien
ABE Nyubo
Group Exhibition
Curator: CHANG Hwei-lan
The theme of "Next Art Tainan Awards" 2020 Uneven Parallel is named from a verse, “Uneven amaranths flowing on the water, and I only search for the one I want,” in Guan Ju – a poem in the famous ancient anthology, Shi Jing (Classic of Poetry). The verse implicates searching the best and most suitable thing for a person.
The naming also combines themes from author CHANG Ai-ling’s aesthetic viewpoint “uneven contrast” – symbiosis, layering, and contrast. The exhibition invites winners of the ‘Next Art Tainan Awards’ and artists of different generations and cultural backgrounds from Taiwan, France, and Japan, to present their artworks. The artworks, including paintings, sculptures, mixed media, new media, are displayed diversely through space installations and “In Situ”.
By gathering 10 exhibition venues in Tainan to converse and interact, personal memories and their relations with time and space are explored. Fractions of memories also reorganize the new possibilities of reading, including “Différance” between tradition and modernism, memories and imagination of the future, conversations between life experiences and history, the hustle and loneliness of the modern day, and layers of all kinds of circumstances.
This exhibition Uneven Parallel, with the participation of the audience, will influence the observation phenomena while attempting to construct the conversing relationship between two subjects. At the same time, the audience is invited to use “displacement” as their method to explore these ten exhibitions, external extensive “In Situ” displays, and an individual exhibition. By taking part in distinctive movements in Tainan, along with the exhibitors, the audience can construct a parallel universe with diverse understanding, observation, record and writing.
The ‘2020 Next Art Tainan Awards’ will use the multiple interpretations of “Uneven” to present the connecting relationships between a microscopic scale to an enormous one, entirety to fragment, and soul to existing matter, instead of two complete opposites.
We hope to offer an experience of being the subjects mutually, accepting differences and being inclusive. Also, through the conversion of images, paintings, and materials, the contrasted layering of space and material is depicted, offering imagination and inspiration to the surrounding reality.
CHANG Yu-Tien (b.1990, TW)
CHANG Yu-Tien received his BFA in Sculpture Department from National Taiwan University of Art and M.F.A in Studio Art Program at Brooklyn College.
His sculptures have been exhibited in many countries, such as the ‘Salmagundi art club,’ ‘Smack Mellon Gallery,’ ‘Amerasia Gallery’ in New York, ‘Todd art gallery’ in Murfreesboro, ‘Go gallery’ in Amsterdam, ‘Anna25 Gallery’ in Germany, and ‘Helios Gallery’ in Taiwan. His sculptures also appear in various online and printed publications, such as ‘Focus magazine,’ ‘Art FUSE,’ and ‘One art Taipei Art Fair.’
CHANG is interested in examining the expectations that are placed on people by society and families while making life choices and selecting careers. He is specifically attracted to evaluate the consequences of succumbing to these expectations and the way to cope with them.
Personally, he feels trapped, powerless, and strangled; and he continually worries about his future and the direction in which our society is progressing. His work examines these deep-seated fears through using animals as a metaphor for illustrating how humans interact with each other today, which is profoundly affected by culture. His sculpture shows how our behaviors align with animals. In the West, there is a visual precedent for this alignment in movies, comics, and cartoons, which helps making his critique more universally accessible. He worries that we are no longer in control of our own destiny just as animals.
ABE Nyubo (b.1982, JP)
ABE Nyubo graduated from the Department of Craft at Kanazawa College of Art and acquired his master’s at the Department of Sculpture of National Taiwan University of Arts. Since 2000, ABE has been creating many sculptures from wood. Besides from participating in international exhibitions in Taiwan and Korea, he also joins in Arts-in-Residence projects and collaborates with researchers of scientific fields.
Since 2007, ABE has been physicalizing the uncertainty toward the unpredictable insecurity of the future, as well as the process and the path toward that. Using “Balance” as his theme and the human body as his foundation of creation, ABE’s wooden sculptures are unique for their long arms and expanded torsos. He creates from the perspective of sub-culture and mythology, and he argues the possibility and variety of deforming extended body through expression of wood carving, which he named “HENTAI Carving”.
ABE ponders on the relationship between human and our assistive devices, which have become a part of our body. Our life is filled with external machines that serve as an extension of our limbs or memories, forcing a cybernetic future on mankind. Through ABE’s work, we might be able to visualize our form in the present or near future, and from that, raise the contemplation of desire and existence.
