December 1, 2017–January 26, 2018
Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York
1 East 42nd Street
New York, NY10017
Hours: Monday–Friday 9:30am–5pm
The Taipei Economic and Cultural Office (TECO) in New York, together with Taiwan Academy and Art Bank, Taiwan, presents What do you see?—Contemporary Art from Taiwan. Curated by Yan-Huei Chen, the two-month long event showcases artwork from seven Taiwanese artists on the subject of reality and the ways in which we interpret our reality through sight and language. The artists explore and examine reality by incorporating their experience and understanding of history and their social environment. The exhibition, which includes paintings, sculptures as well as new media and installation art, hopes to create a dialogue with local artists and foster cultural exchange and collaboration between Taiwanese artists and their international peers.
On display are works by Teng-Yuan Chang, Qing-Yao Chen, I-Ting Hou, Yu-An Liao, Pei-Shih Tu, Yi-Li Yeh and Goang-Ming Yuan
This marks the first time that works from Art Bank, Taiwan have been shown in New York. A program under the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Art Bank aims to promote artistic creation and the cultivation of Taiwanese artists through a public collection program.
Brief introduction of the works of each participating artist:
Looking at Taiwan’s history and current cultural environment, HOU I-Ting explores our unfamiliarity with the cultures of our own country in a time when global cultures are increasingly blending together.
Tu Pei-Shih’s animations excel in showing the relationships between imaginations, threats, and contemporary societies, responding to conflicts and absurdities in life with fictional and imagined narratives.
Exploring Taiwanese folk cultures, Chen Qing-Yao’s work is a parody of the explorers depicted on adventure/discovery-like channels, and of the Western media’s way of seeing things.
Yeh Yi-Li’s pieces are reconstructed memories of seeing. Combining blue-and-white pottery with toy blocks, the sculptures—a mixture of Eastern and Western cultures—depict and add a sense of unreality to memories. They interpret the cultural hybridity born out of the heterogeneous contemporary society and continuously reconstruct what we understand as real.
Liao Yu-An watches the tense and delicate daily interaction between city dwellers and puts it in his work, creating a subtle, almost paranoid metaphor.
The archeology sites in Chang Teng-Yuan’s series of works come from his observation of popular cultures and environments in our time. Logically fictitious and thus realistically imaginative, the art pieces show Earth in the future from the perspective of a group of parrot men—fictional characters in Chang’s series.
Yuan Goang-Ming’s works resemble an image experiment about the act of taking pictures, the objects being photographed, and the viewers. It makes viewers look outside of the visual box and rethink their visual perception models and the spatial relationships created by images.
