Ink Gene

7/16 (Sat) - 8/21/2016 (Sun)

Chen Chun-Hao, Hsu YungHsu, Lin Chuan-Chu, Peng Hung-Chih, Tzeng Yong-Ning, Wu Chi-Tsung, Yao Jui-Chung

Chen Chun-Hao
Born in 1971, Chen Chun-Hao earned his master’s degree from the Graduate Institute of Plastic Arts, Tainan National University of the Arts in 1998. He used to be the director of visual arts at Taipei Artist Village, and the secretary-general of Taiwan Artist Village Alliance. He was an artist-in-residence at the Headland Center for the Arts, San Francisco, under the auspices of the Council for Cultural Affairs in 2002. He participated in the Annual Conference of the Alliance of Artist Communities (San Francisco) and the Annual Conference of Independent Art Spaces (Shanghai) respectively in 2003 and 2004 on behalf of Taipei Artist Village. He has extensive experience in international exhibitions such as City_Net Asia (Biennial, Seoul, 2003), The Bangkok Invisible Landscapes (Bangkok, 2005), and Taipei/Taipei Views and Points (Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2006). Chen has treated pin-nails as his signature creative material since 1997, creating points, lines and planes out of this material of mass production. With the ingenious interplay between light and shadow as well as the shift of viewing angle, the metallic luster of these pin-nails suggests a faintly discernable and aesthetically pleasing mass, which vividly conveys the poetic grandeur and simplicity of Oriental philosophy by means of the profoundly abstract concepts that go beyond the material per se.

Hsu Yung-Hsu
Born in Kaohsiung in 1955, Hsu Yung-Hsu earned his master’s degree from the Graduate Institute of Applied Arts, Tainan National University of the Arts. In 2008, he won the first prize of the 8th International Ceramics Competition Mino, Japan. Treating his body as a creative tool, Hsu has devoted himself entirely to the field of ceramic art. He emphasizes the dialogue between his body and artworks, and confronts the clay by integrating the subject with his body. His artworks are created on the basis of the interplay between the world and his perception as well as tactile and algesic senses within the clay-based structure. To create the purest and finest ceramic artworks, the artist has not only adopted complex and painstaking procedures of making, but also exercised his superior skill in kilning. Through the constant process of deconstruction and reconstruction, he successfully transformed the heavy clay into fairly delicate lines and shapes. Following his philosophy of life, that is, “transcending life through life, transcending artistic creation through artistic creation, and finally transcending life through artistic creation,” the artist keeps challenging himself, expecting to transcend the confines of life and artistic creation.

Lin Chuan-Chu
Born in Taipei in 1963, Lin Chuan-Chu graduated from the Department of Fine Arts, Chinese Culture University, and completed the graduate diploma in art history at the Chinese National Academy of Arts. Later, he earned his MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from the Goddard College. He used to be the executive editor at Art & Collection Group and an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Fine Arts, Tunghai University and the Graduate Institute of Architecture, Tainan National University of the Arts. He currently works as a professional artist who seeks to explore the versatile nature of “being” and creates in an interdisciplinary manner that encompasses painting, landscape art, performance art, animation and writing. Treating his personal background as the point of departure, the artist has tried to make a perfect fusion of land, nature, farming experience, literati culture and religious thought, thereby transforming his works into complex, real and uncontaminated “history of his own kind,” in which he addresses contemporary issues and the common experiences of his family and the society. He has gained contemplative understandings of the rise and fall of lives, the inevitability of death, the efflux of time and the idea of tempora mutantur. By virtue of Buddhist thought and his intimacy with soils, the artist has seen a genuine world brimming with miracles, beauty and solemnness in the impermanence.

Peng Hung-Chih
Born in Taipei in 1969, Peng Hung-Chih works and lives in Taipei and Beijing. He graduated from the Department of Fine Arts, National Taiwan Normal University in 1992, and earned his MFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 1997. He has staged several solo exhibitions in the United States, Europe and Taiwan since 1997. Beware of GOD, one of his fascinating solo exhibitions, won the 5th Taishin Arts Award in the category of visual arts. His early works primarily tackled the identity issue, so that the use of substitutes for originals was the characteristic signature of his early works. Besides, he is highly skilled in utilizing different media, such as installation, video, painting and sculpture. Made of diverse media, his artworks speak from different points of view on the subject matters, creating experiences that the viewers will remember and achieving the goal of propaganda. He believes that art should be propaganda tool which awakens collective conscience and raises general questions in a way as critical as writers’ criticisms of current affairs. Using art as a solution to the problems of the contemporary society seems to be the only choice in the artist’s case.

Tzeng Yong-Ning
Born in Lugang in 1978, Tzeng Yong-Ning earned his MFA from the Department of Fine Arts, Taipei National University of the Arts where he majored in oil painting. He was nominated twice for Taipei Arts Awards and for the 2nd Taoyuan Creation Award. He was an artist-in-residence in Toulouse, France. Part of his works have been collected by White Rabbit Museum (Australia), Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts (Taiwan) and National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts. He is currently a Taipei-based professional artist. Trained in oil painting notwithstanding, the artist started his career with ink painting. Later, he found ball-point pen, a more direct and simple medium, to be more congenial for his creative philosophy after he tried to use it in 1999, since when the strokes of ball-point pens have become his characteristic signature. Unlike rice paper and brushes, watercolor paper and ball-point pens seem to represent opposite poles, yet their combination exhibits pluralistic and riveting rhythms and even the tactile quality of ink painting. The artist’s oeuvre has been concerned with nature, ecology and life. His previous works were marked by kaleidoscopic colors bursting with energy, such as the flame-red exquisitely woven in the Wildfire series that carved out a new path to the native energy of the body.

Wu Chi-Tzung
Born in Taipei in 1981, Wu Chi-Tzung graduated from the Department of Fine Arts, Taipei National University of the Arts in 2004. He currently lives and works in Taipei. Several prestigious awards have been bestowed on him, such as the first prize of Taipei Arts Awards (2003) and the Award of Critics and Editors of Art Magazines at WRO Media Art Biennale (2013). He was also nominated for the Artes Mundi Prize (2006) and the Prudential Eye Awards (2015). The artist majored in oil painting during his college days, and learned ink painting independently when he was an assistant to the painter Ni Tsai-Chin. Later, he engaged in different fields of image creation, such as photography, video, installation, painting and stage design. By virtue of different media, his oeuvre focuses on the nature of images. The artist believes that landscape paintings are little more than imaginary worlds based on artists’ personal observations. Although contemporary artists’ imagination of and relationship with the nature have been a world of difference from those of their predecessors, Wu still argues from the perspective of art that Oriental philosophy is the very foundation about how an artist sees the world and responds to art and history.

Yao Jui-Chung
Born in Taipei in 1969, Yao Jui-Chung graduated from the Department of Fine Arts, National Institute of the Arts (now Taipei National University of the Arts) in 1994. He specializes in photography, installation art and painting. His oeuvre covers broad aspects of the absurdity of human conditions. His magna opuses include Military Takeover (1994) which addresses the issue of Taiwan’s identity, Recovering Mainland China (1997) which debunks Chinese modern political myths, The World is for All (1997-2000) which examines post-colonialism, and Long March - Shifting the Universe (2002), an additional piece of the Action Trilogy. Employing the technique of photographic installation, the artist brilliantly combined the style of “gold and green landscape” with the superstitions that permeate Taiwanese folklore, reflecting a fabricated and alienated “cold reality” endemic in Taiwan. Since 2007, the artist has appropriated Chinese artistic masterpieces and recreated them in his own way, transforming them into his personal life experiences or true stories in an attempt to turn grand narratives into the trivial affairs of his individual life. In other words, the artist intends to usurp the authority of the so-called orthodoxy with his strategy of “pseudo-landscapes.”