Double Square 双方藝廊

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Double Square Gallery is delighted to present Novae Terrae, the solo exhibition of Chiehsen Chiu and Margot Guillemot, which will run from May 7 to June 18, 2022. The artist collective specializes in integrating digital technologies with the context of human geography to create their projects, and has been showcased in various art museums and art prizes in recent years. This solo exhibition marks their first collaboration with Double Square Gallery. Combining technology with historical elements, they draw inspiration from the 16th-century book, Itinerario Voyage ofte Schipvaert naer Oost ofte Portugaels Indien, and extensive anecdotes from sailors, local legends, cartographic records, and descriptions of sea monsters in the book. Artworks featured in the exhibition include kinetic installations, 3D-printed sculptures with stoving varnish, animated mock-documentary produced with game engine, and animation projection reflected by silicon wafers, which bridge art and history while producing heterogeneously multilayered dialogues through the virtual world so that the original historical text is transferred to and stored in the space of art.

The background story of Novae Terrae is set in the Age of Discovery of the 16th-century Europe. The artist collective finds their material from the 1619 French edition of Itinerario Voyage ofte Schipvaert naer Oost ofte Portugaels Indien, and utilizes remote sensing satellite images from the National Space Organization for landscape specimens, which are then combined with a diverse range of elements, such as archival documents, remote sensing images, maps, and chorographies, to compose a series of globalized maps and chorographies of human geography, which transcend histories, platforms and media. In this very text, the Age of Discovery was not merely the beginning of globalization, but also indicated the spreading of colonialism throughout the world. Economic crops and commodities, ranging from spices, sugar, deerskin, tea, to coffee, were shipped for international markets via ocean trade.

From spices and crops of centuries ago to the modern digital age of the Internet, humans have developed strong demands and longings for different materials. In the current era of technology, “silicon wafer” is used in numerous aspects of our everyday life, and has become a dominant material in this world via the Internet. The artist collective compares modern silicon wafers to the “spices” of ancient times. The competition for silicon wafers in contemporary society is just like how people valued spices as precious resources centuries ago. Using “silicon wafer” as an entry point, Chiu and Guillemot see virtuality as the “mirror image” of reality, and project the images of sea monsters via the reflection of silicon wafers. Meanwhile, by bringing together ancient maps and the modern technology of remote sensing image, they layer maps from different periods to re-connect and string together fragment-like events in history, adopting the viewpoint of sea monsters as an alternative way to depict the Novae Terrae.