Beyond The Boundary

Feb 25, 2011-Mar 31, 2011

---

Fang Minto, Su Wong-Shen, Huang Zhi-Yang, Xu Bing, Ai Wei-Wei, Wang Shu-Gang, Xue Song, Zhang Huan, Shi Jing, Guo Hong-Wei

 

Text/ Gallery100

Boundaries do not exist. On the contrary, people tend to set boundaries to limit themselves, losing sight of the possibility to detect and comprehend the complete picture.

Gallery 100’s Dunhua South Space will open on February 25. The theme of our opening exhibition is “Beyond the Boundary.” This exhibition includes contemporary eminent artists across the Strait. Their creations all embody  transcendence in creating formats, styles, materials as well as spirit.

During an artist’s creation process, his or her predecessors’ traditions and styles may become a restriction for his or her creation. However, such traditions and styles may turn out to be a nourishment for creation as well. Prominent artists all combat against those restrictions with unbending will and can eventually demonstrate their unprecedented breakthroughs. The 10 artists of this exhibition at Gallery 100 currently dwell on mainland China and in Taiwan separately, and the years they were born range from the 1950s, 60s, 70s to the 1980s. In spite of their different backgrounds, these artists’ breaking spirit and vitality have all penetrated through in their works, through which viewers can be led deep into a certain landscape, a certain countenance or a certain different world, reaching an eternal and transcendental abode in the long run.

Xu Bing’s(徐冰) works and Ai Wei-Wei’s(艾未未) works both embrace the dual character of being “seemingly simple but actually intricate and profound.” This characteristic stems from their powerful contemporary creative vocabulary, which has resulted from their deep emersion in traditional cultures. Xu Bing’s “Comprehending the Landscape”(讀風景)  offers a new thinking aspect for the Chinese traditional concept that “calligraphy and paintings come from the same origin.” These paintings have become a derivative of calligraphy, painting and script at the same time. Ai Wei-Wei’s Marble Chair was carved from a whole marble stone. This chair in the classical style of the Ming or Ching dynasty manifests a blurred and gray picture. It explores such issues as the reality of structures, the authority of cultures and the creative power of artists.

Take Xue Song(雪松) as an example. He used stones as his major created materials. Also, his oil paintings are suggestive of oriental atmospheres. As to Huang Zhi-Yang(黃致陽), his “Zoon-Dreamscape(密視)” series employed “ink and wash” as the base and mixed various colored lines together, creating in form the boldness of abstract Expressionism. These two artists seem to be completely different, but in fact they have both transcended the appearance of materials and put emphasis on the recurrence of flowing thoughts and mental landscapes.

In his recent works, Fang Minto(范姜明道) has created various images of furniture based on different shapes of trees. New and old usages of materials have been interwoven, bringing forth the warmth of time waning and superb quality. This parallelism of “new and old”, “destruction and rebirth“ can also be found in Zhang Huan’s(張洹) “Ash paintings.”(香灰畫) Incense contains traditional implications, but in his works, ash has been transformed into a re-created material tinted with historical memories. As a result, a brand-new artistic outburst has emerged in these works.

Comparing Su Wong-Shen’s(蘇旺伸) paintings and Wang Shu-Gang’s(王書剛) sculptures, we can find that they have both expressed deep concern with human beings’ states of existence through their creation. Su Wong-Shen has turned reality into a mystic, secluded dream-world. This is a kind of black humor. As to Wang Shu-Gang, he has reflected real life’s helplessness through playful and prankish characters in his sculptures.

As far as aesthetics is concerned, Shi Jing‘s(史晶) and Guo Hong-Wei’s(郭鴻蔚) works have presented to us another type of art. These two painters have attempted to explore the origin of art --- Color is the boundary, but where is this boundary? Like a magician, Shi Jing employed a single color---black, white, blue or green, portraying on the canvas an entire picture of scenery, people, and even the immense night sky. Only when light is projected from a certain angle on his paintings will the images on these paintings become visible to  viewers; therefore, his artworks are supposed to be seen only sideways. Guo Hong-Wei exhibits a series of works based on the theme of “people.” He made use of black and white colors to create abundant shades and remarkable quality. He has purposely disrupted the paint on the lower part of his paintings so as to produce the flowing impression of “time and space” and trigger off individual and group remembrances.   
“--Beyond the Boundary,” are not just visible to our eyes. There is more than what we see.