+1黛 OldWays, Young
悍圖社 2020| Hantoo 2020
悍圖社 2020| Hantoo 2020
DATES|NOV 28, 2020 - DEC 26, 2020
OPENING|NOV 28 (17:00)
The artists will be present.
OPENING|NOV 28 (17:00)
The artists will be present.
sTATEMENT
Henri Lefebvre once said: “everywhere where there is interaction between a place, a time and an expenditure of energy, there is a rhythm.”
“Umber-black dye”, the earliest material used by the ancients to paint their eyebrows. The scriptures state: “to add color with blue stone is to paint the brows with umber-black”, that is, “umber-black dye” is a sort of black-colored mineral, which is also called “umber-black”. Found in the high mountains, women of antiquity used this to paint their brows. At the very beginning of the process, one must first grind the umber-black on a specialized inkstone until it becomes powder. Then one must combine with water, to finally apply it to the brows.
The pronunciation of “umber-black” in Mandarin, dai, is the same as the word for generation or time. Hantoo began in 1998; there is a 23-year gap between the oldest and youngest members of Hantoo, spanning multiple generations, their bonds like those of family, mutually striving and mutually encouraging. This group of experienced, mesozoic Taiwanese artists are constantly training themselves, whether by researching various mediums, breaking into diverse formats, or accumulating transdisciplinary perspectives and practices. Simultaneously as they extend their creative contexts, they also develop individually representative works that unite society, timespace, and the state of the heart. This can be likened to how a raw mineral requires the refinement of time and careful craftsmanship, to undergo change and evolution, to become of use.
“+1黛OldWays, Young” Hantoo 2020, this year’s collaborative exhibition, views Hantoo as a “cohesive subject”, a gesamtkunstwerk formed of the collisions between distinct entities / subjects, with sight and sound, with flair and verve, a “+1” initiative for the individual and the collective, for the individual and art. The 13 artists aim to challenge +1黛 through the three different methods of “old + old”, “old + new”, and “old concepts, new applications”:
Since the ferocious velocity of his earlier works, YANG Mao-Lin has been breaking down taboos. Whether in two or three dimensions, his works are ‘strong’, challenging the authority of politics and society, and displaying a strongly critical attitude. After his large-scale solo exhibition in 2019, he has recently devoted himself to illustration using different varieties of wood, from sandalwood to camphor. This exhibition is the right moment for him to ‘show weakness’; departing from his usual brooding, vagabond persona, he seeks to bring to the audience his strength as well as grace.
Adept at a visual aesthetics where reality and fiction intermix, WU Tien-Chang made public new stills, documentary clips, and other material from their new work, 《Love Song in Harbour City》. A series of getups, from an American soldier to a sailor, a diver to a naval officer, appear consecutively in a single take, currently still in post-production. Through the Taiwanese-language ballad “Love Song in Harbour City” performed by Wu Jin-Huai, the work releases a projected nostalgia for the homeland through the admiration of life, and elucidates the Cold War historical context through the use of props and backdrops, displaying Taiwan’s diverse and multilayered collective memory. Displayed alongside files from older works of 《Farewell, Spring and Autumn Pavilions》(1994, 2015), and making use of the actors, wearing membrane masks, who bring together magic and film, the work discusses the ideological currents of subject and other, body and nation.
From bridges, figures, to his recent artworks of the old trees, LU Hsien-Ming’s series has been pushing for development. However, the unchanging elements are the people, objects, and events that are locked into the detailed observation of societal and living environments. Flipping through his past notes, plant elements have long appeared in his past series. As such, accompanying the display of his newest 2020 work, will be the digitized version of notes from his early works. The flora of the past, once relegated to a supporting role, are brought into the present, and into dialogue with the new protagonist, the old banyan tree.
When LIEN Chien-Hsing created his 1992 work 《Jin-Gua-Shyr and Gold and Bronze Mines》, he hoped for the chance in the future to once again use the same scenery to paint an even larger work, documenting the meditative industrial landscape through his impassive and ethereal style. 28 years later, this wish was concretely granted within this exhibition. It is presented alongside archival data, photographs, notes, and a digitized, small-scale version of his 1992 work, inviting dialogue and presenting in full an idea and concept longtime buried in his heart.
Starting from “an angle”, YANG Jen-Ming is not indulgent with the execution of aesthetic form. It transforms an interest in design into a pictorial vocabulary, an order of points, lines, and planes, geometric spikes, uncountable particles at the instant of their explosion, and such. Abstract expression seems to be YANG Jen-Ming’s method of interpretation for human consciousness and social order. How will the early dessins (from about 15 years ago), never before released, critique the post-debut YANG Jen-Ming from the posture of a forerunner?
LEE Min-Jong expresses that his recent creations are a sort of ‘void’; without unnecessary preconceptions, he returns to his first motivations for painting. Unearthing two works from 2013’s 《靜走 Jin Zo》, he will place them back-to-back as an all-new work, placing them in a thoroughfare and suspending them on either wall in a V-shape, to maintain their transparency. A work that can be viewed from two sides, but that can only be re-examined by circling the exhibition, intends to induce the audience into regulating their breathing, that they can hold steadily their brush, with colours in hand, and complete a tranquil, dynamic act of painting.
Between 2006 to 2008, LAI Hsin-Lung completed many ‘Studies on Reading’ concerning the distance between ‘chair’ and ‘seat’. Another series directly reflects the emotions of the moment through dessins and graffiti, expressing a sort of deficiency in one’s creative mood like the speech of a madman. What sort of chemical reaction will occur when these two series juxtapose or even counterpose?
Through the deconstruction and declassification of hegemonic symbols, CHEN Ching-Yao’s works often appropriate cultural symbols from Japanese and Korean popular culture, putting them through dramatic rewriting and rearticulation and producing images or gestures full of satirical and tongue-in-cheek elements. Or perhaps, he imagines himself as someone else and places himself into the work, amusing the viewer through the enormous discrepancy this creates in the original. His new work continues the sense of ludicrousness, displaying for the first time a handmade costume; this is no mere decoration, but one that gazes longingly at the work on paper, making sparks fly at the exhibition.
The creative process is meant to be ‘just right’, existing in the spiritual gaps between heartfulness and heartlessness, between intention and apathy. This is what CHANG Ling raises and practices “precision” in art, with responses including the three demands of departing out of mental awareness, a toppling of linear logic with regards to personal history, and a creation without notions conceived before or after the fact, shaking off the trap of works repeating itself. Thanks to rest and relaxation, CHANG Ling’s recent creative habitus is very ‘chill’; both large and small new works put together constitute only about a series of 5x10cm mixed media photographs, presenting vastly different combinations of old and new.
When one is accustomed to using ridiculous, ambiguous, resigned, or self-ridiculing lenses to view KUO Wei-Kuo’s paintings, remember not to neglect his cultivation in psychoanalysis and classical literature, as well as his unending exploration of new possibilities within classical technique. This exhibition, he boldly experiments with honey wax and tempera, allowing diverse base materials to present themselves to the viewer like the memory of a millefeuille cake. The work moves from “artificial” to “organic”, giving new life to wood chips, with the resulting combination sprouting out of the walls to the surface.
DENG Wen-Jen’s recent creations have been deeply tied to Taiwanese history and cartography. Her embroidered work 《Les Fleurs de Mort》draws from the northern Atayal peoples’ cosmology where “after one dies, men enter into the stalk of the bamboo, women into the stem of the ramie.” The work evokes different forms, from ramie fibers, to skin, to stems, spectrally expressing the elevation from death into decadence.
Whether in the 《Freshly Dancing Seafood》 or 《Vegetable Stall》 series, TANG Tang-Fa’s works encompass such mixed modes of expression as painting, sculpture, installation and performance, re-evaluating the familiar traditional market, and transmuting these images using the work as a medium. A large banana in suspension investigates whether or not we can be more ‘grounded’?
Akin to the mechanical creatures, TU Wei-Cheng collected from abandoned factories under the Taoyuan Nankan Interchange, taking spare parts, architectural rubble, and surrounding flora, pressing them into clay and molding them into artificial stone. However, there’s a twist - one large and one small work will be displayed at the exhibition, with the smaller work being the creative result of his son Tudou’s participation. Furthermore, a new 100x100cm work was made from a rubbing of Tudou’s completed artwork made into slate. This exhibition further will show for the first time Tudou’s on-paper and 3-D drawings, presenting the overlapping tracks of time left by a father and son’s daily interaction in a museum format.
“+1黛 OldWays, Young” intends to become Hantoo’s creative “Inkstone” / “Experiment” recreational area. In this exhibition, the artists have received a challenge - how do we re-create old works? How do we boldly try ideas that have long been on the backburner but never had the chance to implement? Rather than lamenting “painting or sculpture is dead”, please anticipate how each deeply experienced artist in Hantoo will express themselves to the fullest, breathing life into aesthetic concepts and creativity, and bringing their best to the table!
“Umber-black dye”, the earliest material used by the ancients to paint their eyebrows. The scriptures state: “to add color with blue stone is to paint the brows with umber-black”, that is, “umber-black dye” is a sort of black-colored mineral, which is also called “umber-black”. Found in the high mountains, women of antiquity used this to paint their brows. At the very beginning of the process, one must first grind the umber-black on a specialized inkstone until it becomes powder. Then one must combine with water, to finally apply it to the brows.
The pronunciation of “umber-black” in Mandarin, dai, is the same as the word for generation or time. Hantoo began in 1998; there is a 23-year gap between the oldest and youngest members of Hantoo, spanning multiple generations, their bonds like those of family, mutually striving and mutually encouraging. This group of experienced, mesozoic Taiwanese artists are constantly training themselves, whether by researching various mediums, breaking into diverse formats, or accumulating transdisciplinary perspectives and practices. Simultaneously as they extend their creative contexts, they also develop individually representative works that unite society, timespace, and the state of the heart. This can be likened to how a raw mineral requires the refinement of time and careful craftsmanship, to undergo change and evolution, to become of use.
“+1黛OldWays, Young” Hantoo 2020, this year’s collaborative exhibition, views Hantoo as a “cohesive subject”, a gesamtkunstwerk formed of the collisions between distinct entities / subjects, with sight and sound, with flair and verve, a “+1” initiative for the individual and the collective, for the individual and art. The 13 artists aim to challenge +1黛 through the three different methods of “old + old”, “old + new”, and “old concepts, new applications”:
Since the ferocious velocity of his earlier works, YANG Mao-Lin has been breaking down taboos. Whether in two or three dimensions, his works are ‘strong’, challenging the authority of politics and society, and displaying a strongly critical attitude. After his large-scale solo exhibition in 2019, he has recently devoted himself to illustration using different varieties of wood, from sandalwood to camphor. This exhibition is the right moment for him to ‘show weakness’; departing from his usual brooding, vagabond persona, he seeks to bring to the audience his strength as well as grace.
Adept at a visual aesthetics where reality and fiction intermix, WU Tien-Chang made public new stills, documentary clips, and other material from their new work, 《Love Song in Harbour City》. A series of getups, from an American soldier to a sailor, a diver to a naval officer, appear consecutively in a single take, currently still in post-production. Through the Taiwanese-language ballad “Love Song in Harbour City” performed by Wu Jin-Huai, the work releases a projected nostalgia for the homeland through the admiration of life, and elucidates the Cold War historical context through the use of props and backdrops, displaying Taiwan’s diverse and multilayered collective memory. Displayed alongside files from older works of 《Farewell, Spring and Autumn Pavilions》(1994, 2015), and making use of the actors, wearing membrane masks, who bring together magic and film, the work discusses the ideological currents of subject and other, body and nation.
From bridges, figures, to his recent artworks of the old trees, LU Hsien-Ming’s series has been pushing for development. However, the unchanging elements are the people, objects, and events that are locked into the detailed observation of societal and living environments. Flipping through his past notes, plant elements have long appeared in his past series. As such, accompanying the display of his newest 2020 work, will be the digitized version of notes from his early works. The flora of the past, once relegated to a supporting role, are brought into the present, and into dialogue with the new protagonist, the old banyan tree.
When LIEN Chien-Hsing created his 1992 work 《Jin-Gua-Shyr and Gold and Bronze Mines》, he hoped for the chance in the future to once again use the same scenery to paint an even larger work, documenting the meditative industrial landscape through his impassive and ethereal style. 28 years later, this wish was concretely granted within this exhibition. It is presented alongside archival data, photographs, notes, and a digitized, small-scale version of his 1992 work, inviting dialogue and presenting in full an idea and concept longtime buried in his heart.
Starting from “an angle”, YANG Jen-Ming is not indulgent with the execution of aesthetic form. It transforms an interest in design into a pictorial vocabulary, an order of points, lines, and planes, geometric spikes, uncountable particles at the instant of their explosion, and such. Abstract expression seems to be YANG Jen-Ming’s method of interpretation for human consciousness and social order. How will the early dessins (from about 15 years ago), never before released, critique the post-debut YANG Jen-Ming from the posture of a forerunner?
LEE Min-Jong expresses that his recent creations are a sort of ‘void’; without unnecessary preconceptions, he returns to his first motivations for painting. Unearthing two works from 2013’s 《靜走 Jin Zo》, he will place them back-to-back as an all-new work, placing them in a thoroughfare and suspending them on either wall in a V-shape, to maintain their transparency. A work that can be viewed from two sides, but that can only be re-examined by circling the exhibition, intends to induce the audience into regulating their breathing, that they can hold steadily their brush, with colours in hand, and complete a tranquil, dynamic act of painting.
Between 2006 to 2008, LAI Hsin-Lung completed many ‘Studies on Reading’ concerning the distance between ‘chair’ and ‘seat’. Another series directly reflects the emotions of the moment through dessins and graffiti, expressing a sort of deficiency in one’s creative mood like the speech of a madman. What sort of chemical reaction will occur when these two series juxtapose or even counterpose?
Through the deconstruction and declassification of hegemonic symbols, CHEN Ching-Yao’s works often appropriate cultural symbols from Japanese and Korean popular culture, putting them through dramatic rewriting and rearticulation and producing images or gestures full of satirical and tongue-in-cheek elements. Or perhaps, he imagines himself as someone else and places himself into the work, amusing the viewer through the enormous discrepancy this creates in the original. His new work continues the sense of ludicrousness, displaying for the first time a handmade costume; this is no mere decoration, but one that gazes longingly at the work on paper, making sparks fly at the exhibition.
The creative process is meant to be ‘just right’, existing in the spiritual gaps between heartfulness and heartlessness, between intention and apathy. This is what CHANG Ling raises and practices “precision” in art, with responses including the three demands of departing out of mental awareness, a toppling of linear logic with regards to personal history, and a creation without notions conceived before or after the fact, shaking off the trap of works repeating itself. Thanks to rest and relaxation, CHANG Ling’s recent creative habitus is very ‘chill’; both large and small new works put together constitute only about a series of 5x10cm mixed media photographs, presenting vastly different combinations of old and new.
When one is accustomed to using ridiculous, ambiguous, resigned, or self-ridiculing lenses to view KUO Wei-Kuo’s paintings, remember not to neglect his cultivation in psychoanalysis and classical literature, as well as his unending exploration of new possibilities within classical technique. This exhibition, he boldly experiments with honey wax and tempera, allowing diverse base materials to present themselves to the viewer like the memory of a millefeuille cake. The work moves from “artificial” to “organic”, giving new life to wood chips, with the resulting combination sprouting out of the walls to the surface.
DENG Wen-Jen’s recent creations have been deeply tied to Taiwanese history and cartography. Her embroidered work 《Les Fleurs de Mort》draws from the northern Atayal peoples’ cosmology where “after one dies, men enter into the stalk of the bamboo, women into the stem of the ramie.” The work evokes different forms, from ramie fibers, to skin, to stems, spectrally expressing the elevation from death into decadence.
Whether in the 《Freshly Dancing Seafood》 or 《Vegetable Stall》 series, TANG Tang-Fa’s works encompass such mixed modes of expression as painting, sculpture, installation and performance, re-evaluating the familiar traditional market, and transmuting these images using the work as a medium. A large banana in suspension investigates whether or not we can be more ‘grounded’?
Akin to the mechanical creatures, TU Wei-Cheng collected from abandoned factories under the Taoyuan Nankan Interchange, taking spare parts, architectural rubble, and surrounding flora, pressing them into clay and molding them into artificial stone. However, there’s a twist - one large and one small work will be displayed at the exhibition, with the smaller work being the creative result of his son Tudou’s participation. Furthermore, a new 100x100cm work was made from a rubbing of Tudou’s completed artwork made into slate. This exhibition further will show for the first time Tudou’s on-paper and 3-D drawings, presenting the overlapping tracks of time left by a father and son’s daily interaction in a museum format.
“+1黛 OldWays, Young” intends to become Hantoo’s creative “Inkstone” / “Experiment” recreational area. In this exhibition, the artists have received a challenge - how do we re-create old works? How do we boldly try ideas that have long been on the backburner but never had the chance to implement? Rather than lamenting “painting or sculpture is dead”, please anticipate how each deeply experienced artist in Hantoo will express themselves to the fullest, breathing life into aesthetic concepts and creativity, and bringing their best to the table!