For the past two decades, Tina Keng Gallery has dedicated itself to each edition of ART TAIPEI. This year marks a strong distinction between Tina Keng Gallery and TKG+, the former’s experimental platform. Both promote the burgeoning Asian contemporary art scene through their represented artists and their individual art practices. In this year’s Art Taipei, both platforms present a diverse array of established and emerging artists who explore personal and universal perspectives in the means of motifs, symbols, and media through cross-cultural and cross-generational aesthetics.
Tina Keng Gallery continues its effort to accentuate the Asian art scene, presenting distinguished modern masters and contemporary artists, including the highly-anticipated classic oil on canvas by Zao Wou-Ki. Yang Mao-Lin debuts his latest series Gladiators of Soul(2015), where he navigates humanity’s eccentricities through each aquatic animal he molds and sculpts. Lin Ju’s oil paintings transport viewers to a vast twilit landscape of imagination. Tu Wei-Cheng delves into contemporary living and material culture in his new relief sculptural work, while experimenting possibilities of sculptural techniques through manual labor and physical participation. Peng Wei’s ink painting Dear Old Friend, We Should Meet and Talk(2015) is a poetic, otherworldly marriage between Eastern traditional ink painting and Western famed literary text, where she constructs a new way of cultural imagination by juxtaposing two intrinsically different cultures. Su Meng-Hung provokes viewers to rethink established values and instigates their perception through interlacing Eastern and Western motifs in an overview of kitsch and taste.
As an experimental platform for avant-garde aesthetics, TKG+ highlights paradigm shifts that blaze a trail in contemporary art today. The gray-toned booth for this year’s ART TAIPEI signifies the gallery’s constant exploration of the unknown through contemporary art.
Kao Chung-Li’s installation piece Slideshow Cinema VI - An Autumn Afternooncomprises slides of a Japanese family from the late World War II period that Kao stumbled across online. Narrated by the artist himself, the work articulates a complex, erratic tale that traces the coincidence and construction of history. Graced by his recent participation in La Biennale de Lyon, Taiwanese video art pioneer Yuan Goang-Ming presents Landscape of Energy－Stillness, a photographic piece that meditates on a foreboding reality lurking beneath the surface shaped by normality and habitude. Yao Jui-chung’s photography series Gods & Idols Surround the Border, Roaming Around the Ruins, previously on display at the 2014 Venice Biennale of Architecture, examines the alienation of space and enchanted memory, divulging absurd aesthetics of public urban desolation. In addition to digital photography, TKG+ also carries on a debate on painting. Charwei Tsai’s We Came Whirling Out of Nothingnessponders the relationship between man, nature, and cosmic order, through inscriptions of the Buddhist scripture Heart Sutra. Existing between dreamland and reality, the imagery of Chen Ching-Yuan’s paintings stirs both the painter and the viewer with a palpable energy that beckons the latter to dive into cracks of the former’s consciousness.
In the duration of ART TAIPEI, Brain Dead Travelogue – Yao Jui-chung Solo Exhibitionand Plus I – Lin Ju and Chen Ching-Yuan Duo Exhibitionare on view at Tina Keng Gallery and TKG+in Neihu. Sewing Fields – Hou I-Ting Solo Exhibitiontakes place at the experimental TKG+Projects, as the artist and participating workers explore the notion of art practice and production through an on-site performance. A simple gathering with finger foods specially prepared by Lin Ju and Chen Ching-Yuan takes place on Saturday, October 31, 6-9 p.m.