A Thousand Ways to Objecthood

Introduction

Artists' Profile

 

Chou Chu-Wang

Born in Pingtung in 1978, Chou Chu-Wang graduated from the Graduate Institute of Fine Arts at the National Kaohsiung Normal University and continues to live in Pingtung. He has earned several awards, including the 2009 Chimei Arts Award, the Grand Prize at the 2007 Taipei Art Awards, and the First Prize at the 2003 Kaohsiung Award. In 2009, he participated as an artist-in-residence in the Summer Residency Program at the Watermill Center in New York. His works are part of collections in institutions like the White Rabbit Gallery (Sydney), Yinchuan Museum of Contemporary Art (Ningxia), Taipei Fine Arts Museum, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (Taichung), Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, and Chimei Museum (Tainan).

 

He has held solo exhibitions at various art institutions, including Inart Space (Tainan), Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Beyond Gallery (Taipei), Taipei Fine Arts Museum, AKI Gallery (Taipei), Hongah Museum (Taipei), and so on. Additionally, his has participated in group exhibitions presented by numerous art institutions, including the Pier-2 Art Center (Kaohsiung), Gallery Artislong (Kyoto), National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (Taichung), and Gyeongnam Art Museum (Changwon, South Korea), among others.

 

Chou’s passion for portraying sand and stones stems from his roots in Jiadong Township, located by the sea in Pingtung. Apart from his frequent visits to the beach, his family’s duck farm has provided him with the unique ability to collect duck eggs from a young age, fostering a special bond with pebbles and nurturing a particular kind of patience. On canvas, Chou employs countless dots to convey the depth of time and highlight its transformations, aiming to interpret the unseen patterns of daily life and capture fleeting moments. His sand and stone series is diverse. In addition to utilizing materials from Pingtung, he also portrays sand and stone from other areas, for instance the east coast. From expansive sands to meticulously arranged stones, he finds endless inspiration and challenges, showcasing remarkably realistic stones through hyperrealist techniques that engage the viewer’s sensory perception by emphasizing the traces of physicality.

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Dan Măciucă

Dan Măciucă was born in Cluj, Romania, in 1979. He earned his BFA and MFA in Painting from the University of Art and Design Cluj-Napoca in 2002 and 2006, respectively. From 2008 to 2013, he completed a PhD at the same institution, focusing his research on cultural jamming. In 2004, he was awarded a scholarship from the Academy of Art, Architecture, and Design in Prague. Additionally, he received a scholarship from the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo, Italy, from 2005 to 2006.

 

In 2015, he was invited to participate in the 1st edition of the Romania Timișoara Art Encounters Biennale. He has presented solo exhibitions in various venues, such as the Mind Set Art Center (Taipei), Patrick Heide Contemporary Art Gallery (London), Zorzini Gallery (Bucharest), and the Art Museum of Cluj-Napoca, among others. He has also participated in group exhibitions at Patrick Heide Contemporary Art Gallery (Brussels & London), Martin Kudlek Gallery (Cologne), and Funnel Contemporary Art (Belgrade), among others.

 

Măciucă represents an entire generation of artists emerging after the Romanian Revolution of 1989. They were educated in the style of the Cluj School and came from a vital hub for contemporary art community in Cluj, which was once a paintbrush factory. Following the fall of communism and significant societal shifts, the artists from the Cluj School have harnessed painting to critically examine both historical and contemporary realities, seeking to engage with the nation’s past and social awareness. The overall mood of their works is often informed by dark and unsettling qualities, creating a suppressive atmosphere, which is also characteristic of Măciucă’s creations.

 

Măciucă’s work includes charcoal drawings and oil paintings. This exhibition primarily showcases his black-and-white charcoal landscapes. He consistently employs an abstract expressionist style to interpret figurative reality, revealing his personal nostalgia for specific moments in life. The charcoal drawings are inspired by black-and-white photographs taken by the artist himself, from which he extracts abstract structures and visualizes them. Through the pictural gestures in his images, he emphasizes light and shadow, seeking forms that are both dynamic and evocative while aiming to capture the intrinsic spontaneity of the creative process.

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Rho Eunjoo

Rho Eunjoo was born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1988. She earned a BFA from the Department of Painting at Hongik University in 2012 and obtained her MFA from the Department of Fine Arts at the Korea National University of Arts in 2016.. She is currently based in Seoul.

 

Her residency experience includes the 11th SeMA Nanji Residency ( Seoul Museum of Art) in 2017. Her artworks are now included in collections at several institutions, such as the Art Bank of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Seoul, and the Wumin Art Center (Cheongju). Rho has extensive exhibition experience in both solo and group exhibitions in Korea. Among her notable solo exhibitions are Chapter II, the Kumho Museum of Art, and Space Willing N Dealing. Her group exhibitions span INTERIM, the North Seoul Museum of Art, Seojung Art, SongEun Art Space, Gallery Baton, ONE AND J. GALLERY, Art Sonje Center, and the Museum SAN, among others.

 

Rho’s painting emphasizes objects in intermediate or transitional states, evading clear definition. Her creations frequently showcase dualities and contradictions, evoking a floating or uncertain feeling. The imagery in her works serves as a refined depiction of something familiar, caught between the tangible and the intangible, stillness and dynamism, melting and solidifying, as well as raw materials and finished products. Through this approach, she seeks to capture unseen forces, time, movement, and speed while exploring and translating perceptual experience and the shifts between various senses.

 

Rho employs multiple techniques in her painting. Prior to transferring object images to the canvas, she constructs models and takes their photos. Her primary focus is on the relationship between the models and their surroundings, experimenting with their spatial arrangements and eventually creating diverse images of perception. For Rho, the canvas’s spatial configuration is ever-evolving, with gravity being a crucial element in her creative process. Consequently, the objects she illustrates display diverse states in space: some rest on the ground, others lean against walls, and a few float in the air.

 

Her creations frequently showcase black, white, neutral grays, and shades of blue. The stark contrast between black and white represents both disappearance and revelation, while the blue suggests temporary existence. The grayscale emphasizes the original structural forms of the objects, downplaying their practical aspects at the same time. This invites viewers to break away from conventional visual recognition, adjust their perceptions, allow for greater imagination, and ultimately give the objects new names.

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Chou Yu-Cheng

Born in Taipei in 1976, Chou Yu-Cheng graduated from the Department of Fine Arts at the National Taiwan University of Arts in 1999. In 2004, he graduated from the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris, France, where he was awarded the diplôme national supérieur d'arts plastiques, or DNSAP (equivalent to master’s degree). In 2007, he received his post-diploma in image and special effects at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and later, in 2008, graduated from the research program – La Seine at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. He is currently based in Taipei.

Chou Yu-Cheng has won several prestigious awards, including the 2012 Taipei Art Awards and the 2011 Taishin Arts Award – Visual Arts Award. He has held solo exhibitions at numerous art institutions, including TKG+ (Taipei), Kate MacGarry Gallery (London), Marlborough Gallery (Shanghai/Hong Kong), Project Fulfill Art Space (Taipei), Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin), Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts (Taipei), Hongah Museum (Taipei), and Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver (USA), among others. He has also been featured in various group exhibitions, including the Lyon Biennale, Liverpool Biennale, New Museum (New York), Asian Art Biennial (Taichung), Queens International (New York), and the Taipei Biennial.

Chou’s works span a variety of media, including painting, objects, site-specific installations, performance art, and publications. His seemingly succinct and refined style reflects his intricate reflections and dialectics on the relationships between art, economics, society, and exhibition institutions. Before 2015, Chou’s works were largely project-based practices, such as TOA Lighting (2010), Rainbow Paint (2011), and A Working History: Lu Chieh-Te (2012), where he flipped the logic of the artist as a subject, acting as a mediator to navigate between different systems and observe the contrasting production mechanisms. By means of displacement, exchange, and other approaches, he altered existing relationships and identities, exploring contemporary societal issues such as class structures and the circulation of resources. After 2015, Chou began to use longer titles comprising a series of words for his works and shifted his focus to the formal aspects of art, developing his idiosyncratic aesthetic of form. In 2020, due to limitations imposed by the pandemic, he began experimenting with coloring and testing pigments through the movement of water. Notable works from this period include Moody (2020–2022) and Origami (2023). During this time, he also moved from external social phenomena to introspective exploration of emotions, transitioning from a collaborative, project-based mode of art making to abstract painterly expressions.

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Ai Makita

Born in 1985 in Chiba, Japan, Ai Makita obtained her MFA in Oil Painting from Tokyo Gakugei University and MFA in Art and Education from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2010 and 2013, respectively. From 2014 to 2018, she taught in the Department of Early Childhood Education at Tokyo Seitoku University. In 2016, she participated in an “Art Support Program” organized by Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs, assisting in the creation of art by physically and mentally challenged individuals. She currently divides her time between Tokyo and New York.

 

She has won several awards, including the 2014 Terrada Art Award (Tokyo), the 2015 Taro Okamoto Award for Contemporary Art (Tokyo), the 2017 POLA Art Foundation Grant (Tokyo), and was shortlisted for the 2019 “Rijksakademie” at the Royal Academy of Visual Arts in the Netherlands. Her other residency experiences include ART CAKE (New York) in 2020 and The Fores Project (London) in 2023. She has presented solo exhibitions at various art institutions, including PARCEL (Tokyo), The Something Machine (New York), Mitsukoshi Contemporary (Tokyo), haku (Kyoto), mh PROJECT nyc (New York), Karuizawa New Art Museum (Nagano), and Gallery Vask (Manila). She has participated in group exhibitions organized by numerous art institutions, including the Lurf Museum (Tokyo), Saint Joseph’s University (Philadelphia), and San Art Gallery (Tainan), among others.

 

Makita’s artwork examines various boundaries, including nature versus artificiality, organic versus inorganic, and tangible materials versus digital information. She uses inorganic materials to create artificial landscapes that mirror human society. Inspired by sci-fi films, she often depicts living organisms with monstrous mechanical or plastic elements, resulting in images that evoke an animalistic essence. Initially, her work concentrated on the symmetry and balance of organic forms like insects and human faces. However, her later pieces reflect a deeper interest in the movement or oscillation of these organic and inorganic objects. Believing in animism, Makita views all entities as having a spiritual existence. Her Christian faith has further prompted her to explore Western philosophy, especially the structural relationships and biopolitics discussed by Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, which has shaped her creative perspective. In her artistic process, Makita typically begins by taking several dozen photographs. She then edits them in Photoshop, and ultimately transfers the images onto the canvas.

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Wu Mei-Chi

Born in Tainan in 1989, Wu MeiChi graduated from the Department of Crafts and Creative Design at the National University of Kaohsiung in 2012, majoring in image creation. She currently lives in Taipei.

Her works are included in the collections of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (Taichung). She is the recipient of the Discovery Award at the 9th Jimei x Arles International Photography Festival in 2023. Her solo exhibitions include Jimei Art Center (Xiamen), A26 Space (Beijing), Pon Ding (Taipei), Each Modern (Taipei), and NEPO Gallery (Taipei). Her group exhibition experiences include FreeS art Space (Taipei), Fine Art Private Museum (Tainan), NINUNO Gallery (Manila), Nuit Blanche (Taipei), Gallery Common (Tokyo), National Center for Photography and Images (Taipei), The Hall (Taipei), West Bund Art Center (Shanghai), Fotofever (Paris), and Aura Gallery (Taipei), among others.

Wu Mei-Chi’s still life photography is rooted in her own life and emotional experiences. Her creative approach combines scene construction, digital drawing or compositing, and image collage. In addition to traditional photographic prints, she also works with a variety of media, including metal plates, fabric, and acrylic, along with found objects and projection installations. In her experimental images, she arranges objects in ways that challenge the physical norm of objects, constructing new spatial and material forms. She intertwines objects and dimensions through the interplay of light and mirror reflections. Central to her work is the fluid and elusive nature of time and space, which fosters ambiguity in the meanings of the objects. Wu is deeply fascinated with objects within her daily surroundings, many of which are reflective and adorned with patterned symbols. By examining how the penetration and refraction of light (shaped by factors such as seasons, times of day, and viewing angles) interact with these objects, along with the cyclical effects of mirror reflections, she explores the segmentation of space and broadens her fantasy of objects, while contemplating the flexibility of time within the dynamics of light and shadow, as well as the relationship between light and viewing.

Photos