Edouard Malingue Gallery is pleased to present, ‘Never odd or eveN’, a group exhibition project supported by the Ministry of Culture, Taiwan and the Taipei Artist Village, curated by Esther Lu, curator of the Taiwanese Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale. Featuring work by Benoit Broîsat, Yu-Cheng Chou, Tyler Coburn, Chitti Kasemkitvatana and Ko Sin Tung, the project examines the relational aesthetics between exhibition norms, as well as cultures and artistic practices. Extending the experience of the exhibition beyond the physical display space, the project will manifest itself in multiple forms, including that of printed material as a paper exhibition in the Taiwanese art magazine Not Today and a series of published artist interviews.
“How to unfold our minds and perceptions so that we may hear the landscape that we do not see is an endeavor and dream that dances with the question of sensibility—mysteries are not in things but rippling from artists’ actions and our ceaseless conspiracy.
The exhibition premise departs from artists’ peculiar actions and sensitivities vis a vis conceptualizing artistic ideas and expressions with their own formal grammars so as to speculate and investigate social relations and agencies. Their actions do not seek representation but rather create agents and sources of evidence that allow us to mobilize ourselves again in reality. In order to read aesthetics informed by the seamless conversations and compositions they initiate, and to connect knowledge, imagery and
narration against institutional power and violence, this exhibition proposes to study artists’ action forms and provide ways of seeing contemporary art beyond visibility and
display—that is, in multiple layers and dimensions in order to indicate various realms for aesthetic understanding as well as continuity that take the form of lives.
In our post-Duchamp age of media society, we are driven by new quests to understand and rediscover the meaning, presentation and possibility of the art object—material or not, and functioning in complex social fabrics beyond the act of registering new artistic
concepts. Correspondingly, the exhibition as a form for art presentation faces new challenges and seeks to access and generate active communication between different systems, institutions, ideologies and realities. The project title Never odd or eveN points to the spectrum between integers in mathematics, or any complete entity in a literal approach, suggesting an unbound space to discover new relations and activations. As a palindrome, it provides a passage for travel and return, while the exhibition itself acts as an aesthetic vehicle for presenting projects in the juxtaposed structure of a parallax, illustrating the rendezvous between art and life on the same platform, or via multiple perspectives, directed by the audience. It is a contemplative medium for meeting more ends or beginnings. It shows how form exercises affection and how we are affected to act and run in a contemporary temporality.” – Esther Lu
Benoît Broisat (b.1980, France) lives and works in Paris. Across multiple media, including drawing, installation, photography and digital animation, Broisat engages with the notion of representation, reflecting on the subjective nature of vision to reveal a constructed and mediated world of imagery that is parallel to or interposed in our everyday experiences and understanding of reality. His work has been widely exhibited at the Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 9th Lyon Bienniale, Serpentine Gallery, London, Jeu de paume, Paris, and Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.
Chou Yu-Cheng (b. 1976, Taipei) studied at l’École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts de Paris and received the 2012 Taipei Art Award. Chou’s practice places a conceptual emphasis on the procedures and operations behind his projects in their specific contexts, reflecting on the problems of reality and proffering alternatives to their corresponding benefits, organizations and histories. He’s been widely exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; Kuandu Museum, Taipei; Taipei Biennial 2012, Taipei and Queens Museum, New York.
Tyler Coburn (b. 1983, New York) is an artist and writer based in New York. He received a BA in Comparative Literature from Yale University and an MFA from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. In addition to contributing to frieze, e-flux journal, Art-Agenda and Mousse, Coburn has presented his work worldwide, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; South London Gallery, London; Kunstverein Munich; CCA Glasgow; and LAXART, Los Angeles.
Chitti Kasemkitvatana (b. 1969, Thailand) lives and works in Bangkok & Berlin. An artist and independent curator, he received his BA in Fine Art from RMIT University, Melbourne and co-founded About Art Related Activities (AARA) in 1997. More recently, he co-founded the publication and now project space Messy Sky. His work has been exhibited at Secession, Vienna; CAPC Musee d'Art Contemporain, Bordeaux; PS1, New York; Frac-Ile-de-France / Le Plateau, Paris; Level One, Paris; Times Museum, Guangzhou and Centre Européen d’Actions Artistiques Contemporaines, Strasbourg. He is also a recipient of the 2014 Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD. His works mobilize the shifting of presence and absence and the transformation of void and life through actions and installation, to generate the birth and transmission of ideas among human network.
Ko Sin Tung (b. 1987, Hong Kong) graduated from The Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Department of Fine Arts. Working across a variety of media, including painting, video and digital print, Ko Sin Tung responds to a sense of solitude and distance that is sensitive to the modern life, urban environment as well as the collective internet culture. She is concerned with how images appear and are being perceived or conceptualized in our daily lives and considers the influences as well as functions they fulfill in a psychological sense.
