In an age of ephemerality, it cannot be easier for us to transmit certain information or to move an object: to press the shutter in one second, to surf on the Internet in one minute, or to travel around the world by taking a flight within a day. What we have been experiencing is a world which is moving so fast that it is even beyond time and space. In the exhibition “Taking Time,” however, we wish to reverse such an ephemerality to demonstrate the slowness of contemporary art with duality.
First of all, the exhibition starts with the perception of perspective. With the improvement of technology and photography skills, “image” becomes something we can easily have access to. They can be easily copied and transmitted. Moreover, our life is overloaded with excessive commercial advertisements. Those countless images in our life have already subconsciously veiled our perception. The master photographer Abelardo Morell exhibited the work “Light Bulb” which shocked the art society in 1991. In the work, he analyses the photography skills in a stark-naked way. In his later works, he further develops the technique of “camera obscura,” creating a series of photographical works which combine the inner scene of a room and an apparition-like reflection of the view outside. He travels all over the world, from the cold New York City to the warm Italian landscape, to search for the ideal scenes and the exact brightness for his technique. In addition to those mentioned above, what it requires is an eight-hour exposure. “I want to change the way human beings see the world,” says Morell. He not only blurs the boundary between the realistic landscape and the illusion, his photographical works awake our exhausted eyes.
The Korean-American artist Soo Kim focuses on the reducing visual information in her artistic practice. In her photographical works, she hollows out certain part of the photographs to emphasize the existence of the absence. The photographs are carefully cropped and collaged through a hand-made process, creating a world of surrealistic fantasy. Soo Kim not only transforms the single piece of photograph into a more in-depth visual experience with multidimensional perspective, but also produces a unique sense of “slowness” in her works. It takes time for her to accomplish the artworks, and it takes time for viewers to absorb and to study the images. In the exhibition, Nou Gallery invites her as our special guest to create a series: she will take a trip to Wanhua District, Xinyi District, Beitou, Danshui, Chiufen, and the Pingshi Line. She will provide her unique interpretation of the architecture styles, the landscape, and the cultural atmosphere of Taipei City in her works, which will be premiered in the exhibition “Taking Time.”
Living in Taiwan, the artist Lee Wen-Cheng represents the living space here and the Taiwanese culture with a creative image-processing skill which he has been so good at. He looks into the heart of the ugliness and the undesirable customs of the country, re-discussing the numbness created from a repeated daily life. In his work “Unknown Life,” the prize winner of both the Taipei Arts Award and the Kaohsiung Arts Award, Lee adopts a complex skill of photograph processing, and with the help of distance, to create a special visual effect. Viewers might take the works as simply some beautiful fabric patterns when they stand afar. They need to take a step closer to discover what the images really are. In his video work “Street Life,” Lee vividly visualizes the urban life in Taiwan through sound effect and visual effect. Viewers will definitely sense the hidden humors in the work as well as the freedom of imagination in a city which never stops moving.
Another focus of “Taking Time” is to transform the visual perception of slowness into the “physical” perception of slowness. In Charles Labelle’s works, he chooses certain song, combining each sentence of the lyrics with each location he has stayed. The moving process of the artist, the photos taken throughout the journey, his own personal experiences and his emotions all become the materials in his artistic practice while he re-interprets and re-creates the song. The work “Exterior Song – Continental Drift“ demonstrates a road trip across the North American continent, through which the artist exiles himself in search for life; while the photographical series work “Exterior Song – Hollywood (Cracked Actor)“ makes the best use of private and personal objects – the mattresses Labelle picked up from the streets – as a response to the avant-guard Rock ‘n’ Roll singer David Bowie’s famous song “Cracked Actor.”
The performance artist Antti Laitinen usually locates himself in various situations of absurdity. He has once spent three months, piling up hundreds of sandbags to build up an island country of his own. One year later, he expanded the idea into a moving island country: he sailed along the River Thames on a bamboo raft. The intensive sense of physical labor and seriousness in his works further deepen the absurdity in his performance art. In the exhibition “Taking Times,” we will exhibit Laitinen’s self-portraits, taken while the artist walks through six locations. He superimposes his self-portraits with local map. Wearing a GPS on his wrist, he walks along the silhouette of his face, and then he prints the trails he has been taking. Those locations include the big city as well as the mountain trails – all of them have some unique meaning to the artist. From the smooth pathway to the rough trail, Laitinen searches for the real image of himself step by step in a slow but yet firm way.
Nowadays, we all live in a busy society, in which we rarely slow down the pace. However, the un-visualized resting spot still exists – it is what these artists physically or mentally experience throughout their artistic pursuit. It might be about time for us to slow down. Once we release the concept of time, we might truly discover the humane interaction between the environment and ourselves. Finally, we can come to a full realization about our unique self-existence.
