Since the Martial Law in Taiwan was lifted in the 1987, the conservative atmosphere in the society was soon dispelled by the energy to embrace the “new ideas.” In this island country which used to be called “Formosa” – a beautiful place – there was no way for contemporary art to be apart from such a sudden change. Artists started to employ various types of materials in their artistic creation. Photography thus became one of the most frequently adopted genres for Taiwanese artists to practice their experimental ideas. Liberated from a society once dominated by political ideology, artists were gradually fascinated by the complicated historical background and the multi-cultural influence in their own self-identity and the national identity. The personal memory entwined with the mass collected experience thus became an inerasable mark branded on the development of the contemporary art in Taiwan. The critical insight and the nostalgic touch interacted with each other, veiling the insecurity of all Taiwanese behind the rapid development in economy and politics.
While talking about the representation of reality in Taiwan, “identity” will never be absent in all aspects. The artist Mei Dean-E plays with the idea of identity in his work <Ai-Duen-Ti-Ti> (The homophone of identity in Mandarin). He digitalizes the aged photography from the Japanese colonial period and the following Martial Law Period, piecing up the history as if he is re-creating the colonial memory which he has actually never experienced as a second-generation of Mainlanders (the term refers to those Chinese who came to Taiwan after the WWII with KMT).
Similar to Mei Dean-E, Wu Tien-Chang also reconstructs the images in a digital way. He adopts the idea of “Tai-Ke” (台客, the term used to be regarded as a discriminative slang to refer to Taiwanese, in comparison with Mainlanders, but recently it is often employed as an empowerment for the Taiwanese identity awareness). Awarded as the Special Jury Select by Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture earlier this year, Wu Tien-Chang plays the role as a director in <Never Relax Morning and Night> to embody the history. The sub-cultural setting and the black comedy-like plot thus reflect the tragic-comic essence in the Taiwanese history.
“Memory” is the most important element in Chen Shun-Chu’s works. In <Stations>(1999), the childhood pictures of him and his family standing in front of Taipei Station, Kaohsiung Station, and Keelung Station become the collage of iron sheets and wooden pieces. His another installation work <Candy Rack> mourns the passing of his childhood, bringing the nostalgia to the ritualized representation – The ephemerality of our being has always been the unique charm in Chen Shun-Chu’s photography.
Yao Jui-Chung’s <Roaming around the Ruins> has taken him 6 years to bring this work to full completion. From 1999 to 2005, Yao’s wandering around the ruins was actually a self-quest ceremony. In the slice of reality represented on the photography, time and space (belonging to a certain moment) have thus been congealed and preserved as historical ruins, waiting for the excavation of the offsprings.
As an art gallery promoting multi-media artists in Taiwan, this summer Galerie Grand Siecle turns its eyes toward a more mature generation of artists -- Mei Dean-E, Wu Tien-Chang, Chen Shun-Chu, Yao Jui-Chung. In the exhibition <The Fragmentized Illusion: An Exhibition of Taiwan Contemporary Art>, these four artists will introduce you to have a closer look at how they picture the society in Taiwan – an illusion seemed surrealistic but also inseparable from our reality.
