Open Contemporary Art Center is pleased to announce I Was in the Arctic, the first solo exhibition in Taiwan by New York-based artist TENG Chao-Ming. Last year TENG was selected to participate in the Arctic Circle, an annual artist residency/expedition, run by New York’s Farm Foundation for the Arts and Sciences. I Was in the Arctic shows two new works completed during the trip by TENG.
Eighteen artists from all over the world gathered at Longyearbyen, Svalbard, and boarded on a 100-year-old schooner, sailing between 77 to 80 degree north for almost three weeks. Faced with the extreme condition and uninhabited land, TENG’s new work once again shows his attitude: art-making as a way to approach, re-read, and de(re-)construct the environment we live in, and the systems and concepts we live by. The artist thinks embarking on this journey felt like responding to a certain aspiration; an aspiration to understand and own the remote and mysterious Arctic. Every participant was physically there to collect experiences and signs to their ownership.
One of the two pieces, Getting There, as a State of Mind (2011), is an fourteen-part video piece that consists of long shots between 20 seconds to 11 minutes, played as a loop. The artist fixed his video camera on the boat and recorded the interaction between the moving body of the ship and the powerful sea. The viewer only sees how the boat keeps moving, without seeing the starting point and the destination. This piece foregrounds the necessary physical movement in order to reach a destination, similar to efforts that we make with any pursuit in life.
With all the background information he had researched before he left on the trip, the artist still felt it was difficult to approach places in the Arctic. It was almost like these places, with their rawness and primitiveness, silently rejected being understood. TENG tried to understand them with a very personal approach:
“I used a framework that I’m familiar with (and have missed a lot) -- the floor plan of my space at home in Taipei, Taiwan -- as a reference for both scale, and spatial concepts. At every landing, I would try to find a site that works for such a space, and mark out an area of snow with red construction-use poles; the measurement would match exactly with my space in Taipei.”
The photographic documentation of the actions described above is presented as the main component of the installation work Untitled (2011). Also presented together are all the research documents, maps, scientific diagrams, and photos taken on the sites. The organization of these documents and the form of presentation are intended as an ongoing work in progress, since the artist thinks, at least for now, the piece remains a question to be solved. Viewers are welcome to browse these documents.
Born in Taiwan, currently based in New York, TENG, Chao-Ming graduated with a master’s degree in media arts from the School of Architecture and Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), U.S.A. In 2007 he was invited by the Banff New Media Institute, Canada, as a mentor artist to give lectures, and In 2009 he was awarded a residency at the Centre National d'Arts Contemporain, Villa Arson, France. TENG has been showing his work, leading workshops, and giving talks in Taiwan, Japan, Canada, China, and the United States. In addition to personal art practice, he is also commissioned to produce installations and videos for film festivals and experimental theater plays that tour internationally.
