This year marks the 10th anniversary year of the death of Chen Ting-shih, who died on 15th April 2002. The anniversary of Chen Ting-shih's death coincides with around the time of the Ching-ming Festival – a time of memorial to remember ancestors, loved ones and great pioneers in the Chinese tradition. To publicly express our memories for the great, all-round artist, we are holding a multi-disciplinary memorial exhibition of Chen Ting-shih's works which are organized around a sequence of poems. The exhibition format is inspired especially by two of the total of over one hundred and ninety solo or group exhibitions involving Chen Ting-shih. We believe that a comprehensive exhibition of Chen Ting-shih's works – poetry, calligraphy, poetic dialogues, rare stones, paintings and sculptures – would be the best way to illustrate the incredible talent and extraordinary life of the legendary artist. We hope that a memorial exhibition that celebrates the inexorably poetic character of Chen Ting-shih's art will exude poetic beauty like the artist's name suggests.

Art that verges on poetry

“Art has no limits; all creative practices are basically a matter of selection process.” (Chen Ting-shih)

Chen Ting-shih never stopped writing poetry. As a matter of fact, all his artworks – whatever the medium or form he chose – were driven by a poetic impulse. Chen Ting-shih wrote poetry of exquisite sensibilities with flowing, cursive calligraphic lines and expressed poetic sentiment with ink painting and prints. What's more amazing is that he would even find poetry through re-assembling damaged objects.

Bringing together East and West, traditional and modern

“Chen Ting-shih's greatest achievement is that he brought Western aesthetics to the Chinese artistic tradition, translating the mediums and expressive methods of abstract art into the visual language of Chinese symbolism. Chen Ting-shih was an artist of great significance. He made a valuable contribution in enhancing the understanding of Western abstract art by the Chinese public, and in so doing, substantially improved communication between Chinese and Western cultures.”

(Daniel Davison, Former Consultant, Taipei Fine Arts Museum)

Chen Ting-shih's art transcends the boundaries between bodies, objects, societies and events. It is then transformed into a metaphysical allegory, an artistic or illusionary event that enables us to depart from existing systems of knowledge in exploration of new possibilities.

The music of deep silence

One thing that sets Chen Ting-shih apart from other artists is that he has lived a life of soundlessness for a great part of his life and thus developed extraordinarily acute powers of observation and visualization. Although deprived of hearing from the age of eight, Chen Ting-shih was able to write beautiful poetry using memories of phonetic sounds from his early childhood. Each time he communicated with others through his poetry, he was in the act of refreshing those memories of phonetic sounds over and over again. Instead of speaking with human sounding voices, Chen Ting-shih spoke with his poetry. The sound that he made through his art was indeed the sound of poetry.

Chen Ting-shih utilized his special talent developed out of his physical conditions to produce movements that materialize the continuation of time. Movement, which inherently suggests variation, attracts visual attention. It is also through movement/variation of different kinds that we produce music, or differentiate weight from lightness. This exhibition provides and example of how a great artist turns his quiet observation and the rhythm of the mind into meaningful interpretation of variation.

Chen Ting-shih's art and poetry: continuous echoes and dialogues

Chen Ting-shih collected scrap iron, damaged ship parts, old furniture and other damaged everyday objects from the ship-breaking yard to re-build meaningful connections between them. This enriches the history of the material object itself while at the same time gives the artist a newfound sense of freedom, and creates for the viewers an expanded sense of time and space.

Chen Ting-shih invested in these objects with meanings intimately related to his own personal experience and memory as well as to Eastern cultures – loss of hearing, ancient rituals, the roots of the Chinese characters or his unique understanding of history and the universe. The interaction between the ball and the cube creates a unique visual feel of variation, not only giving off a sense of rhythm, but also signifies the dynamic relationship between the individual and the broader society.

Curator: Liu Kao-Sing