Cool, sweet and drill holes
-The two-Person Exhibition by Michael Lin and Heidi Voet
IT Park gallery is proud to present a two-person exhibition by Taiwanese artist Michael Lin and Belgian artist Heidi Voet. It is Lin's first show at IT Park since 1999, where he first presented his floor painting, that later became the artist's iconic artwork internationally. For the installation artist Heidi Voet, it is her first exhibition in Taiwan.
Their artworks are exhibited respectively in three different exhibition rooms. Lin uses the 2nd floor and the office area of the 3rd floor to exhibit his work “Cool and Sweet”, while Voet makes her installation work “As beautiful as the chance encounter on a gallery wall of a painter and a drill hole” in the main exhibition room on the 3rd floor. Each of their works is somehow site-specific. Both works reflect on the history of IT Park. For Lin, a past employee of IT Park, the past social dynamics created by the bar was an important departure point. While on the other hand, for Heidi Voet the remaining traces of the previous exhibitions establish the bases of this new work. Both artists initiate an excavation of the exhibition space revealing the social and historical context unique to the site.
Lin's “Cool and Sweet” consists of several disparate elements: a cool breeze, wind mills, bicycles, a street vender, crème brulee and cream puffs, illy coffee, and a painting.
The first part “Cool” of Lin's installation is on the 2nd floor consisting of a large painting of a floral pattern and a street vender's bicycle that he bought in Shanghai. Placed in front of the painting the street vender's bicycle, selling toy windmills, is animated by an electric fan, cooling down the hottest room of the gallery.
The second part “Sweet” takes place in the office area of the 3rd floor. A vender's bicycle appears again now selling deserts. The local street vender and his business partner, who sells coffee, are invited by Lin to sell their goods to the audience in IT Park. The only visual trace from the artist in this part of the installation are the illy coffee tins and cups that the artist has designed for the Italian coffee company which directly correspond to the painting on the 2nd floor.
As in his previous large-scale works where Lin creates sensual spaces of social interaction, Lin's work here again emphasizes the physicality of the audience by incorporating coffee, desserts, and cool air. Lin constructs a social sculpture where the street vender, Italian coffee, and design come together to disturb the defined functions of the exhibition space by way of introducing street commerce, business, and desire.
Voet's work title “As beautiful as the chance encounter on a gallery wall of a painter and a drill hole” alludes to the well known phrase “As beautiful as the chance encounter on an operating table of an umbrella and a sewing machine” by Comte de Lautréamont (1846-1870), the first and foremost of Surrealism's literally precursors. It is about the memory of the space, exhibiting and producing images, contradictions and absurdity, and our need for soothing images, desire and imagination.
Voet starts the work with a very common act that many artists usually do before setting up their works, which is filling the holes on the gallery walls made to suspend artworks in the previous exhibition, followed by drilling new holes on the walls to make a new show. The only difference Voet will make in this routine work is filling the holes and damages on the walls with colored plaster so that the marks that the previous art or artists left behind become highlighted instead of being erased. By using the colored plaster, the “renovation” becomes cheerful and at the same time magnifies existing blemishes on the walls and thus the history of the space.
Voet then drills new holes, not to suspend images, but to make new images by piercing the wall, similar to a tattoo needle piercing the human skin. The images taken from tattoo designs, a pin up girl and a palm tree that belong to a subculture representing their desires, dreams, and fantasies are used to mirror our desire to ornament our walls with paintings and works of art.
The present work “As beautiful as the chance encounter on a gallery wall of a painter and a drill hole” refers to an earlier work “Stardust,” where she created a large graffiti made of gingerbread and sugarcoated cookies that mimicked the existing graffiti's on the exhibition site. By conflating youth culture and the fairy tales genre of literature Voet point to the similarities of the two, both of which provide a means to overcome our restricted and mundane life.
“The Earth is Flat” can also be referred to as a relevant past work, where she interrupted the historical context of an abandoned chapel that had been built by a convent prohibiting ornament, by gluing multiple copies of a poster of clouds on the ceiling. By creating an illusionary classical ceiling painting of the heavens with posters hung askew, Heidi Voet orchestrates a collision between our expectations and reality. |
