text by Chen Sung-chih
After five years, in this past June, I once again embarked upon a short-term residency program. The journey led me to Seoul, Korea, as I placed myself in a brand new alternative realm. The trip was not bound by any restrictions, with seeing and thinking being the two most important things for me to do on a daily basis. Adapting to a different life was not overly challenging, and I gained profoundly from the shift in state of mind, with a lot more received from straying away from my familiar place.
In Taiwan, most of us often let everyday details found in life pass us by rapidly. As I slowed down, I was able to discover many subtle and delicate types of scenery. As my mind was filled with curiosities and surprises, my imagination also began to soar. One day, I stumbled upon a flower sprouting from the crevice on a wall, and the encounter evolved into a pursuit for “another place”.
The title Another Place also symbolizes the removal of the tangible parameter from the intangible internal realm. As a concrete gap is eliminated from its preexisting place, a new perspective should also take shape in another place. The 2014 Another Place series continues from my previous approach of using mixed media to create expressions of material abstraction. Using the “gap” as a symbolic catalyst for life’s rise and fall, hope and dispersion are applied to fulfill life’s aspirations.
The artworks are comprised of imaginative everyday sceneries comprised of many cheap everyday objects, interior construction materials, and household textiles. By juxtaposing blanks with fillings, material dispersion and compositionality of meaning are exchanged and interconnected. Connected parts and also detached yet residual components are mixed together by the various approaches and materials used, with the audience guided on a process of re-compositionality of meaning and a transformation of emotional perception to visualization. Between tangible shapes and implications, reflections and contemplations about the applied materials, displays, and living space are sparked in the audience. If life is like a soap opera, Another Place is then a simple and ordinary script based on life, and the people on this distorted stage are induced to repeatedly recount intertwining everyday words of fiction and reality.
With life’s unknown, we seem to be constantly searching for a light at the end of the dark cave that is life. To me, to create art is to be able to enter into another place, away from reality. The Another Place in my art is a space-time that transcends reality; it moves in a massive darkness. If there is a beam of life filled with memories, it will ignite our energies formed by our spiritual consciousness and guide us through the cold valley of reality.
As we all yearn to find our very own “another place”, we should also strive to become an "another place” for others. This notion of another place is like that far away place that we are gazing at, and it also symbolizes a farewell to the place we are in.
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