text by Chen Sung-chih
How far is the “polar region”, after all?
I, like most of the people, have never been to polar region, and get the impression of the region from TV series, books or news articles. Like others, I do not think the remote land is anyhow connected to my life after all. Unknowingly, with the increasingly heated discussion on the weather issues, this progressively changing and disappearing land has led us to reflect on our existence of and change of life styles. What is “polar region”? I am not a scientist, and have limited scientific knowledge; as an artist, I believe that the topic of “polar region” and the spiritual thinking that it derives can reflect the myth that people’s pursuit is beyond nature based upon limited foundation. “Polar region”, here, is used as a satire, or a moral that returns to the basic nature.
Over the recent years, I have constantly explored these transient parts and the values that they bring through deep and remote circumstances of my personal life. I am used to choose many familiar rough raw materials and transform them into noticeable manmade windows through artistic creation. When these residuals become the scenery we stare at, a process is been introduced to abandon the “meaningful” intuitive “nature” and content perception. These incomplete fragments of “construction” and “destruction” discover the missing pieces in ordinary real-life and develop an inextricable complexity entangled between “form” and “imagination”.
“Polar Region—Chen Sung-chih solo exhibition” uses “polar region” to symbolize the distances that people imagine through complex combinations of various artificial materials (such as metals, mirror, papers, polystyrene, etc) to expand the vague boundary that human and matters coexist; theses compressed space-time miniatures reflect the ultimate possibility somehow strong or concealed behind low-limit materials during different process and from various angles.
Maybe deep inside our heart hides a piece of “polar region”; I try to put together every charming pieces in reality and also the lost territory of polar region with my intuitive heartbeat. Polar region can be an extremely beautiful and complicated place, may be also a terribly barren and simple field ground.
Polar region may be just the remote cold ends on the earth.
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