Solo Exhibition by Leo Liu
Missing Key Piano
Curator: Jian Tzu-Chieh

“Missing Key Piano” is a piano that will never appear in ITPARK. It is Leo’s, as well as the piano for performance at Dogpig Art Café in the past. I keep this piano in my mind because it carries the reason that the artist moved from Taipei to Kaohsiung to take care of parents. After his parents passed away, to vent his sorrow he bought the piano for ten thousand dollars in 1998 and founded Dogpig Art Café in 1999.

On Leo’s blog, the description about “Missing Key Piano” is mostly about the persistent fighting with this incomplete piano. The narration of his struggle with it involves the detailed record of laboring condition, which to a certain extent is also related to the relation between man and things. These relations, on one hand, as how enumeration method works, reveals Leo’s exclusive attitude toward building up archives, putting things into an unknown system; on the other hand, he nevertheless writes feelings into “the reason of thing,” as Leo once mentioned, “The piano is the object to which I articulate my feelings. But what I care is how I write feelings into an object.”

It is Leo’s first solo exhibition at ITPARK. As its curator, what I care is how I can write Leo, as an artist, into the exhibition. At the beginning, my intention was to offset the distance between the north and the south. In the past when I was in Taipei, Leo, as far as I knew, was mostly related to “social intervention,” such as “Walking School,” and performance art held in Dogpig Art Café, which was the center for social movements in Kaohsiung. When I worked in Kaohsiung, I started to realize the strength of Leo’s works. Of course, his works may seem to be not only personal but artistic, which is closely related to his “social intervention.” For instance, from “Soul Anti-Sysem Series: Into Love River Delta & Dark matter depicted” in 2012, we can see that it is an experimental creation -- reversing the traditional painting concept. However, his peculiar creation of reversed order holds stunning accumulation of weight and variety of information, including from his personal notes, narration, proposals and publications to viewing Yanchengpu from geological perspective –an extremely microscopic gaze of individual to a huge imagination of human. These works crystalize Leo’s thinking and artistic practice, as well as represent his relationship with resistance through an unusual way.

“Missing Key Piano” is a retrospective exhibition in which “Soul Anti Series” plays a very important part. We make these shown as works’ works in order to reveal the fact that, though these works themselves seem to be purely documentary, they nevertheless exist as substance, like a rock, being there stubbornly and silently. In any case, I am still expecting, whether the audience is familiar with Leo or not, that they can consider them original works. Upon these works that seem be silent, the social context involving is actually something always having stories to tell.