Curatorial Statement

Curator / Sean C.S. HU

In human history, many civilizations originated from places with entwining mountains and rivers. As culturally diverse country, Taiwan is a land of converging mountains and rivers with an artistic environment that promises abundance and vibrancy. The 2023 Next Art Tainan features ten winners of the award and fourteen invited artists/art groups from around Taiwan, bringing together their works of divergent creative media that engage in different topics and issues. With the award’s unique mechanism as the foundation, the Next Art Tainan takes place in ten art galleries/art spaces in Tainan and is presented through various context of dialogue.

The curatorial topic – Bifurcation of Confluence indicates the diverse issues concerned by the young artists, which demonstrate aesthetic ideas, generational viewpoints, as well as dissimilar socio-cultural aspects of the contemporary time. This multifaceted ensemble is an epitome that serves as a clue, reflects the reality, and points to the future. The process of its making is like peeling off layers, which grants a glimpse into the distinctive topics in the eyeline of the young generation and how these topics are addressed in their work.

While different meanings converge in the Next Art Tainan, interstices that promises the emergence of divergence also form in the process, diffusing endlessly into a wide spectrum of unpredictable dimensions of aesthetics. This process is echoed by the current mechanism of the Next Art Tainan, which fosters dialogues between emerging artists and those from different parts of Taiwan, opening up their creative systems that are still forming and evolving to various issues and forms while establishing the connection between art and society. Meanwhile, the Next Art Tainan also aims to inject new possibilities of references into regional and local art communities and the careers of individual artists.

The winners of this edition mostly start from visual cultural experiences, and several of them extend their creative routes from the “problems of art” based on artistic form and aesthetic sensibility. HUANG Li-Ying’s painting of peculiar stones exhibited at Mizuiro Workshop makes use of the reflective quality of graphite pencils to delineate various forms and shapes of stones, revealing metaphysical thoughts embodied by the works and perceived by the spectator. Japanese artist HIRAKAWA Youki portrays the gradual changes of light and shadow under a leafy shade with well-executed images, echoing the features of the exhibition venue and Huang’s paintings in form. Also dealing with the topic of “light,” HU Chin-Hsiang’s interactive light installation at Aglow Art Space technologically reflects on the relationship between human beings and the technological network. WANG Sean’s painting, on the other hand, revolves around the topic of halo, and visualizes the depth of the sky and nebulae through brushstrokes. Artist collective Connection deconstructs the relation between light and colors, combining light installations and performances to portray the different forms of six stages in life.

At San Gallery, an art space renovated from an old house, CHANG San-Hsueh’s painting responds to the large number of potted green plants in the atrium, and driven by the artist’s love and zeal for ferns, traces the geographic pathways of ferns in the glacial period. HUANG Lan-Ya utilizes vibrantly colorful acrylic paint to create a fantasy-based, splendid forest garden born from her imagination. HU Ching-Wen uses ink painting techniques to depict cascading sunlight on a residential balcony. The tranquil moments of light shining on plants, patterned windows, and tiles, reveal her personal states of mind and feelings. At Mezzo Art, CHI Pei-Chen uses computer graphics to integrate Taiwanese culture of street advertisements with images of European cities taken during her stay in France, forging an idiosyncratic landscape of urban jungles. LEE Yung-Chih attempts to dismantle the cityscape dominated by neon signs – an epitome of consumerism, molding an aesthetics of nostalgia that is alternative to changing cityscapes. At Soka Art, CHEN Po-Yuan delineates the rhythmic flow of contemporary ink art with new media, depicting varying climatic views observed an airborne airplane above layers of clouds. Known for his motorized mechanical installations, YU Shih-Fu’s work mimics an intermediary hybridization of birds and aircrafts.

In the present world of information explosion, we are witnessing the advent of a “post-truth era” dominated by social media and key opinion leaders (KOL). The internet culture is increasingly taking hold of the development of contemporary popular culture. The boundary between reality and the online world has become increasingly virtual due to extensive reproduction of images. This phenomenon is responded by GU Meng-Xuan’s work on view at the Asir Art Museum, in which the artist repeatedly topologizes the images of wars and disasters in the news and on the internet to imitate the macrocosmic perception conveyed by traditional ink landscape in the past. WEN Chia-Ning’s interest lies in the body shaped and molded by media images. Her work creates the visual focus through metamorphosis, fictionalization, and drag. At InART Space, new media art collective 2ENTER makes use of real-time data and image collages to fabricate an alternative, miscellaneous cultural landscape using game engine. On the other hand, TSAI Yi-Ju’s extracts signs from animation, social media platforms and communication software to create her painting, which evokes the stages of human life and the visual experiences afforded by different screen interfaces.

Continuing the exploration of the internet and information culture, some of the artists concentrate on the aspects of art, society and politics. On view at Der-Horng Art Gallery, YANG Jie-Huai’s work deals with gender issues and internet culture, contemplating on the ambiguous manifestations of individual desire and the hierarchy of power. TZENG Yi-Hsin engages with women’s viewing mechanism and the subject of gaze to inquire into the unequal gender and political relations. At Absolute Space for the Arts, CHEN Chun-Yu puts forth a hypothetical proposal in a humorous way as a parody of serious topics in contemporary society. CHANG Wen-Hsuan’s work imitates approaches used by lecturers of successology, which is a metaphor for the democratic political scene in the narrative of Asian countries.

Japanese winning artist KOMIYA Yukina utilizes the raised ceilings and elongated space of the Daxin Art Museum to display large-scale soft sculptures incorporated with Taiwanese and Okinawan cultural symbols, reflecting the scale of cultural integration in the context of globalization. Drawing inspiration from the globalized subject informed by cultural fluidity, three invited artists present their topics through respective forms. FANG Wei-Wen’s graphic drawing taps into his “place of memory” and converts the cultural codes encountered in his diasporic life experience into a flowing, unfixed world. CHUANG Pei-Xin re-encodes innumerous virtual visual images, transforming them into tangible “digital specimens.” CHEN Chen-Yu compares messages, objects and images circulating around the world to “vapor” and materializes this concept into a contemporary landscape of “chaos” comprising multiple objects.

The 11th Next Art Tainan – Bifurcation of Confluence showcases the ingenuity of twenty-four brilliant artists/art groups from Taiwan and abroad. It is hoped that confluence of the artists with dissimilar background in Tainan would bifurcate into heterogenous and diversified voices. Different from other art awards in Taiwan in terms of the design and implementation mechanism, one of the main objectives of Next Art Taiwan is to facilitate the connection between artists and the art market. Meanwhile, the award also aims to combine marketing and promotion resources of both the public and private sectors to unite the cultural energy from all fields with the history of Tainan to unveil the city’s urban aesthetic characteristics as a brand that bloom into respective yet equally outstanding exhibitions in ten locations in the city.