Double Square 双方藝廊

Double Square Gallery is delighted to participate in the 2023 Art Taipei and present our exhibition at booth D11 at the Taipei World Trade Center Exhibition Hall 1, which runs from October 20 (Fri.) to 23 (Mon.), 2023. The exhibition features six artists, namely, Cynthia Sah, Hui-Yu Su, Ching-Yao Chen, Yen-Fu Kuo, Hai-Hsin Huang, and Jo-Mei Lee, and showcases their brilliant works of various media, including two-dimensional painting, sculpture, video, and installation. Themed on “Polyphonic Narrative,” the exhibition transforms the idea of polyphonic music into a visual language. “Polyphony,” a term borrowed from music theory, refers to a combination of two or more tones or melodic lines played simultaneously. In a similar way, the exhibition merges diverse forms, media, ideas, and viewpoints, and composes the perfect harmony of individual works to create a piece of mellifluous and vibrant visual music.

Cynthia Sah excels at utilizing solid white marble to create fluid rhythm that unveils the unique inner force of life in the corresponding relations between stone and space. Interpreting minimalistic aesthetics with simple and fluid lines, her works display distinctively refined changes of texture, which reflects the serenity and equilibrium discussed in Eastern philosophical thinking. Su Hui-Yu contemplates on the potentiality of video through exhibition, performance, and installation to extensively demonstrate the interrelations and interaction between mass culture, the media of film and television, and body. In recent years, he has employed the approach of “re-shooting,” a common approach used in the film industry, to revisit the unfinished, the banned, and misunderstood people, events or things in the past. From an ideological perspective, his work engages in the discourses about identity and cultural conflicts, prompting the audience to reflect on contemporary social phenomena.

Chen Ching-Yao’s work revolves around political and cultural issues. Utilizing superb techniques of realist painting, he incorporates scenes of Taiwan in wartime and the modern times into his works, or combines his own images with portraits of political figures, using the past to satirize the present in a humorous way to explore real phenomena in contemporary society, while hinting at Taiwan’s political situations. Kuo Yen-Fu’s work immerses the spectator in a colorful palette and an air of freedom. Bold and unrestrained in style and technique, his painting moves between the abstract and the figurative. Drawing inspiration from deeply felt childhood memories and life experiences, he delineates the memories perceived from the present in painting through capturing the frozen moments in time, reminiscing about the past while depicting shared memories of our time.

Huang Hai-Hsin’s work is inspired by everyday living situations, and selects special moments that are funny and embarrassing. Creating composition in the style of news photos with succinct and unpretentious lines, she portrays the survival scenarios of a range of ordinary people, mixing a sense of black humor and child-like innocence to expose the absurd instants in our interpersonal relations. Her work not only satirizes reality, but also touches upon the angst and aloofness of modern people. Lee Jo-Mei is fascinated with the unadulterated beauty and life force of mountains, rivers, trees and plants in nature. Based on her minute observations in everyday life, she contemplates on the subtle yet disrupted connections between life and sensory perception, and reshapes everyday interactions and reflects the disappearing time in a gentle, poetic way.

• Cynthia Sah (b.1947) was born in Hong Kong. She grew up in Taiwan in the 60s, and after receiving her MA in Art and Art Education, she moved to and settled down in Seravezza near Mount Carrara in Italy, starting a life of travelling between Taiwan and Italy. Over her more than four decades of sculptor career, Sah has obtained various achievements. She is the recipient of the First Prize of Chinese Modern Sculpture Exhibition and was featured in OPEN 2000—International Exhibition of Sculpture in Venice. Her large-scale public art projects can be found worldwide, and her works have been included in the collections of various prestigious art museums and honored in numerous sculpture awards, among which are Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Utsunomiya and Azuchi-cho in Japan, Polisine in Italy, the International Sculpture Park in Denmark, Venice and more. In recent years, she has been commissioned to create works for famous hotels, residences and corporate headquarters in Taipei, Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Macau, Mexico, etc.

• Hui-Yu Su (b. 1976) was born in Taipei. Su received an M.F.A. degree from Taipei National University of the Arts in 2003. The complex phenomena arising from the entanglements among images, media, andquotidian life is particularly fascinating to the artist, which is why he employs videos to investigate how mass media influences people and how the latter in turn project their ideas and desires onto the on former. His works have been exhibited at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, MOCA Taipei, Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Hong-Gah Museum, Double Square Gallery, Tina Keng Gallery, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, San Jose Museum of Art in California, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Casino Luxembourg- forum d'art contemporain, Bangkok Arts and Culture Center and Power Station of Art in Shanghai.

• Ching-Yao Chen (b. 1984) was born in Taipei. Chen received his MFA in Fine Arts from Taipei National University of the Arts in 2006. He has won the Award of Newly Emerging Artists in Taiwan and the First Prize of Taipei Arts Award. He was also the recipient of Asian Cultural Council's grant in 2009, which enabled him to conduct a residency in New York. In recent years, Chen's work centers around photography and painting. The range of his subject matter is very wide, and his work focuses on the deconstruction of power and symbols. He often appropriates symbols of popular culture, and even the portraits of politicians, and drastically recreates and transforms them into humorous, amusing images and behaviors, or simply assumes the roles of these figures himself in his work. His downplaying the symbols of power is undoubtedly a sarcastic satire against modern society. While making his audience laugh about the situation, he also aims to make them reflect upon the absurdity of different actions of power in their surroundings.

• Yen-Fu Kuo (b. 1979) was born in Taipei. Kuo graduated from The University of Taipei college of kinesiology Department of Athletics. Kuo’s inspiration comes from his daily life and feelings which influences Kuo’s works profoundly. For example, the memories of the video rental shop that ran by his family. He hopes to create a "happiness" world that wanders in the second dimension and enters the viewer's heart. His works were exhibited in the United States, China, Korea, Italy, France, etc.

• Hai-Hsin Huang (b. 1984) was born in Taipei. Huang received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York in 2009. She was awarded Honorable Mention in the Taipei Arts Awards of 2011. In recent years, she has presented solo exhibitions at the Art Basel Hong Kong, the Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig, Germany and the ISE Culture Foundation, New York. Her works have been showcased in the 12th Taipei Biennial in 2020, respectively presented at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum and the Centre Pompidou-Metz, France. Her works are included in the collections of various prestigious art institutions, among which are the White Rabbit Gallery in Australia; Leipzig in Germany; the Taipei Fine Arts useum; the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts; the UBS Art Collection; and the Yageo Foundation.

• Jo-Mei Lee (b. 1985) was born in Taipei. Lee’s practice is mainly based on sketches, paintings and three-dimensional sculptures. She looks to depict how we gaze on the texture of objects throughout the everyday experience to explore the sense of memory’s own landscape. From 2015 to the present, the artist has been focusing on the exploration of nature and materials. She loves observing plants and the mysterious notches or small cuts in plants to perceive the sense of time of plants from her own micro view. In this way, her artworks are presented with a particular poetic lyric.