Double Square 双方藝廊

Yeh Shih-Chiang (1926-2013) was born in Shaoguan, Guangdong Province, China. He was accepted into the then Guangdong Academy of Fine Arts in 1948, but left the school in 1949, planning to exile himself to the western part of China with his friends. However, due to the Chinese Civil War, they were forced to change their plan, and took the sea route to Taiwan, not knowing it would be a journey that took them away from China forever. After Yeh arrived in Taiwan, he had trouble earning a living. With the help of his mentor, Huang Jung-Tsan, he was accepted into the Fine Arts Department of the Taiwan Provincial Teachers College (now National Taiwan Normal University). Having survived all these changes in life, Yeh decided to live in seclusion in the 80s, and relied on teaching and making guqin to sustain himself. However, he refused to sell his handcrafted guqin to merchants but only to those who understood and cherished guqin, which was part of the reason for the poverty in his late years.

Cynthia Sah (b. 1952) was born in Hong Kong and 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 traveling 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.

Yang Mao-Lin (b.1953) was born in Changhua, Taiwan. Yang was the first director and a founding member of the Taipei School, in 1991 he won the first Art Creation Award of Hsiung Shih Fine Arts; his works have been shown in numerous exhibitions, including his first solo exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum; in 1990 he participated in the Taiwan Art Museum Exhibition "300 years of Taiwan Art"; in 1995 his works were included in the "Exhibition of Taiwanese Art" in Rome. Since the 1990s, he has criticized Taiwanese social phenomena under the long-term influence of American culture and Japanese culture. Then he added multiple-media in his installation work to respond to current Taiwan society. Yang has been frequently invited to participate in international art exhibitions. In 1999, his early series of Zeelandia Memorandum was shown at the 48th Venice Biennale and was well received by international art critics and collectors.

Huang Hung-Teh (1956-2022) graduated from the Department of Fine Arts, National Taiwan Academy of Arts (now National Taiwan University of Arts) in 1983 and has won multiple prestigious artistic and cultural awards in Taiwan. He is deemed one of the driving forces behind the development of modern art in Tainan. Huang's early paintings have large proportions of blank space, creating a majestic and flowing sense of space. His later work focuses more on writing. Through observing the appearances of objects and internalizing such observations, he is able to project his own life and emotion on different objects with literary brushstrokes full of emotion, and transform the present moment into lively but simple lines on wooden planks, paper boards, and bricks. Freed from his thoughts and painted with a sense of speed, his seemingly spontaneous and handwritten paintings are actually delicately and precisely thought out.

Hsiao Sheng-Chien (b.1968) was born in Tainan. In 2003, He received Yageo Tech-Art Award and attended the artist residency at Location 1 gallery in New York City for 6 months. During university, He had practiced traditional ink wash painting which focused on Buddhism, Eastern philosophy and concerned about the heart’s desire of human being. He has then transformed his practice to new media art after studying at Tainan National University in 1999. He is proficient at using electric sensors, computer programs and motor mechanisms which have designed and pre-recorded to tie in careful inter-logical for creating an atmosphere where audiences can interact with the image or machine. Attempting through the process of interacting, conducting and changing in the audiences’ mentality, he would like to confer and satirize the strange relationship within the civilized society nowadays, or express his ideas on hypocritical phenomenon. Though he always use complicated program design, electric sensor and image technique, he choose to use salvaged machine or electric component as material to create his work.

Tsui Kuang-Yu (b.1974) was born in Taipei. In 1997 he graduated from the National Institute of the Arts and has exhibited internationally since, including Venice Biennale, Liverpool Biennale, Werkleitz Biennial, Reina Sofia Museum, ZKM Center for Art and Media, Contour Biennial, Chelsea Art Museum, Mori Museum, OK Centrum. Tsui has been trying to respond to the adaptation relationship between humans and society from a biological point of view. He also attempts to redefine or question the matrix of the institution we inhabit through different actions and experiments that ignore the accustomed norm. His repetitive body experiments accent the absurdity of the social values and reality that people have grown accustomed to.

Isa Ho (b.1977) was born in Keelung, Taiwan. She received her MFA from Taipei National University of Arts in 2005. Ho is strongly influenced by her previous experience in oil painting, which leads to the rigorous composition serves as the basis of her photographic works, which challenge the documentary attribute of photography and add a flair of special charm of storytelling. The artist has developed distinct discourse of photography that reveals the conflict between the value of individual and society which causes the sense of confusion by employing the directorial photography and the technique of digital synthesis to constantly reconstruct and justify the so-called realities. The artist deliberately liberates the fragments of her personality, allowing each of them to act as it pleases. As unending as the stream of consciousness, the conflict between her identities and the stereotypes that traditional society holds about women are discharged from her works.

Chou Chu-Wang (b. 1978) was born in Pingtung, Taiwan. He received his Masters’s degree in Fine Arts from National Kaohsiung Normal University. Chou’s main focus with his artistic practice is based on the concept of “Home”, from the surroundings of Chou’s active surroundings to the birth of his beloved son, and further in-depth to the toys his son plays with, all the above became important essentials to the artist’s creative elements. Chou’s love affair towards age-old stones has reached the essence of meditation, and admittedly transpired through the strokes of his brush works on to his works, confessing every bit of sentimental collections from the artist’s lifetime. In the eyes of Chou, every aspect in life is memorable and worthy to capture, and he responds by creating these time-consuming works of art.

Moritz Partenheimer (b. 1979) was born in Munich, Germany. He is known for choosing manmade objects in urban environment as his artistic theme, through which he unearths the absurdities and surreal qualities lurking in quotidian corners. The precise combination of colors, lines, and structures in his work contributes to his detached, cool-minded style. The artist captures paired or constellations of objects, usually against a background of nightscape with artificial light, to portray a manmade landscape. In 2010, Partenheimer is awarded the LEAD Award at Deichtorhallen, Hamburg. In 2013, during his artist residency at the ISCP in New York, Partenheimer and Taiwanese artist Isa Ho collaborated on the art project, Westbeth.

Izumi Akiyama (b.1982) was born in Kofu City, Yamanashi, Japan. She received her MFA from Tokyo National University of Fine Arts in 2009. Akiyama’s drawings appeal a presence of the motifs. The artist is characterized by still-life drawings and the motif is usually white porcelain plate and pot, vase, candle, and curtains. Each work displayed at one and the same space will produce silent, slow, tranquil, and gentle time, directing a composed atmosphere in unity. By giving her drawings senses of flowing while making them very realistic, Izumi Akiyama at the closest captures the dualistic nature of the object and expresses it faithfully. Moreover, she is in pursuit of simplification of her works, stripping all the unnecessary information off, and the artist always reflects on an optimum harmonization of the space with the motif.