Double Square 双方藝廊

●Exhibition Worklist
●Curatorial Essay: Chen Ching-Yao’s Battleground Girls: Cultural Restoration of WWII Memory and Contemporary Taiwan in Unrestricted WarfareWritten by Chen Fei-Hao
●Artist's Talk

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Double Square Gallery is delighted to present Battleground Girls – Chen Ching-Yao Solo Exhibition, which runs from July 2 to August 13, 2022, and art critic Chen Fei-Hao has been invited to be the academic researcher of the exhibition. The solo exhibition is the artist’s second solo exhibition at Double Square Gallery since his debut solo exhibition at the gallery in 2019, and features twenty paintings and a video work. Chen excels at exploring contemporary social, cultural and political topics in a comical, interesting style. In the two-dimensional paintings featured in the exhibition, the artist utilizes exquisite, thorough techniques of realist painting to bring together motifs of anime girls, war, and current events to formulate his response to how humanity has been forced to stay prepared against wars during the pandemic. Furthermore, in the exhibition, the artist continues his signature approach to embed his visage into portraits of political leaders. From a humorous, absurd perspective, Chen’s paintings engage in serious social and cultural issues. In the gallery, it is like the artist is leading a group of girls to land on the battleground. The new video work, on the other hand, pays tribute to the female art master Chen Ching through image compositions and figure design. In order to ascertain historical correctness, the artist has had much discussion and planning with the academic researcher Chen Fei-Hao. Interweaving the historical and the modern times, the video images not only reflect the political situations of Taiwan, but also point to the fact that despite the time and background of contemporary society differ from that of Chen Ching’s works, the social atmosphere pressured by international situations is still similar.

The title, Battleground Girl, introduces a humorous, realistic perspective characteristic of the artist. In the two painting series, AK47 Girls Descending and Landing, girl soldiers wearing uniforms of white shirts and short skirts visualize a metaphor for satirizing universal social values and the so-called equal education. Mixing traditional painting techniques and the approach of illustration, the artist compares life to a war, and the girls falling from the sky construct a unique peeping perspective for the spectator. The upward-looking angle indicates the only way for human beings to observe the changes in the world during the pandemic when mobility is restricted. Moreover, being immersed in an environment overloaded with fake news and power struggle also prompts people to re-examine all sorts of absurdities and injustice around them. In the three-channel video work, Battleground Girl, the images of each channel correspond respectively to three paintings by Chen Ching – namely, Someday《或日》 (1942), Overlooking《眺望》 (1945), and a painting without a recorded title in historical materials. The three paintings by Chen Ching delineate women’s everyday life during WWII, and evoke Chen Ching-Yao’s imagination of the war while hinting at the perilous situations facing Taiwan over the years. The artist portrays the girls as students in the late period of Japanese rule in Chen Ching’s paintings, but adds a contradictory background of a modern city filled with high-rises, whereas the bomber airplanes in the sky are China’s Mikoyan-Gurevich fighters. Mixing past and present situations beckons at the fact that the minds of humans have always stayed prepared against wars. Facing current international situations, the cross-strait political dynamics, and the seemingly endless pandemic, the inhabitants of Taiwan perhaps also live in a war that never ends.