Double Square 双方藝廊

Tsui Kuang-Yu
Born in Taipei in 1974, Tsui Kuang Yu graduated from the National Institute of the Arts (now Taipei National University of the Arts) in 1997. His works have been shown at the Venice Biennale, Liverpool Biennial, Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, Chelsea Art Museum in New York, Mori Museum in Tokyo, etc. Through his work, he explores the adaptation relation between human and society and attempts to establish a method to cope and redefine reality through actions and experiments that break the social standards of normality. The artist considers his actions a medium for estimating social tolerance. By revealing relationships in the institution, he conducts experiments to address the absurdity of the social values that people have grown accustomed to. Transforming the reality through interstices found in the everyday life, the artist is able to penetrate the institution or barriers of the environment to execute his estimation or demonstration, performing social interception with his guerilla-like actions and exposing more unseen relationships in the daily life and urban environment.

Chu Teh-I
Born in Korea in 1952, Chu Teh-I graduated from the Department of Fine Arts, National Taiwan Normal University in 1976 and from École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts de Paris in 1984. Chu has always possessed unique insights to the use of colors and the conflicting beauty of materials, and continued to boldly experiment with the sculptural aspect of colors and the spatiality of images. His painting displays interweaving negative and positive planes, producing a sense of rhythm in the visual space as well as an ambiguous realm formed by merging colors and layering acrylic paint. The special polishing technique he acquired as a working student in France enables him to harmoniously juxtapose different layers of image in a corresponding manner in the two-dimensional space, allowing his painting to be visually stimulating. The artist also attempts to explore the space that exceeds the flat canvas. The combination of emotive, pure colors and a precise, restrained form gives birth to abstract paintings that incorporate his experiences of both the Eastern and Western culture, transcending the limits of color and form.

Hsu Yung-Hsu
Born in Kaohsiung in 1955, Hsu Yung-Hsu graduated from the Graduate Institute of Applied Art, Tainan National University of the Arts in 2007. Hsu sees his own body as his creative instrument and focuses on creating a dialogue between body and artwork. He employs bodily senses such as perception, tactile sense, and the sense of pain to interact with the world in the pottery structure and construct his works. Through personally conducting elaborate, labor-intensive procedures, he is able to create the purest sculptural work. The constant constructing and deconstructing process transforms the originally thick and heavy porcelain and pottery clay into sculptures of extremely light and thin lines and forms, and creates the contrast that materializes the innovative perspective of Hsu's pottery work. Therefore, audience is able to witness incredibly "large-scale" and "thin" works rarely found in pottery. "Transcend life from life, artistic creation from itself, and life from artistic creation" is Hsu's artistic belief, through which he has engaged himself in an unending challenge of artistic creation, hoping to amalgamate life and art and turn a new page in his artistic journey.

Chen Wan-Jen
Born in Hsinchu in 1982, Chen Wan-Jen graduated from the Department of Fine Arts, National Taiwan University of Arts. He won the First Prize of Taipei Arts Award in 2006. In 2012, invited by the International Studio and Curatorial Program, he conducted a residency in New York. His work has been exhibited in various museums and galleries in Taiwan. Chen uses video and installation to capture the repetitive, intermittent moments of blankness in life. With a sense of realistic painting, he carefully and elaborately combines digital images together, incorporating multiple elements to form his visual language. As human body is rendered as a flat, decontextualized symbol in an environment saturated with digital techniques, the artist aims to represent fragments of time in his work as detached, mechanical movement. He embeds his own metaphor for the social mechanism in the spatial movement of an enclosed cycle, and transforms various kinds of actions into a waiting ritual as if the act of waiting embodies the stagnant collective consciousness or behavior on an extended timeline, a futile and empty attempt forever suspended in the flat and endless flow of time.

Wu Tung-Lung
Born in Taipei in 1976, Wu Tung-Lung graduated from the Graduate Institute of Plastic Arts, Tainan National University of the Arts in 2004. He has conducted artist residencies in New York, Scotland, and Paris. Throughout the years, Wu has been exploring symbolic representation of organic forms and rhythmic arrangement of geometric lines in the art of painting. Using elements such as line, color, volume, and space to fabricate his own artistic style and producing unique surface texture through repeated brushing, he constructs solid and compact surface imbued with tension and sculptural quality. Carefully examining the development of his painting, there exists contrast of the opposite and integration of conflicts in different series. His rational images with pure and minimalistic symbols are filled with personal emotions. His canvas, processed by hands, reveals rich layers of monochromatic colors and visual penetration of different color tones. Underneath the tranquil, cold tableau lies a space for the audience to experience the succinct, elegant colors and to discover the corresponding relationships between the inner spirituality and the external world that the artist pursues.

Tao Ya-Lun
Born in Taipei in 1966, Tao Yu-Lun graduated from the Graduate Institute of Plastic Arts, Tainan National College of the Arts (now Tainan National University of the Arts) in 1999. Tao creates a wide range of work, including video, sound, mechanical installation, and light installation, and has always focused on human existence and condition in the age of information technology. In Tao's opinion, as the extension of human consciousness and body, technology pushes human thinking and physical reaction to the limit. His work is invested with dialectical thinking and philosophical reflection that are profound and provoke viewers’ thoughts. Optical fibers and media technology erase the sense of distance between people, depriving us of our consciousness and experiences of the real world as well as our awareness of the physical body. The being of art and humanity hinges completely on the visual illusions of perspective, which results in the disconnection of the mind and the body. Utilizing the versatility of natural light and shadow, the artist provides viewers an opportunity to explore the margin of self-consciousness and the utmost of philosophical reflection through interacting with his works, and expects them to gain enlightening insights into themselves as they stand in front of the flickering, ambiguous images.

Su Hui-Yu
Born in Taipei in 1976, Su Hui-Yu obtained his MFA in Fine Arts from Taipei National University of the Arts in 2003. His works have been shown in museums in Taiwan and abroad and collected by various museums. Su is fascinated by the complex phenomena arising from the entanglements among images, media, and the everyday life, and uses video to explores how mass media influences people's viewing of things and how people in turn project ideas and desire onto the media. Such investigation touches upon themes like the aesthetics of violence in mass media, the trance state induced by insomnia, fantasies in which illusion and reality intersect, and erotic and sexual innuendos about the female body implicitly or explicitly expressed in today’s cinematic culture. His subject matter is inspired by his personal experiences of being surrounded by the media. Tackling issues such as consumer culture, advertisements, state apparatus, terrorism, body of the self and the other, projection of desire, illusion and reality, etc., he delves into the world in which the media expands incessantly. Through combining personal dreams and social news, he redirects our attention to the judgment about sex, society, self and morality.

Isa HO
Born in Keelung in 1977, Isa Ho received her MFA in Fine Arts from Taipei National University of the Arts. Ho's skills in composition of oil painting serve as a fine basis for her photographic work, which challenges the documentary attributes of photography and adds a specific quality of storytelling for her audience. Through her continuous reconstruction and adjustment of the so-called reality as well as the approach of fabricated photography and digital composition, the artist explores modern people's compliance to and confusion about social values, forming her characteristic photographic language. In the manner of stream of consciousness, the artist unrestrainedly allows the fragments of her personality to act as they please, unleashing a series of doubts and conflicts regarding the correlation between self-identification and the stereotypes imposed upon women by traditional society. Accordingly, the female figures in her works sometimes are fragile and pampered princesses, and the other times are resolute fighters who defend traditions. Her very nature represented through rational thoughts more profoundly demonstrates a female artist's pursuit of the self in the waves of art.

Yu Siuan
Born in Taipei in 1984, Yu Siuan graduated from the Fine Arts Department of Fu-Hsin Trade and Arts School. He devotes a considerable amount of time to refine his admiration of beauty, hoping to capsulate eternity in visual experience. He uses extremely exquisitely realistic delineation to portray his Greenhouse series, which displays broken wings and fragmented objects combined with deliberately corroded metal pieces, creating a visual contrast between fragile and sturdy materials. The large and strong metal of rust is like an armored knight, protecting the delicate, ephemeral "beauty." However, the seemingly realistic creatures and objects are fictitious things created by the artist, who transforms two-dimensional painting into three-dimensional works, fulfilling his quest of aesthetics and the essence of life through sculpture-like realistic painting.

Huang Hai-Hsin
Born in Taipei in 1984, Huang Hai-Hsin graduated from National Taipei Teachers College (now National Taipei University of Education). She obtained her MFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts, and currently lives and works in New York. Inspired by events and situations in daily life, Huang captures the amusing and awkward moments and focuses on all kinds of intriguing plots or the theatrical atmosphere. With humorous, entertaining composition reminiscing of journalistic photos and substantial and straightforward lines, she portrays the life of a spectrum of ordinary people in this world and exposes the subtle and neurotic moments of absurdity that inform the interpersonal relationships of the times, politics, society, and family. Her work is not only a form of satire to the reality but also a powerful coup to modern people's worry, fear and detachment. The sense of anxiety from the image sometimes gives rise to a contrasting sense of helpless joy because there is simply nothing more to be done. Other times, it reveals a festival-like, collective escape that is accurate without being aggressive. Her black humor stems from a perspective of child-like innocence, enabling the viewer to gaze into the reality through a fun mirror that still reflects the world's cruelty in a way that is easier to accept.

Liao Chien-Chung
Born in Taipei in 1972, Liao Chien-Chung graduated from the National Institute of the Arts (now Taipei National University of the Arts) in 1996. In recent years, he has applied carpentry techniques, which he perfected in his learning of woodwork, to his artistic work. With exquisite craftsmanship, he vividly simulates the machines or vehicles often seen in the city, representing the texture and tactile quality of the original objects with realistic depiction. His work explores the ambiguous relationship between the simulations and the real objects. Whereas the original objects possess their functions and meaning, the simulations accentuate their symbolic meaning through the disappearance of functions. The elaborate and delicate delineations become a form of stubborn resistance, and the wooden material used in the work gives a sense of simple rebellion. From taking the works for what they might be to finding out the deception, the audience experiences a process that the artist aims to offer through the representation of the objects. He hopes to stimulate people to inspect the environment they have taken for granted and to talk about the life stories behind these simulated objects as well as their social implications.

Chen Ching-Yao
Born in Taipei in 1976, Chen Ching-Yao 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, especially those of the Japanese and Korean pop culture, and even the portraits of Asian 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. By doing so, he creates a strong sense of contrast to the original subject and produces laughter. 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.