Double Square 双方藝廊

Exhibition online viewing room: https://www.artsy.net/show/double-square-gallery-ephemeral-scenes

Double Square Gallery is pleased to present Ephemeral Scenes, a group exhibition featuring five artists from Taiwan and abroad, including Long Chin-San, Marvin-Minto Fang, Cindy Ng Sio Ieng (Macau), Lin Chien-Jung and Youki Hirakawa (Japan). Running from February 8 to March 28, 2020, the exhibition combines contemporary thinking and diverse media, including two-dimensional painting, photography, sculpture, video and installation, and integrates traditional Eastern aesthetic philosophy focusing on one’s inner world and the external environment with contemporary expressions and approaches. The goal is to represent the thinking about humanity and nature, along with the cosmic view of life, embedded traditional Chinese landscape imagery while re-interpreting the tradition with new meanings characteristic of our time. At the same time, the exhibition continues the Light Year Project, an annual collaboration project between Double Square Gallery and Samsung started in December 2019, and offers a fresh and unparalleled visual experience of landscape with Samsung’s display equipment.

The mountain appears empty, not a person in sight.
Yet, the sound of human voices is uttered and heard. As ephemeral twilight deep into the forest shines,
Lush, moist moss is motely lit with specks of light. – WANG Wei, “Deer Enclosure.”

The exhibition title is inspired by “Deer Enclosure,” a poem by the Tang dynasty poet Wang Wei, who in this poem employs both the audio and visual perceptions to delineate the sensory experience of sojourning in the woods. His description of sound indicates the quietude in the mountains whereas the delineation of light a leafy, secluded environment. Utilizing the interplay of light, shadow and sound, the poet paints a landscape with poetry, presenting a picture with the scenery and sound in unison. The exhibition, on the other hand, employs expressions and forms of diverging media as a point of entry, extending two-dimensional landscape imagery in traditional Chinese painting into the three-dimensional space. By weaving and layering image, sculpture and installation, the poet’s state of mind and the artistic conception of the poem are unified to create a world of landscape that the spectator can freely traverse through; and as the audience is immersed in this poetic realm, an inner, spiritual resonance is generated. In the interstices of light and shadow, the audience can explore more possibilities of traditional and contemporary artistic expression.

Ephemeral Scenes gathers artists from different generations, who adopt the combination and transformation of diverse techniques, media and artistic language to portray the culture and spirit of landscape and present its imagery and what have been derived from this tradition through the aesthetic perspective of space and nature. Chinese pioneering photographer Long Chin-San replaces paint brushes with cameras to reshape the meaning of Chinese landscape painting. Blending Eastern spirit and Western darkroom photography techniques, he takes varying postures of cranes from countless photographs, and employs a seemingly unending process of developing, cropping and compositing to eventually create a photograph of “composite photography” that overflows with the poetry of Chinese landscape painting. Beijing-based Taiwanese artist Marvin-Minto Fan starts with nature to create his work, and converts his observations of environment and life into the new soul of lifeless trees. As the branches stretch and extend, they become a union of humans and trees, and their appearances subtly emit a tranquil yet resilient force of life, captivating the audience’s attention and drawing them in with nature’s poetry.

Macau-born artist Cindy Ng Sio Ieng mainly creates ink works that reinvent the tradition, combining contemporary thinking and diverse media to interpret ink art. For many years, she has endeavored in elevating ink as a medium to free it from the subordinate role to calligraphic writing and painting. With interdisciplinary and intermedia ink expression, she has found a unique method to show the distinctive nature of ink. Lin Chien-Jung’s work amalgamates lighting and sculpture to embody the indescribable things in life. He uses mimicry achieved with objects and environmental installation to reconstruct a model of self-projection. Using islets, rocks and light, his work meanders through the topography in flickering light, attempting to visualize an inner state. The work of Japanese artist Youki Hirakawa revolves around the preserved time and its vehicle, using various transformative approaches to re-activate the still time. He collects the now disused cellulose nitrate films from around the world and adopts a method of media archaeology reminiscent of the ancient art of alchemy to represent the disappeared history with digital modern technology, introducing an alternative visual landscape.