Double Square 双方藝廊

Shih-Tai Chan
Born in Taipei, 1971, Shih-Tai Chan graduated from the division of sculpture, National Taiwan Academy of Arts (now the Department of Sculpture, National Taiwan University of Arts) and pursued advanced study at the Graduate Institute of Plastic Arts, Tainan National University of the Arts. He earned the Advanced Diploma in Sculpture from the Department of Visual Arts, Accademia di Belle Arti, Carrara in 2011. He was invited to stone-carving workshops held in Italy, Portugal and Hualien, and was awarded several prestigious domestic and international art prizes. His artworks are primarily stone-based with the appropriation of architectural symbols. By perfectly blending curvaceous details of sentimental warmth with extremely rational geometric lines or shapes, the artist clearly demonstrates the kernel of his artistic practice, namely simplicity and purity. Chan has been trying as much hard to achieve precise visual aesthetics in his artworks as in his life. He treats his art as the recordings of his life in a content and comfortable manner. In other words, he refines his art by virtue of his real-life experiences. In sum, he sublimates the solemnity of life and his emotions into his brilliant artworks, by which he earnestly searches for profound experiences in every moment of his quotidian existence.

Wan-Jen Chen
Born in Hsinchu, 1982, Wan-Jen Chen graduated from the Department of Fine Arts, National Taiwan University of Arts. He was awarded the first prize of Taipei Arts Awards in 2006 and invited to be an artist-in-residence at the International Studio & Curatorial Program in New York in 2012. In addition, he staged many exhibitions in art museums and spaces across Taiwan. He is skilled in capturing the repeatedly alternating blank fragments in his daily life with videos and installations. His one-of-a-kind visual vocabulary features an attractive combination of multiple elements and collaged digital images as finely as realistic paintings. Against the digital environment in which the human body is often codified, flattened, and decontextualized, the artist, by virtue of his artworks, represents the elapsing fragments of time as unapproachable and mechanical objects in motion. He evokes the metaphor of a continuous loop in a closed space to symbolize the social mechanism, transforming all kinds of actions into a ritual of waiting. It seems that waiting has become a collective consciousness or behavior along the elongated timeline, suspending in the flat and endless efflux of time with futility and nihility.

Chien-Ju Chia
Born in Taipei, 1984, Chien-Ju Chia earned her MFA from the Department of Fine Arts, Taipei National University of the Arts. She was awarded the Kaohsiung Art Awards in 2012 and her award-winning entry has been collected by Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts. Daily scenes have been the focus of her artistic practice. Treating the law of triviality as the point of departure, the artist attempts, through her artworks, to visualize the rich imaginations and delights people may find in their daily routines. This approach not only draws the viewers’ attention from the exhibition back to the circadian rhythms of their real lives, but also helps them develop their own ways of interpreting their own lives. Her works tend to show the connections between people and their lives with ordinary yet indispensable objects. The process of turning easily obtainable objects into artworks not only changes the objects’ monotonous visual quality but also creates a story-like texture of life experiences, which allows the viewers to stretch their imaginations beyond limited life experiences and to reflect on their quotidian existence in a relaxed manner.

 

Onion Hsu
Born in Yunlin, 1953, Onion Hsu graduated from the division of sculpture, National Taiwan Academy of Arts (now the Department of Sculpture, National Taiwan University of Arts). He engaged in image creation in his early career and later studied in Italy where he earned double master’s degree, one in sculpture from Accademia di Belle Arti Brera di Milano and another in product design from Domus Academy, Milan. The artist was awarded the grand prize of Modern Sculpture Biennial organized by Taipei Fine Arts Museum, and his award-winning entry has been collected by the museum. He has been often invited to exhibit his artworks in major art museums in Taiwan. The themes of environmental protection, life, nature and culture run through his artworks made of colorful plastic products and daily objects. He tends to humorously create a sui generis aura around the products of mass production and explore the materiality of ready-mades. His artworks represent an aesthetically pleasant blend of sculpture and spatial installations, which boldly break away from the academic traditions of material application, expressive techniques and formal thinking. In other words, the artist has blazed a trail amidst the artistic context and the folk culture, placing the viewers in an angle of vision which is familiar to them yet subversive at the same time.

Chao-Hao Liao
Born in Taichung, 1990, Chao-Hao Liao earned his BFA from the Department of Fine Arts, Taipei National University of the Arts, and is enrolled in the Graduate Institute of Plastic Arts, Tainan National University of the Arts. He was awarded several prestigious prizes such as those of New Taipei City Art Exhibition, Exhibition of the Newly Emerging Artists in Taiwan and the 2015 Kaohsiung Art Awards. He uses pulp to create simulated landscapes of Taiwan, be they the tetrapod commonly seen along the coastline, the retaining wall erected along a mountain road, the vegetation slope designed to preserve soil and water, or the Jersey barrier on the roadside. He tends to move the outdoor “spectacles” indoors, trying to simulate solid cement structures designed for protection with hand-made soft materials such as pulp. These ordinary objects made of cement have become a shield against the wrath of nature. However, the mottled pulp models and the visible wooden armatures collectively suggest their extreme vulnerability to the power of nature, highlighting the artist’s reflection on the precarious balance between human development and environmental protection.

Chien-Chung Liao
Born in Taipei, 1972, Chien-Chung Liao graduated from National Institute of the Arts (now Taipei National University of the Arts). After finishing his mandatory military service, the artist co-founded the collective “Nation Oxygen” with Jia-Rui Ou, Chih-Sheng Lai, Shueh-Meng Chiu, Chieh-Hua Yeh and Ji-Hong Lee. Their artworks have been on view in many art museums and spaces. In recent years, Liao has applied carpentry techniques he acquired painstakingly over the past decade to his works. By virtue of his uncanny, exquisite craftsmanship, his artworks vividly simulate the machines or vehicles commonly seen in his real life, presenting the texture and tactile quality of the original objects with lifelike depiction. He not only focuses on the ambiguous relationship between simulacra and realities, but also attempts to uncover the figures hiding behind these objects. By way of representing and reviewing these objects, the artist expects the viewers to trace or at least pay attention to the life stories carried by these simulated objects, and thereby arouses public concerns over these social issues.

Takahiko Suzuki
Born in 1962, Shizuoka, Japan, Takahiko Suzuki graduated from Tama Art University, Japan. Living in Taipei currently, the artist used to exhibit his artworks in the United States, Europe and Australia. The Global Store Project is his recent endeavor that contrasts local small stores with notable fast food restaurant chains. Existing in every town, small stores need not to advertise themselves because their customers tend to be the residents in the vicinity. What they have to do is to put up their store signs. On the contrary, fast food restaurant chains spare no effort to market themselves around the globe. The artist seeks to investigate “globalization,” an indiscriminately used term translated as “worldism” literally in Japanese. “The world is united and everyone in it is born equal” is the artist’s first impression about the term. However, in reality this is not the case. Against this background, the artist initiated the Global Store Project, trying to promote these small stores across the world. Adopting a standpoint of resisting globalization in the world notoriously prone to right-wing ideology, the artist attempts to break out of the encirclement of globalization by launching a series of transnational creative projects.

Sih-Chin Wu
Born in Tainan, 1985, Sih-Chin Wu earned his MFA from the Department of Fine Arts, Taipei National University of the Arts. His artworks were displayed at numerous exhibitions held in Taiwan, France, Italy and Japan. He himself was also awarded several prestigious prizes in the arts. When he was still a postgraduate, he tended to sample the figures, events and objects he encountered in his daily life, and then turned these samples into sculptures by treating “modularization” as the form of reference. The sculptures manifested processes and a narrative quality with a subtle touch of nostalgia and sorrow. The artist had stayed in Australia for one and half a year since 2013. The distinct life experiences and cultural shock he got there profoundly affected his creative approach. The focus of his recent artworks has been shifted on interpreting the living conditions of human beings and animals as well as their relations to the nature. He has embarked on re-creating the bodies of dead animals, thereby imagining the throes they had been in and transforming the bodies into the presence of still objects by reference to his personal life experiences. In this sense, the artist expects to develop trail-blazing vocabulary of art and to re-orientate himself in terms of his creative approach.