Double Square 双方藝廊

The Double Square Gallery is pleased to host The Still Point of the Turning World – Chen Wan-Jen Solo Exhibition scheduled to be on view from 22 April to 28 May 2017. This is Wan-Jen Chen’s new solo exhibition after a five-year hiatus since 2012. Dar-Kuen Wu, the director of the Taipei Artist Village, is specially invited to serve as the curator for the purpose of perfecting this exhibition. We expect to guide the way the visitors perceive the art world created by the artist through the curatorial statement and associated academic research.

Devoting himself to artistic creation, Wan-Jen Chen presents in this solo exhibition a whole new series of artworks that entailed a long gestation period. The large-scale projection collage that occupies the entire room faithfully reflects the artist’s creative energy. Following his consistent interest in looping images, the artist employs aerial photography for the first time in this exhibition, turning the horizontal perspective commonly seen in his oeuvre into a bird’s eye view, thereby giving his artworks an extra aesthetic dimension and a broader Weltanschauung. Such a perspective turn is a result of the artist’s continued self-inquiry, experiment and breakthrough over the past five years. This is the fourth solo exhibition throughout Chen’s career as an artist. He quotes T.S. Eliot’s exquisite phrases “the still point of the turning world” as the title of this exhibition, setting out on the quest of how the dynamic loop of humankind approximates the “still point” of time under the non-linear temporality. This is the main entry point into the ambiguous, non-narrative space created collectively by the artworks displayed in this exhibition.

Wan-Jen Chen’s oeuvre has focused on images having neither beginning nor end. In his previous artworks, the quotidian situations or the moments of devastation tended to go on and on in an endless manner. The content of these images lingered over the moments right before the events unfolded, prompting the viewers to be on tenterhooks and find it absurd at first glance. After careful observation, however, the viewers would notice the profound insight it yielded about the present. As far as the artist is concerned, every chance encounter carries specific implications. The figures haphazardly passing by in front of the lens of the artist’s video camera were captured as unknown characters in his artworks. In the time-consuming and painstaking creative process, the artist treated and named these figures with an indescribable sense of intimacy. They are not only deprived of their histories and purposes but also detached from their original characteristics. Nonetheless, they find their own positions and leave their traces of movement in the artist’s works. The viewers are immersed in the world harboring infinite possibilities, as if they live the day in an endless loop.

Born in Hsinchu, Taiwan in 1982 and graduated from the Department of Fine Arts, National Taiwan University of Arts in 2005, Wan-Jen Chen specializes in using videos and installations to capture the repetitive and alternating blanks in his daily life, which also formed the core of his creative philosophy. The artist tends to collage digital images in a meticulous manner as if he is producing photorealistic paintings. He also makes a perfect fuse of diverse elements and transforms them into the sui generis visual expression of his artworks. In view of the frequently symbolized, flattened and de-contextualized human body in the digitalized environment, the artist not only represents the elapsing fragments of times as objects in unapproachable, mechanical and repetitive motions, but also infuses them with attentions and criticisms insofar as to render the images oscillating amid reality and imagination. Moreover, the artist seeks to weigh these fragments of times and collect the pictures of every transient moment by filling the exhibition space with quotidian scenes.

Dar-Kuen Wu, the curator of this exhibition, is the director of the Taipei Artist Village / Treasure Hill Artist Village. He was the chief curator of Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei National University of the Arts, and the director of VT Artsalon. He has long been focusing on the generation and evolution of contemporary art and Asian cultures. He not only reflects on the social conditions of Asian countries with his unique artistic language, but also contemplates the ways to embody the philosophy of “art without borders” by treating art as a means under the impact of globalization and neoliberalism. In his long and prolific career as a curator, his recent curatorial tours de force include Republic without People (2011) which was hosted by the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts as well as the winner of the Jury’s Special Award of the 10th Tai-Shin Arts Awards, Asia Anarchy Alliance (2014) at the Tokyo Wonder Site and the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Boundless Treasures: Inexhaustible and Limitless at the Hong Kong Arts Center (2015), Roppongi Crossing 2016: My Body, Your Voice (2016) at the Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), and Taiwan Biennial 2016: The Possibility of an Island at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts.