Double Square 双方藝廊

Double Square Gallery is delighted to present Chen Ching-Yao’s solo exhibition, AK Girls and Panzer, which opens on February 23, 2019. Chen is the proud recipient of the First Prize of Taipei Arts Award, the Asian Cultural Council’s grant and the Taiwan Emerging Art Award. Chen creates photography, painting, installation and video to explore contemporary political and cultural issues in a humorous, amusing way. Continuing his long-term focus on political and cultural landscape, his solo exhibition will showcase large-scale painting series featuring girl army soldiers, AK47, the portrait series featuring political figures, Dear Leaders, and the photography series, National Geographic Channel. By turning himself into the prominent figures in his works, the artist unfolds his serious and thought-provoking social and cultural viewpoints through his seemingly comic, nonsensical imagination, ushering audiences into a personal world of fantasy. The exhibition will run until the 6th of April.

The exhibition title, AK Girls and Panzer, is inspired by the girl army soldiers in the painting series, AK47. Chen’s work has revolved around political and cultural scenes. His Dear Leaders series adopts the form of traditional painting and combines the artist’s image with portraits of Asian political figures, revealing images or gestures that are highly comical and satirize the myth and worship of political figures in Asian culture. Deriving from his mocking portraits of historic figures is the army of girl soldiers featured in AK47, inspired by famous Japanese idol girl group, “AKB48.” For the artist, such an idol girl group somehow reminds him of a military group, triggering his imagination to associate popular culture with authoritarianism. Dressed in white shirts and short uniform skirts, the girl army becomes a symbol mixed with Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese elements; and by appropriating popular culture and downgrading power symbols, the artist expresses a sense of irony against contemporary society and invite his audiences to re-examine the absurdities born out of various actions that aim to grab powers in our surrounding. In the series, entitled National Geographic Channel, Chen imitates the filming angles of Western adventure TV programs and investigates Taiwan’s hunting culture in the early days. Conducting explorations in an ancient manner within modern, man-made settings, the artist brings our attention to the culture stemmed from a colonial past. Traces of invasion and impact of foreign cultures, along with the consequent discordances, are captured and expressed in the works. Such conflicts, moreover, reflect those existing in contemporary society. Audiences can also observe how the artist employs cosplay and popular cultural elements in his photographic works. The figures’ gestures, their costumes, the lighting and the design of the settings create lighthearted and humorous tableaus, transporting spectators into an absurd yet intriguing world of fantasy.