Double Square 双方藝廊

Double Square Gallery presents Seize the Life: Contemporary Writing and Painting starting from May 28 to June 25. The exhibition is curated by curator Su Yu-An and showcases four outstanding Taiwanese contemporary artists, including Huang Hung-Teh, Li An-Cheng, Cheng Po-Tsung, and Lin Yi-Hsuan. A talk is scheduled at 3pm on June 18. Seize the Life displays how these artists have expressed and captured the ever-changing and flowing meaning or life through handwritten lines. The word, writing, is not confined to textual writing; it also refers to hand-painted, expressive lines that reveal the artists' thoughts and feelings of the moment. The painting of handwritten lines is intuitive and instantaneous, which enables its audience to straightforwardly perceive the painting's spiritual quality.

For the curator, the painting of handwritten lines directly exhibits the existence of life without words, revealing the present status of life to us through incredible brushstrokes, rhythm, and variations. What is the origin of art? What propels artists to make art? What is the status of creating images or painting? The handwritten line in painting differs from other media in that it more intuitively reflects an artist's thoughts of the moment and is expressed through the artist's hands. The instantaneity and intuitiveness disable the thinking process and allow artists to delineate a purer and truer realm. Human perceptive condition (perception and thinking) cannot be completely expressed through a singular logic, an image, or words; therefore, we often compose, inspect, and explore ourselves through writing and painting. When we revisit these manuscripts or journals, something always stirs inside, which could be the initial thoughts as well as the mark-making of one's "existence" or "creative work."

Judging from the historic context of Eastern and Western painting, the curator has observed that Western classical painting gradually formed a set of rules to precisely represent the seen world. As the modern art emphasized on the qualities of the body and writing, Western art has eventually become anti-visual, anti-painting, and even against existing knowledge systems. However, in Chinese calligraphy and painting, textual characters are ideographic. Writing, painting, body, movement, the subject, and the world is one and the same. Using the simplest ink and the most intuitive lines, artists have portrayed their understanding of how the cosmos operates and their own life. This exhibition showcases four artists from two generations: Huang Hung-Teh and Li An-Cheng were born in the 1950s, and Cheng Po-Tsung and Lin Yi-Hsuan were born in the 1980s. The directness and instantaneity of such writing unfolds their individual personality and painting characteristics while epitomizing the changes in the development of Taiwanese painting. A dialectic process of aesthetics is presented here—the dialectic process between Chinese calligraphy and painting, the transformation and transition of Western art, and the self and existence of the artists.

Born in Taipei in 1977, Su Yu-An holds a BA in Fine Arts from National Taiwan University of Arts, and is currently a PhD student in Fine Arts at Taipei National University of the Arts. From studying artistic creation to being a curator, Su simply hopes to show people artworks that are rarely seen. People have not seen them not because they are rare, but that they exist in our everyday life, and we have grown accustomed to them. However, each one of us is capable of discovering and creating because every person and each moment is unique. Such as a photograph taken at a random moment, words jotted down, or some everyday scenes that flashed by could all become the most valuable and irreplaceable things when they are picked up in the future. Su has curated Drawing Now (Hong-Gah Museum) in 2011, and co-curated Weak Painting with Chang Ching-Wen (Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts) in 2009.