Double Square 双方藝廊

As humans, how exactly can we bridge the distance between our inner world and reality to coexist with Nature in a tumultuous and chaotic world? – Huang Lan-Ya

Double Square Gallery is pleased to present Wind is Blowing in the Forest / Lanya’s Botanical Garden, which runs from August 7 to September 18, 2021. An Honorable Mention recipient at the Taipei Art Awards, Huang Lan-Ya has much experience in conducting art residencies in Taiwan and abroad and has created multiple highly recognizable public art projects in many places. She specializes in utilizing media that are challenging to master and allowing materials to demonstrate their life through her creative work. By consciously and creatively adding her creative ideas onto recycled materials that form the core of her art, she unforcedly free the materials from human control and express a vividly organic force of life. As the life of her materials and objects is continued, they are also given fresh forms. This exhibition showcases works created by the artist since 2016, which include nearly forty works from two art series, The Forest and Inner.

Huang’s work originates from her experiences of visiting the botanical garden, based on which the artist transforms the serene and peaceful feelings evoked by rays of sunshine cascading through trees and breezes caressing tree leaves, lush greenery and her body into an exploration of the balance between human beings and nature as well as the creative inspiration of her work. The artist recycles and converts discarded materials she has gathered by adding thermoplastic resin and other materials unto unwanted wood to create new forms, giving it a new existence. For Huang, the core of her work lies in the distinctive value and personality of the wood she chooses. Building upon this foundation, she layers human labor and handiwork upon it; thus, the wrapped real life enters a new cycle of existence. Wind is Blowing in the Forest embodies the artist’s personal memories but also conveys her answer to the question about human coexistence with nature.

This exhibition features two series, The Forest and Inner. In Forest, the artist uses discarded wood as the structure of every work, covering the existing form with thermoplastic resin and colorful acrylic beads to reveal a vibrantly splendid new form of the wood and grow a fantastic realm filled with spectacular plants that collectively echoes the series title. When the spectator walks among the works, this fantastic realm can also be imagined as an unknown, life-bursting marine ecosystem. Nevertheless, whether it is a world under the sea or a forest in dreams, what remains unchanged is the vital force of life genuinely conveyed by the fantastic realm. On the other hand, the use of acrylic beads also reflects the artist’s feelings towards and how she finds comforts in female labor that she witnessed growing up.

In the Inner series, the artist combined discarded wood and thermoplastic resin with salvaged industrial materials and test tubes. With the varied states of organic life and inanimate inorganic objects, she creates tranquil scenes with low saturation colors and reminiscent of the depth of mountain forests in winter nights, reflecting a subtle, steady inner rhythm. Huang chooses conflicting natural and artificial materials and uses color contrasts to create a space of varied atmosphere. Then, she interweaves different symbolic meanings into new installations, showing the interrelations between human beings and nature. The series enables the audience to see the juxtaposition of fading and newborn individual forms—this is also her way of connecting and coexisting with nature after giving the matter much thought.

Huang Lan-Ya received her MFA from Taipei National University of the Arts in 2002. After graduation, she started a career as a professional artist and has run the “One Year Gallery” art project. During 2005 and 2007, she conducted art residencies in various museums and artist villages in the US, Belgium, Korea and Japan. Huang is also a recipient of the Taipei Art Awards (Honorable Mention), the visual arts grant of the Asian Cultural Council and the Public Art Awards (Creativity Award) organized by the Ministry of Culture. In recent years, she has created various public art projects in Taiwan and abroad, such as Fractals Dancing installed at the Kaohsiung Science Park in 2014; The Forest at Midori Clark Hotel in the Philippines in 2016; and The Nest at the Taipei City Public Housing of Wanhua in 2020. This solo exhibition marks her first collaboration with Double Square Gallery. In the past, Huang has held solo exhibitions in alternative spaces (e.g., FreeS Art Space, Heart Spot Space, etc.) and art museums (e.g., Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, etc.), showing her works in unique and brilliant ways in varying types of sites. She specializes in using thermoplastic resin to create her work and utilizes the concept of fractal and the characteristics of resin to shape and embody the organic inner worlds of individual existence. Her work demonstrates the interaction between and combination of artificial materials and the natural environment while displaying a contrasting yet harmonized beauty in the visual site.

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