Convergence and Divergence Ⅱ

Exhibition Description

This exhibition continues the exploration of Convergence and Divergence (1). To push the dialectics and verification of my own creative principle further, it is obvious that I have dealt with the forms through more complicated processes, and created bolder experimental expressions. Although metal remains the main material, I have delved into in-depth exploration and interpretation of the languages and properties of various metals. Thus, I have used materials such as copper, iron, stainless steel, and aluminum, and paired them with other materials, such as granite, resin, acrylic, and canvas, to display the richness constructed by the material languages. I deliberately highlight and describe a kind of ambiguous temporal factors in the dialogue of utilization between symbols, presenting the temporal concept of synchronicity of the past, present, and future, and expressing a complicated and interwoven cultural scenery, as an attempt to probe deeper into the relationship between the human body and industrial scenario.

Thus, the exhibition space, which is 39 meters long, 9 meters wide, and 3.8 meters tall, has been planned, arranged, and decorated in advance, as I try to create a specific spatial site within personal consciousness, thus conducting a dialogue on the convergence and divergence between men and men, and men and environment, history, and nature; first, around the exhibition venue near the center, four stone pillars (300x60x50cm) in the traditional style have been erected; a metal sheet covers the top of the pillars, and at the center of the rectangular space encircled by the pillars is a 810x360cm floor consisting of 30x30cm stainless steel mirrors. On the mirror floor is a frame-shaped copper rectangle (320x20x120cm), and its four corners are supported by four granite stairways (30x30x30cm). The front and rear ends each features an incomplete human body welded by stainless steel parts, constructing the subject of the entire venue, while also showing the multilayered reflection on its material meaning. Around the entire venue are some other works, such as: in front of the venue is a child’s foot made of aluminum, which is trapped in a 30x30x30cm resin cube; the last display in the exhibition is a 270x270x40cm “Pyramid,” which is built by 45 30x30x30cm iron cases, each containing an industrial part, or a piece of a metal object. The work is rich in suggestive industrial symbols.

The above explanation is the main structure of the exhibits, presenting that there exists a kind of solitude of being in an industrial scenario between the heavy metals and symbols: a sharper humanist thinking between opposing symbols, which is built on the material tensions exerted by the medium itself. This power is not simulation of concrete body, but a constructive power that represents all basic elements of the physical structure, allowing our thinking to shift from real life to the state of pulsing prior to materials taking shape, thus disclosing the reflection on natural nature and industrial nature.

The industrial scenario created for this exhibition is full of opposing symbols, such as the linearity of the frame structure, the ancient style of stone pillars, the natural stone stairways, and the industrial quality of body; however, it has inadvertently revealed mythical imagination derived from an alter-like design, allowing us to revisit the past memory of history and re-propose how we should regard nature, and thus re-face the present. That is, these works have realized a kind of fantasy real perceptions, and the disassembly and re-assembly of represented memory, while also interpreting a kind of value emotion of human’s own existence.

Exhibition works