Steel Romance

Exhibition Description

The “Iron Man” series has been the research direction of my personal creative journey over the past decade, as well as the most iconic collections of my metal expressions.This artwork as a symbol is to describe the social culture nowadays by using the steel material of the industrial field. Regarding to the subject of this series, people have a perfect vintage image of the muscle-man in an ideal: as a legend of the undefeated Vajra body in the Eastern Buddhism, is to mean that the people have a powerful body after the process of a practicing Buddhist. These serial artworks named “Iron Man ” are to imply the meanings as well as a strong, brave and fierce, unbeatable body in “Chivalric fiction novel”, “A fairy tale” or “A science-fiction movie” as a steel body.

The sculptural practice site derived from the image of “Iron Man” is where sculptural thinking of varying and changing sizes and images, duplication and differentiation, clustering or layering, and multiplication and proliferation, the nondistinctive appearances of “Iron Man” created using iron and steel as materials, and the image of “Iron Man” that emphasizes force and strength, continue to evolve and transform through a series of collections: Linear Iron Man, Scrap Iron Man, Iron Man Transformation, Colorful Iron Man, Altered Land, Altered Territory, Iron Man Ascension, and Iron Man Fossil. Each of these collections showcases different roles and contents, such as the meaning of art to existence; the various victorious gestures of resistance are the exercising of will and intention, triggering people to contemplate on the forms of individual lives, and another kind of potential of reversal through the transitioning and changing of different space-time. Thus, I have developed “Steel Romance” through contextualizing my personal artistic thinking. These inclusive artistic experiments respond to industrial development and modern civilization through both macroscopic and microscopic perspectives, and contemplate on the current status of the existences of nature, universe and mankind.

The “Iron Man” in “Steel Romance” perhaps no longer refers to the established notion of metal sculpture—is it not also an individual’s rational longing for the future development of industry, technology, and civilization? The vessel made of flesh for the projection of divine consciousness? Embodiment of the implication of emptiness? Or the on-going fable of the uncertain status of the universe?

Exhibition works