Situation of Existence: Contemporary Realistic Art in East Asia

Introduction

Artists' Profile

 

Chu-Hsin Lee

Chu-Hsin Lee obtained his MFA degree from Fontbonne University, Missouri, USA. He is currently a professor in the Department of Arts and Design, National Hsinchu University of Education, and the director of Yu-Hsiu Museum of Art. He has been a judge for Da Dun Fine Arts Exhibition, National Art Exhibition, Kaohsiung Awards, Hsinchu Art Exhibition, Nanying Award, etc. His works have been collected by art institutions, such as Taipei Fine Arts Museum, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Chimei Museum and National Taiwan University of Arts.

<Situation of Existenceincludes> Live Alone (I) and Live Alone (II) from the Old Farmers series. Along the way, Lee has witnessed the progress of Taiwan’s transformation from an agricultural society into an industrial one. Although the entire society has gradually shed poverty and enjoyed the ensuing wealth, it has simultaneously witnessed the disappearance of the farmers from an older generation. Therefore, Lee transforms his sorrow and helplessness in his paintings, in which the upper halves of the old farmers gradually fade into gloomy shadows as their familiar crops and plants cover their figures. Meanwhile, he deliberately emphasizes the hands and the clothes that symbolize their identity, integrating the relationship between the land and the farmers into an inseparable tie of intimate affection.

 

 

Seung-mo Park

Park graduated from the Department of Sculpture, Dong-A University, Korea, in 1998. He has had several solo exhibitions in London, New York, China, Korea, Taiwan, etc., and currently lives in New York. Specializing in using metal as his creative medium, Park creates realistic yet fantastic works through overlapping, interweaving, and controlling the spacing of lines. He had drawn inspiration from his travel and living experience in India as he observed the daily practice and meditation of the spiritual people and realized his own creative direction. Therefore, the constantly intertwining metal wires in his work symbolize the state bordering on spiritual practice and the investment of labor.

MAYA846 in Situation of Existence is a sculpture based on portrait photography and made with metal wires while incorporating the element of light and shadow. At first glance, the work reminds of a two-dimensional sketch; however, taking a closer look, one could see how the artist has captured the interplay between light, shadow, and the material with maximum precision while maintaining the realistic and unostentatious beauty of the metal material.

 

 

Christopher Cheung

Graduated from Ling Hai Art School, Hong Kong, in 1970, Cheung has been living in France throughout the years. His works possess a distinctive atmosphere of the East, and he excels in creating a surreal ambience. With delicate, realistic techniques, he is able to minutely delineate the clothing, hair, skin texture and shine of the characters. In his works, by employing symbols or metaphors, he elaborates on the experiences in life as well as questions and feelings towards life.

Mama Cheung Plays/ Dame Mang Tasting the Forgetfulness Potion is an artwork comprised of two pieces. The artist employs the Chinese myth of “the forgetfulness potion of Dame Mang” to express his laments when facing his mother’s dementia; and the fact that Dame Mang herself drinks the forgetfulness potion in the painting seems to hint at a possibility of making his mother forget the suffering of illness and all the sorrows. Rainbow Mask is a self-portrait of the artist wearing a red headscarf; while the artist sits in nudity on the harlequin floor and stares into a golden mask reminiscent of his own face, a rainbow forms the mutual relation between the self and the object. Stigma portrays a man sitting in front of a seemingly oriental palace with his eyes blindfolded and hands tied behind his back with golden ribbons. As the work displays a surreal ambience with anachronistic displacement, it seems to voice the living experience of the artist being an expatriate in France whereas the gray hair reveals time’s unrelenting marks on his body throughout the years.

 

 

Chan-peng Lo

Lo holds an MFA degree in Western Painting from the Department of Fine Arts, National Taiwan Normal University, and has attended residency in Berlin and Los Angeles. The series, Wanderer in the Mist, follows the series, Ashen Face, in terms of the tone of the image and the atmosphere created with the silver-toned background. It marks the artist’s efforts in interpreting the current condition of Taiwan and Taiwanese people’s state of mind through artistic creation.

Wanderer in the Mist—Dining depicts the scene of dining in the exhibition which is a part of the Wanderer in the Mist series. In this series, Lo creates an epic narrative of Taiwan. As if adopting the structure of a movie trilogy, each painting is interrelated in successive themes; meanwhile, every piece could also be viewed independently. Each of the paintings in this series represents the artist’s reflection on the current state of the Taiwanese society, expressing how he has perceived this land’s history, politics, culture, and future. His feelings are expressed through his brushes, transformed into a small boat wandering in the mist as it is unable to see clearly the past as well as the future and could only float in an unanchored state.

 

 

Jung-woong Lee

Lee is a member of the Korea Art Association, and has won the Special Selection Prize in Korean Great Art Exhibition in 1985, 1992, and 1993. Active in the international art scene, in addition to having held over twenty solo exhibitions, during 1996 to 2005, Lee attended Start Art Fair in France, ARCO Art Fair in Spain, NICAF in Japan, and consecutively participated in the Shanghai Art Fair in five years.

Jung-Woong Lee’s Brush series combines the artistic expressions of “Performance Art - Abstract Art – Realism.” In his works, he not only integrates the rational perspective of Western painting and the sensibility and style of freehand brushwork in Eastern painting, at the same time, Lee also uses succinct structures of images to convey the profound air of Zen. On traditional Korean paper, Lee depicts ultra-realistic brushes, corresponding to the brushstrokes of calligraphy. His works have received critical acclaims around the world because of the intense dialogue embedded in the works. Viewing his works from a distance, one could appreciate the astounding momentum of the splash-ink; and when taking a closer look, one would be amazed by the artist’s skills of delineation and the perfect arrangement of a balanced image, which is the artistic expression achieved with utmost mastering of power and aesthetics.

 

 

Chien-chung Liao

Liao graduated from the Department of Fine Arts, Taipei National University of the Arts. After finishing the military service, he and the other five artists formed the contemporary art collective “Nation Oxygen”. In recent years, Liao calls his artistic theme by the name of “Surface Engineering,” with an attempt to satirize the hypocrisy of the so-called artistic authenticity through the approach of mimicking the appearance of real objects.

His Forklift Truck in seems like a machine in use in the middle of installing an exhibition. Liao creates a large machine in realistic ratio and size but has no actual function whatsoever; it seems to be “dealing” with a stone sculpture, of which its authenticity remains undetermined. The entire scene is actually a pseudo-reality constructed by the artist. Through this work, he continues to ask the audience an essential question, “the lifelike, realistic objects (artworks) one sees in the museum might not be what one perceives at the moment. What is the essence of art, then?”

 

 

Siuan Yu

Graduated from Fu-Hsin Trade and Arts School in 2002, Yu has won the Selection Prize of the 7th Japan International High School Arts Award. The visual elements of love, regrets and desolate beauty are often seen in Yu’s work. In his opinion, desolate beauty comes from the combination of the desolate and the beautiful. “Beauty” exists because of love; if love were to be removed, beauty would be lost, leaving only desolation and sorrow. As for imperfection, damage and death, through individual aesthetics and philosophy, they could be re-interpreted meaningfully to state the aesthetics of imperfection, making it different from loss.

Two sets of Yu’s works, Iron Curtain and The View of Greenhouse, are presented in the exhibition. He extends the two-dimensional realistic painting to the three-dimensional form. The seemingly ordinary metal material is actually collaged and painted by the artist. He intentionally creates the sense of contradiction between the frail and the strong; withering butterfly wings and damages metal parts are sealed in what seems to be the Petri dishes from laboratories, displaying a dialogue between the strong and the soft. The unreal world reflects Yu’s aesthetics of desolate beauty, surfacing as frozen fantasies in front of the eyes of the audience.

 

 

Pei-chen Yang

Yang graduated from the Department of Fine Arts, Taipei National University of the Arts, in 1999, and studied and lived in Spain from 1999 to 2003. In 2001, he was awarded the Excellence Prize of ELISA International Sculpture Award in Spain. He obtained his PhD degree in Fine Art in Sculpture from Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain, in 2014.

Yang’s sculpture does not simply recreate the form and texture of its objects; instead, his work embodies the transferring process of certain meanings from one material (the object) to another material (wood). The six sculptures in the exhibition are Leather Jacket No. 3, Leather Jacket No. 4, Leather Jacket No. 5, Leather Bag No. 4, Leather Shoes and High Heels. Each of the works is entirely shaped from one single piece of wood, and painted with grease paint by the artist. Yang aims to “realistically depict” the objects easily found in the everyday life and to speak the stories of the characters through these objects, allowing the audience to explore the cultural meanings about memory and time by themselves.

 

 

Chao-liang Shen

Born in Tainan, Taiwan, in 1968, Shen received his MA degree from the Graduate School of Applied Media Arts, National Taiwan University of Arts. He used to work as a newspaper photojournalist, deputy chief photographer, artist-in-residence at National Central University, and was the convener of the Photo Portfolio Review Project in Young Art Taipei. At the moment, in addition to his work in feature photography, criticism and research, he is also an assistant professor at both National Chengchi University and National Taiwan University of Science and Technology.

The series of works, STAGE, are created during 2006 to 2014 as Shen travelled and photographed around Taiwan. Representing this unique industry and its rich cultural message with unrestrained imagination and iridescent, totemic images, the artist hopes to encourage the public’s comprehension and imagination of this special industry and entertainment culture in Taiwan, both in the temporal and the spatial aspect in its vastness and depth as well as in the two-dimensional form and its three-dimensional structure. Meanwhile, in the STAGE series, combining a traditional, straightforward form and the contemporary language, Shen’s visual delineation that emphasizes on the current social and cultural condition in Taiwan provides the audience another possibility and focus in examining the development of Taiwanese contemporary photography.

 

 

Han-ching Lee

Lee obtained his MA degree from the Department of Arts and Design, National Hsinchu University of Education in 2014. He grew up in the 90s when the culture of animation and comics started to boom. The pictorial strips in comic books not only displayed the matured skills and fluent styles of each comic artist, the exaggerated actions and storylines also became the object of Lee’s admiration and his creative nutrients. On top of imitating the characters in the comic books, he started to create his own stories, which have gradually become the key elements in his works.

Three works from the series, Between Collecting and Treasuring, are exhibited in . The images of the works are filled with the artist’s Gundam capsule toys collected throughout the years as well as the Lego toys carefully kept since his childhood. One day, inspiration struck, and he started to bring back and preserve the joy brought by these toys through painting. As a result, he recreated the random placement of the toys that filled the entire images. From a distance, they look like miscellaneous blocks filled with colors; viewing closely, one can appreciate individual characters embedded in the paintings. In artistic creation, through painting the cherished objects, the artist is able to escape the frustration and pressure in reality, submerging in this private time and space and transforming himself into one of the characters to travel in his own collection.

 

 

Yoshihiro Suda

Graduated from Tama Art University in 1992, Yoshihiro Suda has held solo exhibitions at Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, The National Museum of Art, The Contemporary Museum in Honolulu, Chiba City Museum of Art, etc. Born in Yamanashi at the foot of Mt. Fuji, Suda grew up in an idyllic environment of nature. After leaving his hometown to study in Tokyo, the bustling city with its fast pace made him nostalgic of the countryside and tranquil life of his childhood. The flowers and grass on the roadside or in the corners were often the objects of his observation. His depiction of the plants in equal ratio and the minute detailing all reflected his subtle attention and affection towards the delicate existences.

In order to create a dialogue with the fair-faced concrete architecture that houses the exhibition, Suda took a special trip to visit the museum in advance, investigated the corners that were easily overlooked, and designed how his three wooden sculptures, Morning Glory, Weeds, and Leaf, could be installed. Suda is good at positioning his works subtly at an abandoned place or in an accidental crevice. The powerful force of life embodied by the individual tiny plants demonstrates the will of survival despite their petite size. Through the contrast of the microcosm and the space, a dialogue between the real and the unreal is achieved.

 

 

Keisei Kobayashi

In 1964, Kobayashi graduated from International Design Institute, Kyoto, Japan, specialized in visual communication design; he is currently a professor of printmaking at the Department of Painting, Faculty of Art and Design, Tama Art University.

In recent years, Kobayashi has upheld the idea of “the simple is the best,” and carried out this concept in his wood engravings; this idea also represents how he approaches the contemporary society. In his opinion, the modern social condition is rather complex as the factors in making any judgments have become more diverse. While everyone lives in a chaotic, uncertain state, people are prone to scorn the approach of realistic art that is time-consuming and carried out steadfastly. Modern people live in a technologically advanced society, which often makes them forget that “human being is just a tiny part of the entire ecosystem” and continue to live ignorantly in the illusion of “being the ruler of the world.” In the past, people embraced nature, diligently plowed the field, and co-existed with the flora and fauna in nature. Such a simple lifestyle should indeed never be forgotten! Therefore, through his wood engravings, Kobayashi hopes to offer the reflection and appreciation of the tranquil mind and the symbiosis of all living beings.

 

 

Riusuke Fukahori

Fukahori graduated from the Department of Media Design, College of Arts, Aichi University of the Arts, Japan, in 1995. A number of years ago, the passing of his beloved goldfish inspired the artist to realistically document the swimming of goldfish along with their living traces through the techniques of three-dimensional painting. The uniqueness of Fukahori’s work lies in his creative processes. He first pours transparent resin into a container; after the surface dries, he starts painting from the bottom level and works his way upward; with multiple layering, he is able to create lifelike, swimming swarms of fish.

The series, Four Tubs, displayed in the exhibition includes the swarm of red goldfish created with free strokes, Nikikogane, the blue-striped goldfish with a moonlight shine on the back, Gekkou, the white-bodied, red-headed goldfish reminiscent of sanguineous flowers in snow, Settan, and Kusakage, which shows the artist’s first attempt in depicting the interaction between water plants and goldfish. The forms of the goldfish in Gekkou and Settan are imagined by the artist, so they are breeds to be found in the current market. Meanwhile, Fukahori has been constantly challenging himself in artistic creation, overcoming the difficulties in constructing the image and perfecting the techniques of painting from a bird’s eye view.

 

 

Ho-chung Ku

Ku obtained his BFA degree in Western painting from the Department of Fine Arts, Chinese Culture University in 1990, and received his MA degree from Taipei National University of the Arts in 2003. In 1997, Ku was awarded Honorable Mention from the 4th Annual Paris Prize in Taiwan; in 2010, he won the Chinese Literature and Art Award in the oil painting category. In his work, one often sees detailed delineations of still life. Through direct, realistic depiction of objects, he expresses his understanding and philosophy of life through his paintings.

Underlay, one of the two displayed works in the exhibition, portraits a glass vessel filled with egg fruits in ripe color and luster. In his mind, all fruit or food has a cycle of life; and observing its condition from its beginning to the end is like experiencing a journey of life. Therefore, through his work, Ku hopes to convey the most precious wisdom of life—things would be matured and enriched only after the refining of time. Boundless Sound depicts a state of unison of the self and things. For Ku, the connection between the subject and the object could definitely be forged through following and cultivating the idea of “the unison of man and the universe” or the idea that “all living beings are sentient.” Consequently, an object depicted in his still life painting (the work itself included) is both a substance and a bearer of the spirit, and the two things consequently become one.

 

 

Chang-kyum Kim

In 1994, Kim received his MA in sculpture from Accademia di Belle Arti di Carrara, Italy, and continued his study in Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany, the next year. He has had exhibitions in the United States, Germany, China, Japan, Korea, etc. In Kim’s work, one often sees the objective existence of real space subtly integrated with virtual digital image, creating illusory visual and audio experience for the audience. He continuously pursues and explores the relations between the existence of things and digital image while combining his efforts with his understanding of contemporary creative media and art.

Water Shadow—Four Seasons is Kim’s video documentation of a puddle on a hill near his home; the audience can see in a large stone basin the changes of the four seasons, the sky, and the reflection of passers-by. Occasionally, there are even ripples on the surface of the water. With projection on real object, the artist is able to combine his video and the object, fashioning a simulated stone basin of illusion and fabricating the surrealistic out of the realistic to create a fantastic time and space of illusion.

 

 

Jui-fu Hsu

Obtaining his MFA from the Graduate School of Fine Arts and Crafts Education, National Hsinchu University of Education, in 2009, Hsu specializes in creating his artworks with the simplest media, such as pencils and charcoal pencils. includes four of his works, Symbiosis-2, Symbiosis-3, Mountainscape-2, and I Am, in Front of the Mountain-2, which all contain elaborate drawings of the symbiosis between flora and fauna. Hsu has been paying close attention to the decaying existences in nature and their appearances in high density. The observation of the amazing interaction between different species in nature and their silent communication form the origin of his art.

Hsu spends a great amount of time in the mountains, listening to the incessant chirping and chittering in the woods and immersing himself in the wonderful feelings in realizing his co-existence with all the animals and plants. When he paints, he also transforms the animal nature of human beings into a part of his artistic world through turning “the self” into spores or fungi that grow unlimitedly and unifying with all begins into one. His works are not simply documentation of his observations, but also the manifestation of the subconscious.

 

 

Ming-chang Huang

Ming-Chang Huang obtained his degree in oil painting from the National School of Fine Arts in Paris in 1984. In 2000, he was invited to participate in Exhibition of 21st Century Chinese Oil Painting in Shanghai and Beijing. He also participated in the 55th Venice Biennial in 2013.

Art critic Chien-Hui Kao once said, “With his reverence of the traditional, classic beauty and reflections about the modern life, Ming-Chang Huang has attentively achieved a surveyal mission of the era in the past twenty years, transforming himself into the only Taiwanese painter that simultaneously continues the poetry of local realism and attends to the grand structure and style. From the local realism that is usually preoccupied with a certain time and region, Huang’s work has ventured into the vastness of land and is free from the confinement of time…. His local realism is no longer a slice of the space captured by the camera lens; it is the local imagery constructed with minute delineation and careful structure. As he inch-by-inch cultivates on the canvas with his sable brush, he intends to capture the tranquility in every inch of the image, resisting the disturbance from the outside world with illusions bordering on reality.” Art critic Chia-Chi Wang also spoken highly of Huang’s work, “Putting in the context of Taiwanese art, Huang’s Rice Field series and Sea View series have indeed filled up the gaps in Taiwanese landscape painting…. Ming-Chang Huang has formed a master voice in the history of Taiwanese landscape painting.” Master of literature, Hsien-Yung Pai, praised Huang’s achievement, “Among the Taiwanese local cultural achievements, the idyllic paintings of Ming-Chang Huang, “the son of Hualien,” should be ranked as one of the representatives.”

 

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