Living the Days

Introduction

Artists' Profile

 

Hsu Chun-Yu

Hsu Chun-Yu (b. 1996, Hsinchu) received a BFA from the Department of Material Arts and Design, and later, an MFA in Jewelry and Metal Arts from the Graduate Institute of Applied Arts, Tainan National University of the Arts. She now lives and works in Tainan.

Hsu is the recipient various honors and awards, including Young Artist Award (Selected; 2022), Tainan Fine Arts Exhibition (Tainan Award and First Prize in Three-dimensional Plastic Creation; 2021), Dadun Fine Arts Exhibition (Bronze Medal; 2021), National Fine Arts Exhibition (Bronze Medal; 2021), and the 22nd Huangsi Fine Arts Exhibition (Merit Award in Three-dimensional Craft; 2021). She has exhibited in various art institutions, among which are GALERIE PIERRE (Taichung), Tainan Cultural Center (Tainan), National Tainan Living Art Center (Tainan), MUMU Gallery (Tainan), National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (Taichung), and Changhua County Art Museum (Changhua).

Hsu make human the main subject of her creative work. In addition to the concrete images based on people she observes in everyday life, she also creates works that express her personal state of mind. Occasionally, some even embody abstract or metaphorical ideas. The intricate lines varying in thickness constitute the narrative threads in her creative work. The process of bending these lines – usually copper or iron wire – resembles a journey of organizing her relations with the external world. In college, she mostly concentrated on making works in the form of painting, which required her to use pliers to repeatedly wrap and fasten the wire. In graduate school, she started experimenting with large-scale and life-size works, using metal wires of different thickness to create more nuanced facial expression and folds. Meanwhile, she also started carrying recycled paper around to record everyday scenes as her material. She has also used techniques of forging to more unfetteredly depict her perspective and delineate the figures in her works in a neater and livelier manner.

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Kusofiyah Nibuesa

Kusofiyah Nibuesa (b. 1992, Pattani, Thailand) received her BFA from the Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts, Prince of Songkla University in 2015, and her MFA from the Faculty of Painting Sculpture and Graphic Arts, Silpakorn University in 2019. She now lives and works in Pattani in southern Thailand, and is a member of the artist collective, Muslimah Collective.

 

In 2015, Nibuesa was selected into the 6th “Young Artists Talent” project by the Royal Thai Consulate-General, Los Angeles. In 2019, she participated in the 65th National Exhibition of Art at Silpakorn University; and in the same year, she was invited to partake in the 15th Jogia Biennale as a member of Muslimah Collective. In 2018, she was featured in the first Bangkok Art Biennale. She has also exhibited at various art institutions, including the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, Delmar Gallery (Sydney), Gajah Gallery (Singapore), the Ratchadamnoen Contemporary Art Center (Bangkok), the De’Lapae Art Space (Narathiwat, Thailand), and the Andaman Cultural Study Center (Krabi, Thailand).

 

Nibuesa’s hometown, Pattani in southern Thailand, is close to Malaysia, and has been inflicted by military conflicts as well as riots and violent assaults resulting from cultural, religious, and racial identity issues. As a member of the non-mainstream Malay Muslim community, a discriminatory experience in Bangkok several years ago made Nibuesa understand that southern Thailand is still trapped in people’s stereotypical impression and different perspective. She then became determined to reverse the so-called mainstream narratives of southern Thailand through her creative work by foregrounding people’s lifestyle and scenes of everyday life from her hometown. Drawing her inspiration from her childhood experience and memory of visiting traditional markets with her mother, Nibuesa places her emphasis on the vitality she has felt from different communities as well as the connections and harmonious coexistence between them. She uses photographs she has taken as the material for her creative work, and her medium is mainly cardboard, which she puts through a process of cutting, stenciling, dying, puncturing, and weaving. When making her work, Nibuesa also incorporates other materials, such as tissue paper and mangosteen peel, to produce different texture and color tones.

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Photo provided by Taoyuan Museum of Fine Arts

Lo Yi-Chun

Lo Yi-Chun (b. 1985, Taipei) holds an MFA from the Department of Fine Arts, National Taiwan University of Arts. She now lives and works in Taipei.

 

Lo has conducted artist residencies at numerous art institutions, including Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (Australia), Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (Japan), Aomori Contemporary Art Centre (Japan), Soulangh Cultural Park (Taiwan), The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (U.S.A.), DordtYart (the Netherlands), BankArt Studio NYK (Japan), etc. She is the recipient of the Taipei Art Awards (Selected, 2021), the Taoyuan Contemporary Art Award (First Prize, 2017), the Kaohsiung Art Awards (First Prize, 2015), and the Asian Artist Fellowship Award (art residency at Vermont Studio Center, 2011).

 

She has held solo exhibitions at several art galleries, including Mind Set Art Center (Taipei), Galerie Nichido (Taipei), and Absolute Art Space (Tainan). Her works have been showcased in group exhibitions at numerous museums and institutions, among which are the Chiayi Art Museum, the Green Island Human Rights Art Festival, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Solid Art (Taipei), C-LAB (Taipei), the Tainan Art Museum, the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts (Taipei), the New York Foundation for the Arts, Galeri Lorong (Yogyakarta), the JUT Art Museum (Taipei), the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (Taichung), the Hong-gah Museum (Taipei), the Cattle Depot Artist Village (Hong Kong), and SPIELART (Munich).

 

After her residency in Yokohama in 2013, Lo launched an art series featuring dried banana peel as her creative medium for making narratives. With the art series, she has subsequently conducted various residencies in different countries to explore several topics: the movement of fruit, the historical context and cultural imagination of fruit as cash crop, the relation between agriculture and politics in the context of globalization, the power relations in transnational trade, and the migration of goods and people. In addition to banana, she has also started researching on tobacco and sugar industries, turning tobacco leaf and sugarcane fiber into her creative media, which in turn introduce more and diverse changes into her work.

 

Lo has used sun-dried and air-dried banana peel in several art series, including Banana in Taiwan, Japan and the Philippines (2013), BANANA JUSTICE- The Drama of Global Trades and Riots (2014), Voyage to the Homelands (2015), and Taste of Ocean (2018). Showcased in this exhibition is the Taste of Ocean series, an extension of Voyage to the Homelands (2015), with Taiwan as the background. In 2018, Lo had various encounters with Southeast Asian migrant workers at different locations in Taiwan, such as 228 Peace Memorial Park, Daan Forest Park, Taipei Station, etc. Through making portraits of these migrant workers, she initiates dialogues. The process sheds light on the life situations and living conditions of the migrant workers thousands of miles away from home and reveals the need of labor force worldwide.

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Uttaporn Nimmalaikaew

Uttaporn Nimmalaikaew (b. 1980, Bangkok) holds a BFA in Painting from King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology and an MFA in Painting from Silpakorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, where he currently works and lives. He is also Art Instructor at the Painting Department, Faculty of Architecture, King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology, Bangkok, Thailand.

Nimmalaikaew has won multiple awards in Bangkok, including the Art Competition of Thailand by Philip Morris and various nationwide art competitions and exhibitions. He is the recipient of the Sovereign Asian Art Prize in Hong Kong in 2006. In recent years, he has held solo exhibitions at SAC Gallery (Bangkok), Yauvz Gallery (Singapore), ARDEL Gallery of Modern Art (Bangkok), Bill Lowe Gallery (Los Angeles), and Craig Scott Gallery (Toronto), and has been featured in group exhibitions at La Lanta Fine Art (Bangkok), the 2020 Bangkok Art Biennale, Quai Branly Museum (Paris), Prince Street Gallery (New York), Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, National Gallery (Bangkok), etc.

Nimmalaikaew mainly works with three-dimensional painting, creating his works by layering tulle, mosquito nets, filament wires or meshes. The uniqueness of his chosen materials creates subtle movements in his work that never stays fully still. Such a quality, combined with his idiosyncratically stylized approach to installation, often produces an illusory perception, making the spectator feel like he or she is in the presence of some shadowy, mysterious existence. With the effect of holography, Nimmalaikaew’s work can be watched from different angles. He draws inspiration from Buddhist philosophy, and uses portraits of his family members and stories to explore reality, suffering in life, as well as the decay and death of the body and mind, making his work a caution to his audience.

 

Photos