Since the establishment in Ciaotou Sugar Refinery Station Art Village (Bywood), Kaohsiung in 2010, Formosa Wall Painting Group has been legendary because of its boundless energy, mobility and penetration to develop
Off-Site Painting Projects”,
Community Painting Projects”, and
Urban Guerrilla - The Formosa Wall Painting Group Expo” in Taiwan and further bring
Off-Site Painting Projects” to Ishinomagi, Japan and to Venice, Italy. Formosa Wall Painting Group can be regarded as a visual art movement in Taiwan contemporary art. Autonomic assemblies are set up without specific invitation nor via open call. All the participating artists are willing to manage themselves and cover expenses of project realization out of a direct incentive to devote incorrigible passion and determination for arts to people and earth in this country.
Lift the drink and sing a song, for who knows if life be short or long!”, a line from Cao Cao’s A Short-Song Ballad which is quite an illustrative analogy of artist’s unconstrained spirit and affection to homeland. So do drink and sing with Formosa Wall Painting Group to be immersed in its fiery vitality! Projects like
Off-Site Painting Projects”,
Community Painting Projects”,
Urban Guerrilla” and newly developed auction event and
Seeding Project” are all under the umbrella of
Guide Bywood Project”. This project serves as the core concept and a starting point to develop four motives raised by Lee Jiun-Shyan: to return to human nature, to enter real social environment, to promote handcraft spirit and to accumulate art in context. Formosa Wall Painting Group expects to build up a research pool for the images of Taiwanese visual arts, to provide prompt feedbacks to Taiwanese art history from the perspective of a less-organized art group, to carry out art therapy which heals heart and soul, to incubate young artists for next generation, to re-connect the earth and habitants by making histories into visual images, and to encourage art collection. All these relevant intensions shows that Formosa Wall Painting Group’s painting movement is not simply an action of graffiti or environment design but an atypical culture reversal which turns the hierarchy of art structure upside down. A sharing mutual understanding of bonded relationship and ideal of art practice is the firm ground of Formosa Wall Painting Group’s aesthetics. From Lee Jiun-Shyan and Lee Jiun-Yang the two founders who raised the contemplation of
painting” to two core curators Shang Yu-Fang and Chiang Yao-Hsien who focus on the practices of land justice, this group gathers artists who have high expectations on Taiwan’s cultural landscape and realize their expectations and social responsibility for homeland by the excellence in art practice of painting.
Guide Bywood Project” ended in mid-summer of year 2014, but there are more challenges coming as a new beginning. During this turning point, the first session of a series of forums
Art Relativity of Formosa Wall Painting Group” is accompanied with the exhibition in the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts to unveil the academic value of this group by discussion and organization of art theories and history, and further to build a new discourse of Taiwanese art. By Li Szu Hsien