Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts

Exhibition Period: 2012/9/29 - 2012/12/16 Location: Taipei National University of the Arts - Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts (KDMOFA) Opening Ceremony: 2012/9/29 5:00pm Asian Contemporary Art Forum: 2012/9/28 （9:00am-5:00pm） Location: Taipei National University of the Arts - International Conference Hall All people have an innate ability for imagination. Even more, artists are practitioners of
imagination.” With its theme, Artist in Wonderland, the 2012 Kuandu Biennale brings together ten artists and curators from different countries and cultural backgrounds across Asia to showcase the multitude of imagination that Asian artists have surrounding
Artist in Wonderland.” Ten international artists + ten international curators work together to expand the maximum range value of
1+1 = ?”. It may correspond to an aesthetic speculation of the world, a subconscious outlet for imagination, a futuristic urban landscape, a disappearing landscape mapping, a pursuit of historical myths... or even romantic imaginations regarding this fantasy world of
Wonderland.” Through the different understandings and interpretations between the real and the psychological, and the discrepancies found within the texts of dialogues, artists are able to once again write about the past, present, and future of the language of art through their works. This particular gathering juxtaposes the immediate outlook of Asian contemporary art with its creative tenses. On another level, it also demonstrates the styles and appearances of Asian contemporary art even as it is surrounded by the mainstream of Western art movements. Since its first exhibition in 2008 with the theme, Dream, followed by Memories and Beyond, and now, Artist in Wonderland, the Kuandu Biennale assembles the solo exhibitions of ten artists from different countries throughout Asia to intersect and construct a chapter in contemporary art that belongs solely to Asia. Simultaneously, in accordance with the academic orientation of university art museums, Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts has planned
Asian Contemporary Art Forum,” creating a platform for dialogue that meets the methods of a non-Western style of Asian contemporary art. It is the hope that this platform created by the Kuandu Biennale links together artists, curators, art critics, art spaces, and other art communities and exhibition mechanisms into a multi-cultural system comprised of various Asian nationalities. With an intimate and pragmatic approach, it materializes a communication network that features a
multi-directional dialogue” for Asian contemporary art, and further promotes an opportunity for cooperation amongst its various disciplines. Artists＋Curators 國家Countries 藝術家Artists 策展人Curators 韓國KOREA 夫智鉉 (BOO Ji-hyun) 金福基 (KIM Bog-gi ) 台灣TAIWAN 陳怡潔（Agi, CHEN Yi-Chieh）王柏偉（WANG Po-Wei）越南VIETNAM 蒂芬妮‧鍾（Tiffany CHUNG）黎越（Việt Lê ) 中國CHINA 劉建華（LIU Jian-Hua）張冰（Zoe ZHANG Bing）新加坡SINGAPORE 李鴻輝（Michael LEE）李美玲（Joanna LEE）泰國 THAILAND 尼潘‧歐拉尼維（Nipan ORANNIWESNA）吉碧‧格拉希雅‧卡威旺（Jeab Gridthiya GAWEEWONG）澳洲 AUSTRALIA Pip & Pop 莎拉‧邦德（Sarah BOND）菲律賓PHILIPPINE 唐‧薩盧貝巴（Don SALUBAYBA）派崔克‧佛羅斯（Patrick D. FLORES）台灣TAIWAN 崔廣宇（TSUI Kuang-Yu）黃建宏（HUANG Chien-Hung）日本JAPAN 渡邊豪（Go WATANABE）天野太郎（Taro AMANO）

Wang Po-Wei （Abstracted from Wang Po-Wei’s essay） The circles in “Circle Islands” reinvigorate cartoon characters as storage memories in the age of electronic images, and thereby become functional memories themselves. The circles provide their possessors with an “extending situation” (zerdehnten Situation). In other words, these circles move the cartoon characters from specific cartoons to Facebook (or even to anywhere such as the show/ exhibition brochure of some possessors of circles) without losing the critical features of those characters. Nevertheless, we should notice that the “circle,” as a symbol of a cartoon character, is merely “a text carrying the information about that character,” whether concerning cognition or action. In other words, regarding the event of “performance” that “extends characters from cartoon to Facebook,” the circles are not simply circles. Rather, they convey the information of characters. The circles serve as the medium through which the character information can be transmitted. Contemporary “images” bridged the gap between “actions” and “the cognitive conditions of actions,” and therefore the “Circle Islands” project could eventually precipitate certain community actions through the identity to the circles. On the one hand, contemporary images mobilize individuals’ unique perceptions of specific issues (i.e. specific cartoon characters in “Circle Islands”). On the other hand, they refer to our collective knowledge of a specific cartoon character on the social dimension (just as that all the participants in “Circle Islands” are able to identify the characters referred by the others’ circles). More importantly, each participant allows the other participants (circle carriers) to freely choose actions corresponding to the circles they carry within the differential framework of “individuals’ unique perceptions of cartoon characters/most participants’ collective knowledge of cartoon characters.” This practice adequately addresses the question of “making choices under the condition of excess.” The primary role of contemporary images in our society is therefore consistent with that the “Circle Islands” project attempts to do, namely a medium of building-up collective actions. This is also a possible development of art in the near future.

Việt Lê （Abstracted from Việt Lê’s essay） The project for the Kuandu Biennale morphs vernacular edifices and continues the artist’s examination of utopias and dystopias. At the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Tiffany Chung presents the viewer with sunken edifices—only part of the roof and its supporting walls is visible. The artist’s “buildings” can be seen as a landscape. The indoor and outdoor constructions are buried, have collapsed or perhaps have flooded—they are ruins. Working with an architect, Chung designs entire buildings but then slices them—a sliver is seen. With any archeological remnant, the viewer gets a partial view, a partial understanding of a given society from the skeletons of homes, shards of a beloved bowl, or weatherworn effigies. It is as if the building has sunk into the ground, buried alive. Or the dwelling is submerged by water. The museum is transformed into an archeological site, or the scene of disaster. This construction is a shell, a husk. It’s a hollow form for hollow men, for hallowed men. Spanning mythology and modernity, Chung’s project raises timely questions about humanity’s capacity for growth, survival and self-annihilation. This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper. We are in a time of crisis; we are at a precipice now. Apocalypse now. We are on the brink of catastrophe. Like Benjamin’s angel of history, we are confronted with the wreckage of progress. All that we have built in the name of survival ironically threatens our survival. We continue to search for solutions, for meaning… How did our dreams turn to disaster? The artist offers us alternate visions for living on the ruins of modernity’s edge. Our “future ruins” may look like another civilization and sound like another language, but it is our only home. Our future is and isn’t ruined. Tomorrow isn’t here. We only have now. Our post-apocalypse is now. We are lonely seekers.

Zoe ZHANG Bing （Abstracted from Zoe ZHANG Bing’s essay） Over the past two decades of artistic creation, Liu Jianhua has explored different materials, styles and expressive forms to articulate and reflect his ever-developing and transforming creative concepts. After many years of exploring sociological meaning in his work, Liu Jianhua turned to an “aesthetics of quietude” from 2008, notably in his Untitled series and his Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (Beijing) exhibition Screaming Walls. And, of course, his works on exhibition at the Guandu Art Museum are part of this latest development in his work: Bone, Blank Paper, and Fallen Leaves. There are four major differences between these “quiet” works and Liu Jianhua’s previous allegorical or social realist work. First, they turned from the narrative structure of his past works to a modern persistent scrutiny of formal language. Second, the physical representations and their realistic meanings have become distant, becoming more abstract and minimalist. Third, they use the language of contemporary art to express the intrinsic qualities of traditional Chinese aesthetics, focused on creating a spiritual, meditative and reflective space for the viewer. Fourth, in these works the artist returns to demanding perfection from the technical aspects of the ceramics, idealistically combining the traditional with the modern. Of these works, Liu Jianhua has said that: “It seems that many artists these days are accustomed to and prefer to fill their works with grand thematic meanings through narrative methods and iconographies. I want to do the opposite. I want to erase so-called meaning and put more emphasis on the spiritual experience artwork will give people.” In Bone, Blank Paper, and Fallen Leaves, Liu manages to illuminate the essence of Chinese traditional aesthetics through the language of contemporary art, evocative of the idea of “blankness” in traditional Chinese painting. These objects—bone, blank paper, fallen leaves—locate the spirit, symbolic without mimesis; the specific form itself is not the focus. His work emphasizes the use of physical forms to access and open up imaginative worlds for the viewer to feel.

Joanna Lee （Abstracted from Joanna Lee’s essay） Michael Lee’s Office Orchitect (2011) is an installation consisting of an introductory wall text, twelve built-to-scale architectural models, each with label and caption, and a diagrammatic mindmap ‘Mapping KS Wong’. In opting to confess the fiction of Office Ochitect at the start of the work, could it be that Lee intends the disclosure to be more than a performative formality? Might this be a cleverly subtle manoeuvre to forthwith dismiss the issue of veracity (or the lack of it) and move the work’s conceptual focus to interests in representation? More bluntly put, it amounts to saying: this is a fictional story, so let’s just focus on the telling of the story. Office Orchitect is nothing if not an allegory dressed in a parody of authoritative didacticism and heroic validation. If the work’s critique is aimed at institutionalized logic and practices, the fiction that is KS Wong and his architectural career strikes at the heart of the authoritative authenticity that underscores, frames and insures institutionalized practices and production. This appears to be the essence of the tease in Office Orchitect’s fiction: the disclosure shifts the focus from believing to believability. “Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space,” Mies van der Rohe tells us, and Lee’s practice is wont to tease out the relationship between architecture and epochal urban psychology, or more precisely the socio-historical cracks within which buildings and ideas for buildings slip into undesirability, obsolescence and forgetfulness. “Among buildings conceived across culture and history, the most poetic must be those deemed useless, whether by wear and tear or by not having been built at all. Architectural ruins and fantasies alike belie the human longing for a better or different world from that which physically exists,” he writes. “Like poems bearing no practical and immediate function, buildings as such are concentrations of realities dreamt up by a select few, desired for a few precious and intense moments, and deserted by most for their lack of an imaginable use.”

Jeab Gridthiya Gaweewong （Abstracted from Jeab Gridthiya Gaweewong’s essay） Nipan Oranniwesna’s works deal with public and private issues, time and space in a site specific and minimalistic approach. Recently his works shifted from private to public, more critical and socially and politically engaged due to the recent political instability in Thailand, touching upon structural problems and asking essential questions of the public. Born and raised in Chaiyapoom, Northeast Thailand, Nipan received the Monbusho grant for his MFA and DFA at the Tokyo National University of Art and Music. Returning to Bangkok in the 1990s, he taught at Bangkok University’s School of Fine and Applied Art. Multiple relocations may be a factor that shaped his language of expression from introvert to social consciousness. Travelling helped him open up, making him ponder his relationship with others and society. It allowing him to create new works. Since Japan, nostalgia and memories were the foundation of his artistic creations, working with the relationship with his mother, birth and self retrospect. Relocating to Tokyo, he found ways to express his ideas through installation, exploring found objects which were significant, relating to specific social history, materials culture and contemporary issues. When he travelled to new cities or countries, he became more aware of the geography, mapping the territories. Maps started to play significant roles in his works, connecting with the new site; he tried to locate and establish his own relationship with the new space, both physically and conceptually, be it in Tokyo, Manila, and later Venice, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taipei. Manila’s map was visualized in a strange new way, as dots on paper the sheets which included dots for Paris, Moscow, Manila and Caracas; and the plane relationship between these indifferently profane and sacred dots was determined by nothing beyond the mathematically calculated flight of the crow. The Mercatorian map, brought in by the European colonizers, was beginning, via print, to shape the imagination of Southeast Asia. When he was in Manila, its’ urban landscapes fascinated him, becoming new territory for him to browse and explore, making the invisible visible for the audiences.

Sarah Bond （Abstracted from Sarah Bond’s essay） The diminutive world of Pip & Pop is vivid. It is strange, unknown and impermanent. Satiated with coloured sugary mountains, crystalline valleys and meandering glittery pathways, this world draws you in and transports you to whimsical paradise, a temporary pleasure zone inspired by the ancient craft of storytelling sourced from an eclectic mix of children’s literature, local folklore, video games and Buddhism. Pip & Pop present a hyper-Zen garden for the 21st century. Born in Perth (Australia) in 1972, Pip & Pop is the pseudonym for the artist Tanya Schultz, a multi-disciplinary producer. Tanya's practice embodies both independent and collaborative processes across varying disciplines including installation, painting, wall-works and sculpture. Many of these works examine ideas of abundance, temporary pleasure and utopian dreams that arise from within a contemporary culture of mass consumption. Pip & Pop explore mythical landscapes and document a potential journey in the revitalized museum diorama format. The diminutive world of Pip & Pop is vivid. It is strange, it is unknown and it is impermanent. It is bright enticing, tactile and inviting. It oozes blissful abundance. The artwork of Pip & Pop doesn't just teeter on the brink of excess it swallows it whole. It pushes social limitations and acts as a reminder of the shifting boundaries shared between abundance and excess, temporality and fragility of our existence. It is a moral tale of excess and mass consumption, a warning to those of us who enjoy our contemporary lives in all its consumer glory. It is also a cautionary reminder to embrace the wider unknown world, unseen and foreign, so that like the little frog in the well, we will see for ourselves if the world is bigger, brighter and richer for ourselves. Pip & Pop provide that other point of view.

Patrick D. Flores （Abstracted from Patrick D. Flores’s essay） Don Salubayba’s work for this exhibition titled The Union of the Forgotten and the Unknown emerges from this sense of the in-between in the tropical atmosphere of his country, particularly in its nether regions of the repressed unconscious of conquest and of the hybrid idiosyncrasies of post-colonial remembrance. It seems that Salubayba has taken keen interest in both mystification and myth, and this is but a logical inclination within his scheme as both refunction figurative devices needed to create narratives that are meant to ring true and oftentimes cover a multitude of lies. In this undertaking, he extends the definition of folklore to frame the iconographies and ideas that have become sediments in the recesses of a cultural mentality. If dredged up, they might reveal insights into our current politics or nuance common sense or explain predilections that have been conceived of as natural, and therefore preordained. One of the consequences of the artist’s experiments with myriad devices, which always resonate with his artistic formation as a shadow play performer, is the reflection on the nexus between the mythic and the historical, the epic and the vignette, the folkloric and the photographic, painting and virtual imagery through projection. It has also allowed him to breach the boundary of a national culture and thus free him from the trite formulae of national identity and the bereft enterprise of Filipino indigenization and its overinvestment in the fetish of authenticity. In his universe, myths mutate. They are not viewed as fully formed texts, but are seminal and germinal, the nucleus of a transforming, transformative discourse. He holds on to this promise with the view of sustaining his critique of the colonial narrative and the way it has captured the consciousness of Filipinos in the present. As myths morph, the possibility of change in both worldview and lifeworld is forever awaited – and guaranteed -- in the half-light of his art.

Huang Chien-Hung （Abstracted from Huang Chien-Hung’s essay） Tsui Kuang-Yu started his works with the “practice of ordinary people” or “body show” that compares word expression with physical situations. Then his works extended to redefining city spaces and measuring the frameworks of city life with physical characters. Nowadays, his works focus on “multiple oil-massage of cities.” Concerning the more-than-a-decade process that evolving from a simple mind into a surveyor and finally into an infiltrator, we identify that “touching cities” serves as a constant feature of Tsui’s works. He entered the society simplemindedly, that is, “entered the world with virginity,” and then re-physicalizes the city. The concept of an “extraterritorial man” shaped by actions and touches contains the artistic fact of “becoming” that generates criticalness from the experience of “inaccurate overprint” in the structure of sensitivity sharing. However, this concept per se does not contain any connotation of criticism. The afore-mentioned virginity refers to the real state of spirits and relationships rather than the physiological state in sexual matters. When he entered the world with an unsophisticated effort, his body demonstrated a virginal feature that was weak but endowed with inexhaustible creative energy, whether through games (physical interpretation), identities (role-play), or scientific experiments (survival). We could argue that the series of “City Massage” not only change Tsui’s behavioral model, but also systematically clarify all his past works. On the one hand, the virginity he created serves as an interdisciplinary terminal for removing the restrictive framework. On the other hand, the symbolic representation of Monads is a without-organ body that sexualizes the world. It is a fixed, slightly opened, and tightlipped kuso smile in face of the real world. We are placed in an age of “no sense of touch” when the controlled societies transform “breeding” into catalog-like production, and when creation and curatorship transcend history and claim infinite small worlds, that is, when sundry worlds become image files in small windows on computer screens. Therefore, to whet new “appetite” in the world is to defy the controlled societies. Although any new “appetite” might be cataloged rapidly, Tsui’s work, “Touch and Run,” still depicts an escaping map of continuously flirting. Our critique of the world could and should be a “love letter” that sketches, caresses, and impinges the world repeatedly. It is also an infinitely extended map of escaping history.

Kim Bog-gi （Abstracted from Kim Bog-gi’s essay） JiHyun Boo hung about 300 fishing lights on the round ceiling of Guandu Art Museum in the shape of a massive cone. She filled the fishing lights with seawater from Taiwan or Samdasoo(the most popular bottled spring water in Korea) of Jeju-do and installed LED light for blue flashing light. Beneath the tip of this cone that seems to fall down onto the floors from the sky is a small box filled with salt. The fishing lights light up and the salt box, symbolizing seawater, devours the shadows of fishing lights. As the audiences look into the shadow over the salt, they can hear the sound of ocean and people (gathered from the seas of Taipei and Jeju-do). Look up the pile of fishing lights again! Isn't this scene the feast of light with the stars in the night sky? Now, look down onto the fishing lights reflected on the salt! Doesn't this remind you of one moon reflected on a thousand rivers. However, you come back to the thinking that the source of this view is the fishing lights (recycled material). Looking at the pile of fishing lights hung on the ceiling, you can think of a massive chandelier. As Boo has shown in her previous work, the fishing lights, when lighted in a dark room, creates a fantastic ambiance similar to phantasmagoria of modern civilization. The essence of Boo's work is converting this rough energy of civilization with the calm breath of nature. With the fishing lights used as dreaming objects, Boo's 〈Being-Net〉 bring the sky, land, and people(audiences) in one space. Each of the fishing lights is perceived as an independent universe or nomad. It is very similar to the shape of an ‘egg.’ An egg is often used as a metaphor for the birth of new life, transition from darkness to light, and enlightening. In this respect, the fishing light is another name for the egg, the symbol of life. Boo contains the bright light of life and the clear water of life in the fishing lights. Aren't light and water the sources of human being? Boo uses light and water to densely weave the circulation of 'birth-death-resurrection' that involves the nature, the civilizations, me and others. This is the net of being.

BOO Ji-Hyun was brought up in Jeju, a southernmost island of Korea. The beautiful scenery of her hometown island Jeju, and particularly, its mysterious marine landscape at night underpins “the beginning of her memory.” Since she started working as an artist, she naturally adopted the fishing lamp that brightening the ocean at night as a motif for her artworks. Boo has steadily expanded the styles of her work from painting (etching, aquatint) through three-dimensional work to spatial installations. She has tried to freely cross the borders of genres and forms by accepting the materials not only the fishing lamps but also those related directly to the ocean as boats, sands, salt and water and even such immaterial ones as light, wind and sound. She wishes that the dumped fishing lamps would be revived into some live objects by shine lights on it and that such objects reborn would act as new light. This light will guide contemporary human beings to a world of unconstrained imagination or dream. She also wishes that the fishing lamps would not only deliver the calm breathing of the nature but also shine the life of human beings, civilization and the universe. Weaving of “a net of being” for her and the world with the fishing lamps, this is an aspiration of her work.

Australian artist Tanya Schultz works as Pip & Pop to create a range of works including drawings, wall-works, and hyper-coloured installations from materials such as sugar, glitter, sweets, plastic flowers, and craft materials. Through her work she examines ideas of abundance and temporary pleasure within material culture while drawing reference from a vast array of cultural references. She looks at the notion of paradise and wish-fulfillment as told through ancient mythologies and folk tales, as well as contemporary video games, animations and children’s stories. Pip & Pop works have been shown throughout Australia, Japan and Europe. Her recent exhibitions include: The Blinking of an Eye at Spiral (Japan), We Miss You Magic Land! at the Gallery of Modern Art (Australia), Happy Sky Dream at Aichi Triennale (Japan), Bing Bong Big Bang at Kunstlerhaus Ludwigsburg (Germany), and Sweet Sweet Gallery at Smiths Row (UK). She has been awarded many grants and prizes including the Qantas Contemporary Art Award in 2009.

TSUI Kuang-Yu was born in Taipei, Taiwan in 1974. In 1997 he graduated from National Institute of the Arts and has exhibited internationally since, including Venice Biennale, Liverpool Biennale, Reina Sofia Museum, Chelsea Art Museum, Mori Museum, OK Centrum. TSUI Kuang-Yu’s videos present the contrasting actions and interactions between people and the surroundings that can be taken as a trace of or parameter for social interception. These absurd yet subjective interceptions are what the artist calls “shortcuts,” or a medium and method that measure and question the culture and society in which we exist. Alternatively, one could say that Tsui has demonstrated a way to alter the reality or survive within the crevices in the present institution, and overcome the obstacles in our living environment.

Agi, CHEN Yi- Chieh was born in 1980. She is now studying the Doctoral Program in Art Creation and Theory Department of Tainan National University of the Arts. Her work “Powder Puff Girls' Wednesday” has been awarded the First Prize of Taipei Arts Award in 2005. She has joined different international residency projects throughout the world included Asian Cultural Council grant for ARCUS Project in Japan, British Council grant for the Residency Project in Loughborough University, and Artist in Residency program in “Platr” in Phuket Thailand organized by Osaka City University Urban Research Plaza. She also has various experiences in exhibiting in Taiwan and overseas. As an artist and a consumer of public culture, CHEN Yi- Chieh creates a range of contemporary works with modern significance through reversing the colors of animations to reveal the public culture and to remind the visual collective memories.

LIU Jian-Hua was born in 1962 in Ji’an, Jiangxi Province, China. In 1989, he graduated from Fine Art of Sculpture at the Jingdezhen Ceramics Institute and lives and works in Shanghai, China. Since 2004, he has been teaching in Fine Art of Sculpture in Shanghai University. LIU Jian-Hua is one of China’s best-known sculptural and installation artists who uses porcelain and mixed media as his primary material. Grew up in Jiangxi Province and he also had spent 14 years at the main ceramic factory in the city of Jingdezhen to learn the craft. After graduated from Fine Art of Sculpture at the Jingdezhen Ceramics Institute in 1989, Liu has embarked upon his own experimental practice within a contemporary context. Liu’s ceramic, porcelain and mixed media works are a response to the economic and social changes that have recently beset China. In his series Regular/Fragile, first shown at the Chinese Pavilion, Venice Biennale in 2003, Liu created uncanny replicas of everyday objects in porcelain that privilege appearance and symbolism over function. In 2008, he shifted his attention from the problems emerged in globalization and sharp social changes in China to “no meaning, no context”, which declared the fairly new exploration in “Untitled” in 2008. Ever since, “quiet aesthetics”, a basic direction leading the perception of contemporary art creation has founded. LIU Jian-Hua’s works have been collected by Towada Art Center (Japan), Guggenheim Museum (New York), The Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia), Santander Bank Art Center (Spain), Queensland Art Gallery (Australia), Kawara Museum (Japan), China Club (Hong Kong, China) etc,.

Go WATANABE was born in 1975 in Hyogo prefecture. He graduated from Aichi prefecture Art and Music University with MA in Fine Art. Watanabe has presented dark tranquil animations and digital printed photography works created by adhering graphics from photography of an object’s surface onto the 3-D structures created in a computer. His unique expression receives much attention from viewers. Recently, he was participated in the exhibitions; “Media City Seoul” (2006, Seoul Museum of Art), “Beautiful New World: Contemporary Culture from Japan” (2007, Guangdong Museum of Art), “Asian Art Biennial” (2007, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung), “Big in Japan” (2009, CAC, Lithania), “COSMETIC TRAVELERS” (2012, Espace Louis Vuitton, Tokyo), “Carpe Diem. Seize the day” (2012, Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Aichi), accomplishing impressive achievement both domestically and internationally.

Nipan ORANNIWESNA graduated with a BFA in Graphic Art from Silpakorn University, Bangkok and received his MFA from Tokyo National University of Fine Arts & Music. His works have been exhibited both locally and internationally. In addition to the exhibition 18th Biennale of Sydney: all our relations(2012), City - Net Asia 2011, Seoul Museum of Art, Korea(2011), THIS IS NOT A FAIRY TALE, g23, Bangkok(2011) , PAPER MATTERS, BACC, Bangkok(2010), Safe place the future, VER Gallery, Bangkok(2009), Sea Art Festival, Busan Biennale(2008), Golbalization Please Slow Down at the Thai Pavilion, 52nd Venice Biennale(2007), he also has participated in the exhibition at Soka Contemporary Art Space, Taipei, The Art Centre, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Eslite Gallery Taipei, BISCHOFF/WIESS, London, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Osage , Hong Kong. He lives in Bangkok where he is head of Visual Arts Department, School of Fine & Applied Art, Bangkok University. Artist's Statement: It’s impossible to compare the distinction between two separate acts of exploration: a traditional way of traveling on foot and an unconventional way of dissecting the map laid across the table,　using razor blades to trim out the areas between the roads and the canals. A friend from afar once said to me when he saw my first cut outs that the creating process is truly an idealistic way to experience the city rather than a repetitive walking routine. Additionally, the process also allows me to “readjust” to the constant changes of the surroundings.

While certain parts of the maps are cut out, roads and rivers still remain intact. The powder is carefully dusted through the stencil onto the material underneath. With piles of powder rising, the substance is being held together by humidity which helps form and sustain the shapes. The longevity of the mystery city’s delicate map remains unknown as it will be determined by the force of nature and audiences.

Don Maralit Salubayba graduated at the Philippine High School for the Arts and received his Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts from the University of the Philippines in 2000. A Cultural Center of the Philippines 13 artist awardee for 2009. Although he began his career focusing on painting and drawing, his interest quickly shifted to working with light and shadow when he became a key participant and teacher of Anino Shadowplay Collective (www.anino.sining.net). When he returned to painting, he found himself immediately drawn to the struggle between light and dark, experimenting with translucence by laminating his sketches and mixing digital animation and actual puppetry. He has exhibited his works at various galleries and museums here and abroad such as the Drawing Room Gallery, Magnet Gallery, Ayala Museum, Boston Gallery, KulayDiwa Art Galleries, Anita Gallery at the Center for the Arts in San Antonio, Zambales , Cultural Center of the Philippines, Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Valentine Willie Fine Arts, in Malaysia and Singapore, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. Japan, DUMBO Art Center and Goliath Visual Space both in New York City. He has participated in the First International Shadow Theatre Festival held in Greece in 2000 and at the Multi media festival entitled “The F.O.B. Show” held at the Binddlestiff (www.binddlestiff.org) in San Francisco, California (2005) Don also received an Asian Cultural Council grant to participate in a residency program at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California, and at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York City in 2004‐2005. He won Special Jury Prize Award and Voice Award at the Singapore Short Film Festival held at the Substation Art Center in Singapore for his animation piece, “A Not So Giant Story” in 2006. (www.substation.org) He was awarded numerous grants as Artist in Resident at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Fukuoka, Japan In 2008, Taipei Artist Village in 2009 and Vermont Art Studio in 2010. He currently teaches at the Philippine High School for the Arts.

Tiffany CHUNG’s cartographic, installation, and video works examine urban development in relation to history and cultural memories, exploring the recovery and growth of specific cities that were war-torn or heavily damaged by natural disasters. Interweaving specific historical events with spatial and sociopolitical changes, her work reflects the multi-layered relationship between site, map and memory. Her research on the decline of towns and cities due to human destruction, deindustrialization, and demographic changes investigates the complexity of urban progress and population aging in post-industrial societies. Blurring the distinction between art, anthropology and sociology, Chung’s most recent videos and large-scale installations create allegorical fantasies that imagine our world at the end of the human race and examine the aftermath of colonization and modernization. CHUNG has participated in numerous museum exhibitions and biennials around the world, including: the upcoming Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane, Australia (2012); Six Lines of Flight, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, USA (2012); The Map as Art, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, USA (2012); Singapore Biennale (2011); Roving Eye, Sorlandets Kunstmuseum, Norway (2011); Incheon International Women Artists’ Biennale, Korea (2009); and Fukuoka Triennale, Japan (2005). Chung’s recent solo exhibitions include TOMORROW ISN’T HERE, Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York (2012), and Fukagawa Shokudo, Fukagawa Tokyo Modan Kan, Tokyo (2011).

Michael LEE (b. 1972, Singapore) received his Master and Bachelor of Communication Studies from Nanyang Technological University in 2001 and 1997 respectively. He is an artist and curator based in Berlin (Jun 2012-) and Singapore. His research revolves around urban memory and fiction, especially regarding the contexts and implications of loss. He transforms his observations into objects, diagrams, situations, curations or essays. He has staged solo exhibitions at Hanart TZ Gallery (Hong Kong), Baba House (Singapore) and Alliance Francaise de Singapour (Singapore). His group exhibition participations include The 2nd Asia Triennial Manchester 2011, The 3rd Singapore Biennale 2011, The 8th Shanghai Biennale 2010, The 4th & 3rd Guangzhou Triennial 2011 & 2008, The 2005 World Exposition (Singapore Pavilion) and International Film & Video Association Film Award & Festival 1997 (co-winner, Experimental category). His curatorial projects include Between, Beside, Beyond: Daniel Libeskind's Reflections and Key Works 1989-2014 (Singapore Art Museum, 2007). His accolades include the APBF Signature Art Prize 2011 (People's Choice Award), conferred by the Singapore Art Museum, and the Young Artist Award (Visual Arts) 2005, conferred by the National Arts Council, Singapore.

Taro Amano （Abstracted from Taro Amano’s essay） Born in 1975, Go Watanabe graduated with a degree in painting from Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music in 2002. His first group exhibition “Rolling Library” was in 1997 and his first solo exhibition “Her existence is just…” took place in 1999. The following statement by Watanabe explains how he created his distinctive photography series, Face, which he started in 2002: “To make this portrait, I pasted the photographed skin of a woman on a 3D (three-dimensional) face created on the computer and made a printout. This 3D form consists of polygon so it only has an external shape like papier maché. Thus, the portrait has only a surface without any solidity.”* Suggested in these words is why Watanabe makes works like these after studying painting. Also referenced is the intent behind his works that will be shown in this exhibition. The sense of discomfort he encountered in the process of painting came from the material texture of oil paints and the structure inevitably built up by layered paint. Feeling resistance to the dullness of the front view of the subjects, or to the structure of painting itself as the representation of an illusion when he was seeking to capture two-dimensionality, Watanabe chose to take up photography as his medium. Basically, scenes of everyday life appear mundane to us, for we do not examine the “structure” of every scene we see. Of course, we see a structure in everything but it is in the domain of our unconsciousness. We have the ability to recognize that there is a hallway that leads to the next room on the other side of the door, as we usually grasp our surroundings as something self-apparent or we are subject to internalizing our perception in this way. Is there something behind the familiar landscape as presumed, and will it lead to the promised domain? Watanabe’s work stirs up the internalized visual systems of our modern society and salvages visual experiences such as ”seeing something white coming out of a hole in the screen door in the middle of the night” from what can be called an “incorrect domain.”

Works