Date: 2022/3/26-2022/6/26
Venue: Gallery 103-107, Gallery Street
Curator: LAI Ming-Chu

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The late 1980s was a period when modern art movement thrived in southern Taiwan. In June 1991, the “Taiwan Project” was jointly conceived and executed by Chen Shui-Tsai, Ni Tsai-Chin, and Lee Jiun-Shyan, three members of the “Modern Art Association of Kaohsiung (MAAK),” which was founded only four years prior; the next year, Su Chih-Che joined the project. Within 10 years, the “Taiwan Project” conducted a total of 13 participatory exhibitions of art activity. Through continued dialogues between subjects (the artists) and others (places), as well as intersubjective exchange experience and practical  art actions, the four artists completed experiential journeys of the historical context and unique features of local life of 12 unfamiliar regions, including towns, villages, outlying islands, and cities, shaping a uniform imagery of the Taiwanese culture. These island-tracing journeys were also their journeys of self-return and self-seeking, as the four artists traveling in company/alone were external “objects” in the world of visible and real “places” and had no other choice but to reflect on who the real subject was between their own selves and others? On these puzzling journeys, they opened a bilateral door, discovering “two beings” and “conjuring up a bilateral dream.” In the process of dialogue, exchange, and communication, they used habitus (minimalism, abstract, new expressionism, surrealism, and so on) or experiential visual vocabularies to link the places they perceived, and connect Taiwan’s imagery of the end of the century.

During the creative period of the “Taiwan Project,” the four artists also continued creating own works. Their works created in the period spanning some three decades before and after the project actually maintained a bilateral opening and communication with the “Taiwan Project.” Every artist’s unique style and idea would always infuse and project onto every work in the “Taiwan Project”; with the practices of the “Taiwan Project” and sparking of new ideas, their creative works simultaneously shifted with the progression of the overall time and space, generating mutually referencing and retentissement trajectories. Through the stimulation and expansion of the four shared artistic concepts of “Marginal Consciousness,” “Dialects of the Land,” “Subjective Truth,” and “Diverse Dialogues,” the four artists completed creative works of visual art, in which “particular” and “universal” coexisted, through own unique subjective thinking and style.