Writer/Curator | Dr Susie Lingham
Curatorial Premise (excerpt):
How would a sculptor embody “conscience” and “respect for others” as qualities of power and strength within the individual human mind? How does the phenomenological represent the psychological? Sculpture as a discipline, despite paradigmatic shifts in perspectives on what could constitute art, remains a deep engagement with material and formal truths. Apprenticed to his chosen medium, the sculptor and chosen medium mutually condition each other within projected possibilities and stretching of perceived limits.
With the sculptor Liu Po-Chun, this wrestle becomes physically acute when the chosen material is recycled industrial steel. The conceptual dimension is forged in the physical process, wrested from this process, claimed as part of phenomenological reality: a test of, and a desire for a steely demonstration, and representation, of strength, while necessarily acknowledging frailty, anxiety, self-doubt. This wrestle is a commitment to being human, yielding to the challenges of the material, which demands honesty – and compromise – from the sculptor. For Liu, the hand-forged object is emotionally powerful, and a kind of transmutation takes place: century-old objects, once useful, memoried, are smelted down to fluid materiality, and re-membered. Agency, and mediumship, forged amidst doubt and anxiety: sculpture lays down being as ground, and claims ground for being.
