Booth｜L01
Preview｜2021.10.21-10.22
Public Days｜2021.10.22-10.25
Participating Artists｜Yang Mao-Lin, Ava Hsueh, Yao Jui-Chung, Chen Chun-Hao
The Exceptional｜Lin Ju
Since early 2021, the Tina Keng Gallery has participated in flagship art fairs worldwide, including Frieze New York at the Shed, Art Basel Hong Kong, DnA Shenzhen, and the upcoming Frieze London. As the global art community heads into a new era acclimatizing to a post Covid-19 reality, the Tina Keng Gallery will return to Art Taipei 2021 for the first time after five years of hiatus, presenting new works by a stable of artists that has shaped the development of art in Taiwan, including Yang Mao-Lin, Ava Hsueh, Yao Jui-Chung, Chen Chun-Hao and Lin Ju. The group presentation aims to showcase the creative responses from Taiwan, in reaction to the ongoing international dilemma in the face of unprecedented uncertainty.
Yang Mao-Lin (b. 1953), a landmark artist in Taiwanese contemporary art, has always kept his finger on the pulse of social changes on the island. His new series of paintings on wood is illustrated with vivid iconographies composed of raven, clouded leopard, Formosa Lily and native hinoki. This set of new works effectively conjures a collective imagery unique to this land, and creates a hybrid narrative that infuses the past with the present and the future. Leading female artist Ava Hsueh (b. 1956) expands her visual language for abstract painting with her latest works that mix warm colors with their opposing cold counterparts across nine respective gamuts. This use of color, enabled by a creative state of fusion composed of pigments, shapes, formations, and dynamics, is a testament to an intimate dialogue between abstraction and reality.
Active contributor to the international art scene, Yao Jui-Chung (b. 1969) presents the latest addition to his signature landscape painting series. His embellished work, pushing the boundary of classical landscape tradition, depicts episodes of absurdity from a hyper consumerist world. It is a provocative challenge to the legitimacy of the classical art form. At the same time, this almost divorced-from-reality dark humor embodies the artist’s response to the post Covid-19 new normalcy. Similar inter-contextuality between traditional art forms and their contemporary iteration can also be seen in Chen Chun-Hao’s “Mosquito Nail Shanshui” — a series of traditional Chinese landscape paintings composed of industrial nails. Building a three-dimensional universe with hundreds of thousands of nails, Chen fabricates a multilayered visual intensity for his amorphous landscape on canvas to stretch the lexicon of the ink art tradition.
In the specially curated sector, titled The Exceptional, the Tina Keng Gallery presents the rebellious storyteller Lin Ju. Lin’s work is characterized by an inward journey into the sensorial and psychical presence. Often drawing from mythological references and schools of philosophy, Lin illustrates on the painting scroll a familiar yet deeply alienating cosmology. The icon-like figures, cannibalistic and disfigured, summon the image of the self-rejuvenating mystic beast, Shirou, from the ancient Chinese mythological anthology Classic of Mountains and Seas. The artist, with his awe-inspiring depictions, transforms into a modern shaman to give a contemporary undertone to the allegories of ancient mythologies.
