Crisis of Now: Contemporary Asian Photography Part II
HOU Lulu Shur-Tzy / TING Chaong-Wen / I-Hsuen CHEN
December 11-14, 2019
Opening & Artist Talks: Wednesday, Dec 11, 7-9pm
Closing reception: Saturday, Dec 14, 6-9pm
Crisis of Now: Contemporary Asian Photography Part II features work by three Taiwanese photographers, HOU Lulu Shur-Tzy, TING Chaong-Wen, and I-Hsuen CHEN. Curated by Chun-Chi WANG and organized by IDOLONSTUDIO (Union of European Asian Artists), this exhibition is presented with the support of Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of China (Taiwan) and Taipei Economic and Cultural Office (TECO) in Houston (TX, USA).
The exhibition will be on view for four days only, open Wednesday through Saturday from noon to 5pm, plus opening and closing evening receptions.
Please join us Wednesday night when curator Chun-chi WANG and artists Prof. HOU Lulu Shur-Tzy and TING Chaong-Wen will be in attendance. At 7:30 HOU Lulu Shur-Tzy (TW) and Allison Young (US) will engage in a public conversation. Their discussion will focus on ways to interpret the interaction between photography and society, and the mind-set and experience of art intervention into the community.
Crisis of Now : Contemporary Asian Photography is an exhibition series that takes a close look at contemporary culture and art practice from Asian artists’ perspectives. The exhibitions concentrate on specific pieces of history and life experiences, but also attempt to construct or discover relationships between historical contexts from varied perspectives. Specifically, they make observations either from different geographical locations synchronously, or from the same location at different times. The personal experiences and collective consciousness are linked with multiple historical trajectories charted by the vicissitudinal political and social forces.
In Part II of the “Crisis of Now” series we invited three Taiwanese artists —HOU Lulu Shur-Tzy, TING Chaong-Wen and I-Hsuen CHEN— to present their contemporary photography through multi-cultural observations.
ARTIST BIOS
HOU Lulu Shur-Tzy (Taiwan, 1962– ) was born in Chiayi, Taiwan. In 1985, she graduated from the Department of Philosophy at National Taiwan University and in 1992 she received a Master of Fine Art degree from the Rochester Institute of Technology, U.S.A.. Now she is an Associate Professor at the Department of Crafts and Creative Design of the National University of Kaohsiung. In 2017, her solo exhibitions “Out of Place — A Trilogy on Kaohsiung Military Dependents’ Villages” at Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, the artist’s creative work involving Kaohsiung’s Zuoying and Fengshan military dependents’ villages over the course of many years. HOU has been widely exhibited in numerous international exhibitions including the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art(2019); Tokyo Photographic Art Museum(2018); Fukuoka Asian Art Museum(2012); Kokanecho Art Bazzar, Yokohama(2014) and in 2017, her works “Song of Asian Foreign Brides in Taiwan” were published in the book: “Creating Across Cultures: Women in the Arts of China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan,” which featured the stories of 16 leading Chinese women artists.
TING Chaong-Wen (Taiwan, 1979– ) was born in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. He graduated from the Tainan National University of the Arts in 2006, and currently lives and works in Tainan. TING specializes in mixed media installation incorporated with images and objects. Drawing inspiration from his personal experience, his works often reveal specific historical narratives created by embedding readymades in specific exhibition contexts. With surprising and innovative attempts, the artist deconstructs, extends and re-interprets the collective history while examining material culture, historic conflicts, collective memory and transnational phenomena and problems. His works have been extensively exhibited in numerous art museums and biennials, among which are Asian Art Biennial (National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung; 2019); High Tide 17—Fremantle Biennale (Artsource, Fremantle; 2017); Nakanojo Biennale 2017 (Former Hirozakari Brewery, Gunma, Japan; 2017); Citation from Craft (The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; 2017); Taipei Biennial 2016。
I-Hsuen CHEN (Taiwan, 1982– ) was born and raised in Taiwan. After receiving an MFA in Photography from Pratt Institute in 2012, he now lives and works in Taipei. He has an interdisciplinary practice that experiments with photography, publishing, video installation, and performance. CHEN’s work has been shown at photo festivals and biennials internationally, including New York Photo Festival (2012), Singapore International Photography Festival (2014), Taipei Biennial (2016), Lianzhou Foto Festival (2016), JIMEI ARLES International Photography Festival (2016), and Offline Browser—Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition (2018.) His work is also in the Permanent Collections of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Kadist Collection.
CURATOR:
Chun-Chi WANG is a curator and artist based in Berlin. She is trained as an artist at New York University Tisch School of the Arts. In 2012, she worked on together with Anselm Franke as Assistant Curator for Taipei Biennial, Modern Monsters / Death and Life of Fiction. Her projects presented in various collaborations from 2010 to now. A collective and intergenerational investigation of feminism in the context of contemporary art practice that included a symposium, exhibition; and lecture. She is the founder and director of IDOLONSTUDIO (Berlin). WANG’s work develops ideas that lead into a collaborative process-based working relationship with artists to examine issues she considers crucial, such as: critically assessing contemporary culture, investigating the way meaning is constructed and endowing the world with complexity at a time when the surface is rarely scratched and time is short. Her curatorial voice endeavors to make people re-think, slow down, delve beneath the surface and to excavate rather than simply consume. It does not summarize or offer answers, rather it asks questions that lead to contemplation, discussion, and new thoughts about the world around us.
ORGANIZER: IDOLONSTUDIO
(Union of European Asian Artists)
SPONSORS
Taipei Economic and Cultural Office (TECO) in Houston (TX, USA)
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of China (Taiwan)
