Despite the name of their current group exhibition at the Hong-Gah Museum (鳳甲美術館) -- "Girls at Ease" (女子自在) -- the five young women artists in the show do not try to make grand feminist statements. The exhibits, mostly installations, show the artists' respective dreams and memories through innovative materials including yarn and glue and seem united only by the fact that they were all created by women.
Huang Lan-ya's (黃蘭雅) Soft Sculptures (軟雕塑) series is composed of several porous and amorphous structures dotted on the walls and the corners of the gallery. These literally soft sculptures are made from a foaming agent, usually used to patch cracks in walls, covered in glue. "I didn't really sculpt them but let the foaming mass take its own shape. It seemed like they were growing at their own will. Sometimes the results are quite unexpected," Huang said. She then painted the sculptures in brilliant colors, making them look like a colony of tropical sea creatures or blooming cacti.
Beside Huang's works, shrouded in gauze, is an unsettling installation by Chiang Mei-lun (江玫倫). The mysterious crimson object hanging from the ceiling looks like intestines taken from a freshly killed animal, still pulsing lightly.
The installation is made of Chiang's favorite material -- yarn. "Yarn is like our second skin. There's an intimacy between cloth and our body. It's natural to use it in my works," she said. This personal touch can also be found in Cloth Object (布件), Chiang's second work in the exhibition. It is composed of a shelf, also made of yarn, stocked with Chiang's personal belongings, seeming to tell the story of a girl's life.
Using photography, Chang Hsing-yu (張杏玉) deals with girls' lives from an historical angle. The Poetry of Skin (膚賦) series lines one wall with images of female backs projected with various traditional Chinese images. On the adjacent wall is a photo of a bare back without any pattern. The patterns projected onto the women's backs include images of dragons, children and flowers. They show the standards ancient Chinese society imposed on women, like being fertile and compliant with her husband, and the fantasies men had of their bodies.
Chang's attitude toward this tradition is expressed in the last panel, in which the projected pattern on the female flank looks like a question mark.
Huang Ching-yi's (黃靜怡) Backyard (後院) turns a large part of the gallery into a showcase for corrugated paper. This installation would look like a regular backyard but for the fact that everything in it, fruits, pot plants, drifting clouds and the skipping dog, are made of bits of corrugated paper.
"I get the corrugated paper mostly from cartons for fruits or other goods. The material is the epitome of industrialization. It originally came from trees, then was made into something useful and commercial by humans, but now I've turned it again into part of nature," Huang said
Lin Feng-ru's (林芳如) interactive installation has viewers stand in front of a projector to see their shadow overlap projections of trees and paper birds on the wall. Playing with the effects of shadows and light, this untitled work provides lighthearted humor.
One feature of this exhibition is that each artist is given a "closet," a showcase in which they can freely place whatever they want. Visitors to this area at the back of the gallery will see the artists' past works, the original idea from which their works developed and their collection of objects related to their works. In this way, viewers are invited to share in the artists' personal lives, as well as the creative product.Art Notes:
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