`Distant Reality' a quiet distraction

Two weeks ago, when British theorist and critic Neil Leach came to the Urban Flashes architecture conference in Taipei, he briefly touched on a certain idea currently shared by a number of scientists and critics, namely that "the whole world can be simulated on the computer." As the hypothesis goes, all that is needed for this is enough processing power.

Leach could be classed as a technophile, a person who embraces technology and looks optimistically to what it will bring. He's into the digital, the virtual, networks and mobility. When he speaks about ideas, he readily quotes seminal philosophers of post-structuralist thought like Martin Heidegger as well as contemporary critics like Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who say understanding technology is now integral to understanding more classical disciplines like sociology and philosophy.

The current show at Taipei's IT Park art gallery, Distant Reality, addresses similar themes. After all, the four exhibiting artists, Tsong Pu (莊普), Ku Shih-yung (顧世勇), Chu Chia-hua (朱嘉樺) and Chen Hui-chaio (陳慧嶠), are also capable of ignoring that they too live in a world of bits, bytes and megabytes, and also that their world forces them to look at things in terms of codes and data packets.

But instead of looking at technology as the technophiles do, with near unwavering faith, these local artist accept the changing environment a little more naturally, retaining in their works a character that's both local and human.

Tsong Pu, who for years has been using palette knives to smear repeated ovals of paint onto gridded canvases -- a style that in its time has progressed from looking like minimalism to looking like pixilation -- has displayed four of his tinier pixel paintings. In combination, and even more interestingly, he's strewn hundreds and hundreds of dice, the kind used locally for everything from drinking games to gambling with street vendors for sausage, all over the floor of the main gallery. So in walking through, you're consistently kicking the dice, rolling the dice, haphazardly playing with the fates of all these tiny anonymous units. And even though the dice are all the same, they're characteristically Taiwanese, which is something that may only be important or even noticeable to people who live here. It's like walking in the street of your home city, the faces you see are basically anonymous and statistically repeatable, but at least in a way they're also familiar.

Chen's two paintings, Far away...(遠方的) and Pulsation (跳動), express a similarly pseudo-digital vernacular. The paintings' grounds consist of lacquered metal, surfaces that are smooth and nearly perfectly uniform. And into these plain fields she has set patterns, codes, or braille of raised yellow and white dots, which would be a cold formalism, except that the dots are ping pong balls.

Ku's contribution to the show is a virtualization of the gallery within the gallery itself. He's made scale photographs of sections of the gallery's walls and floor, framed them and hung them in their appropriate spots. One almost hopes that someone buys one, takes it home and hangs a painting on top of it. In point of fact, the piece was created to represent IT Park in South Korea at the Kwangju Biennial in March.

All told, Distant Reality is no gangbuster show. A bit spare, it is more of a quiet distraction, or a watershed. IT Park typically leaves a few weeks around Chinese New Year free each year, filling the galleries with whatever flows into place. According to Chen, the four artists came together for this show, "because we realized the work we were doing was all related in certain ways."