Looking at art that looks back to you

Chen Po-wei's (陳柏維) artwork is certainly something to look at. Giant eyeballs stare back at you from each of his canvasses -- eyeballs dressed in suits, eyeballs being mugged by cats, eyeballs in a bowl waiting to be eaten. If there's an absurd situation in which you can imagine an anthropomorphic eye, Chen has likely painted it. They resemble something a bored high school student might have scratched onto the cover of his notebooks, but Chen has thus far built a career on them.

His work has been featured in dozens of exhibits around Taiwan, trod the boards as costume and set pieces for various theater productions and been featured on television programs here and in China and Singapore. For the moment though dozens of his pieces can be seen at Citizen Cain, a recently opened restaurant-bar cum artspace on Dungfeng St.

"Most people paint what they see, I paint what I see with," Chen said at the Friday night opening of the exhibition. The show is a continuation of an exhibit from last year titled The Eyeball Loves Globe. This year's offering, The Eyeball Loves Globe's "How Are You?", is more of the same. If you saw last year's exhibit, there's really little point in seeing this year's -- unless you're as fascinated with eyeballs as Chen is.

The best reason to go have a look is the venue itself. Citizen Cain is a joint venture between five transplants from around the globe still busy honing every aspect of their establishment. They're still flushed with excitement and the attention being given to the menu, drinks list and decor is all to the benefit of their customers. "It's our baby," said part-owner Dominik Tyliszczak. "Our first boy." As an art space, though, Citizen Cain has its limitations. With booths and a bar lining the walls, there's limited space for hanging larger pieces. The current exhibit compensates for this in part by plastering laminated prints to the tables themselves. You can munch a pizza while an eyeball businessman stares up at you from the other side of your plate or a newborn eyeball crawls across a canvass hung over your shoulder. The pizza tastes good nonetheless.

You can look at eyeballs looking at you from now until Feb. 12 at Citizen Cain, 67 Dungfeng St., near the Jenai circle (台北市東豐街67號). More of Chen's work can be seen at his Web site, www.eyeball.com.tw.