Orgasmic art livens up MOCA

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Taipei, has been using its large space to showcase some of the best in contemporary art since it first opened in 2001. Less known is MOCA Studio, a space that focuses on up-and-coming local artists. It is an ideal place to showcase the recently opened exhibition called A Cactus in Yellow Bloom, an exhibition on contemporary metal art by four Taiwanese artists.

"We [want] to create a platform for young artists because they might not have a chance to show their works, especially in a museum of this scale," said Elaine Liu (劉怡伶), a spokesperson for MOCA.

According to the exhibit's curator, Hsu Mei-ing (徐玫營), contemporary metal arts originated in Europe and the US in the middle of the twentieth century as an escape from the traditional function and decorative approaches to using metal.

"The liberation of material, transcendence of technique and expansion of type, acted as a catalyst pushing [the art form] beyond the confines of the discipline," Hsu said.

The artists assembled for this exhibit follow this tradition.

In Happy Together, Lin Li-chen (林例貞) has arranged hundreds of spoons on a table interspersed with ceramic bowls, all resting on top of a surface that looks like a table or bed, where the spermatozoa-shaped spoons and ceramic bowls symbolize the process of creating life. Though all spoons are essentially the same shape, a few are cast so as to create different colors, demonstrating that some are more successful in fertilization than others.

Lin's Massage Egg is a spoon embracing and protecting a metaphoric egg, a denouement to the struggle that is taking place in Happy Together. Both works are complementary and are sublime statements on the arbitrary nature of conflict and resolution, which are instrumental to creating life.

Explosions, or perhaps ejaculations, are the centerpiece of Hung Hsui-hui's (洪秀慧) stark nobody, an installation in three parts. Hung "dissected" a doll and cast the head as metal and attached the neck to a tap with a number of hands shooting out of the skull towards a separated body — symbolized by a tub that rests on the floor a few meters away. Completing this trinity of separation is a single hand resting on the floor pulling a string.

Hung implies that in the information age there is a constant flow of information from the external world that humans have to sift through and make decisions about. The single hand resting on the floor shows that we can only ever make one choice at a time, though we have an explosion of options to choose from and it is this multiplicity of choice that creates the separation with the self and others.

Chiang Mei-fang's (江枚芳) abstract triptych Inlaid Ridge was inspired by the scenery she encountered during her travels around Taiwan. Using thin metal lines, she creates an impression of the different places she has visited resulting in a conversation between the metal lines and the light emanating into the museum hall. The work hints at the beauty of Taiwan's natural landscape and the home that she has found.

In Stay together, Cheng Jing-yun (鄭景勻) combines silver, copper and timber to show an eternal connection between husband and wife. It is a Chinese tradition, rarely practiced anymore, for the husband and bride to combine their hair in an act of eternal love. The length of the copper hair in the sculpture suggests the eternal nature of love between a man and a woman.