Also Japanese, two-boy group (or two-man group — Yusuke Nakano is 33 and Yasuhiko Hayashi 38 years old) Paramodel filled a 58 ping (193m²) gallery floor, walls and ceiling with toy car tracks, toy cranes and Styrofoam mountains in an installation they said they’d shown, with little variation, in six countries. It was hard to get a word out of the Osaka-based pair through the museum’s inept Japanese-to-Chinese translator. “We like toys,” is about as deep as the 20-minute interview got. Nonetheless, the room is fun to walk through. Once. Then you feel like a grup and never want to see it again.
Pakistani artist Rashid Rana had no such trouble describing his Desperately Seeking Paradise, a 3m cube that from one angle looks like a block of mirrors. Walk around the piece and a cityscape comes into view. Then look closer and discover the image is composed of tiny pictures of his hometown, Lahore. The artist doesn’t claim to have invented the technique, which is perhaps most popular from advertisements for the 1998 movie The Truman Show. Rana said he had no idea how many images went into making the work, but that he started with about 100,000 digital photographs and worked from there. He wants “geometric abstraction and representation to coexist, something often thought impossible.”
Malaysian artist Justin Lim said he thought his paintings were going to be shown in Taipei, but happened to be in Taichung with his 11-man percussion band Aseana — no relation to the airline — for the Taichung Jazz Festival just down the street from the museum last month. Lim’s paintings explore Malay ghosts from folk legend. “I use the ghosts and apply them to current political situations,” he said. In Oil We Trust is based on the story of a serial rapist called Orang Minyak who covers himself in black oil to sneak around undetected.
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