On the lowest floor of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM), a large room contains household items from coffee cans and wrapping paper to a mangled shopping cart. This is Lili Deli, the latest exhibition by multi-disciplinary artist Steph Huang (黃麗音).
The London-based Huang deftly blends painting, photography and sculpture to comment on mass production, commerce and consumerism.
There are platforms the size of small cars made entirely of shredded paper, a cherry made of hand-blown glass, a painting of a shopping cart drowning as though it is part of a Monet painting and more.
Photo: Lery Hiciano, Taipei Times
THROW-AWAY CULTURE
Huang has had several exhibitions satirizing and lampooning our contemporary obsession with buying more than we need and wasting more than the planet can handle.
“I am always aware of capitalism and consumerism in my work by engaging with materials from the capitalist world,” Huang told the Taipei Times.
Photo: Lery Hiciano, Taipei Times
In particular, she focuses on how speed, efficiency and affordability are prioritized in our society.
Upon walking into Lili Deli, visitors are greeted by a large platform of shredded paper with several art pieces on top of it, including Ride the Wave, made out of a horseradish root tube.
On another platform, a repurposed coffee can from the Netherlands and a human-sized paper clip stand tall, divorced from their original context.
Photo: Lery Hiciano, Taipei Times
URBAN DETRITUS
Huang describes her process as actively seeking out items left behind in urban areas, then gathering them in her studio, “waiting for their moment.”
What ties all these objects together? They once mattered, or functioned, or served some purpose far removed from being centerpieces at an art exhibit in Taipei — their commercial usefulness expiring, to be reimagined as part of an ongoing commentary on the need to consciously reconsider our own consumption habits.
Each piece is ambiguous yet familiar, readily willing to accept a viewer’s projections.
The shopping cart, dug out of a landfill in Scotland, looks like one that anyone would use in a supermarket, and the can of coffee grounds evokes memories of grandma with her morning cup of joe.
Yet each piece, by virtue of its placement in the gallery is puzzling, cryptic and obscure in its meaning.
It is strange to see household items in such a place, to try and figure out what type of household the item already came from or, in some cases, deduce what item it was and what its original purpose could have been.
“These works hold the potential to resonate with a wide audience, as many of the works are transformations of trivial day-to-day living experiences,” Huang said.
At the same time, she says that different countries where her work has been shown lead to different audience reactions, a “gap.” One work that is under construction is Lili Deli’s Tower of Freebies Project, where visitors are invited to bring unwanted items from home and deposit them to create a makeshift, collaborative monument.
At the end of the exhibition’s run in June, the tower’s items will then be distributed to interested parties, who can hopefully find more use or meaning in them than those who first abandoned them.
“I would love to see the tower reach its full potential,” she said.
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