Mind Set Art Center is delighted to take part in the 26th edition Artissima. It’s a return after the presentation by Marina Cruz in 2015. This time, MSAC entitles the project “Shan shui • the Earth”, featuring eight artists the gallery has either presented or been working with on long-term basis, including Buen CALUBAYAN, Marina CRUZ, Nona GARCIA, LEE Ming-tse, Mia LIU, Shinji OHMAKI, SHI Jin-Hua and TANG Jo-Hung. The art fair will hold its preview on Thursday, 31 October, and open to the public from 1 to 3 November.
The nature as a subject of art has played important roles in the evolution of art for both the West and East, despite with different characteristics and historical meanings. In the East, landscape in Chinese Ink Painting has become a symbolization of the feelings or wills of the artist or scholar. In the West, once served as the background of mythological or religious paintings, landscape has evolved into a realm where people are allowed to immerse in the nature and contemplate the reality, and at the same time as the place for the artist’s spiritual traveling. Either from the Western or Eastern point of view, landscape occupies a place which is not to be neglected. It not only reflects the ways people view or consider the world, but also reveals the process of people’s encounters with the nature and the essentiality for human being to keep a dialogue with the nature.
Investigating into a subject with a long tradition, “Shan shui • the Earth” reconsiders the role and evolution of landscape in the hopes of exploring possibilities and influences it could bring to the contemporary art after all the breakthroughs made at the peak of Chinese Ink Painting and the times following the Impressionism. It starts with Nona GARCIA and Buen CALUBAYAN who have imbued contemporary visual elements into paintings of landscape subject, followed by SHI Jin-Hua, who reconstructs natural scenery with pencil lines. The project further presents Shinji OHMAKI and Marina CRUZ, who maps with abstract lines or response upon the landscape by oil rendering, and TANG Jo-Hung who infuses the form of eastern aesthetics into paintings. Furthermore, LEE Ming-tse reacts to the contemporary age and reveals the unique cultural aspect of Taiwan through innovative use of ink and the schemata-like images; Mia LIU develops the drawing installation by conduction of gathering and layering the strokes on traditional ink wash paintings.
