Rao FU, JHONG Jiang-Ze, TANG Jo-Hung：Chaos

Chaos is the beginning, as well as the end. According to Greek mythology, Chaos was the first thing to exist, and then came the world and beings. As 2018 commences, the world is overflowed with information, national boundaries are blurred, and remains of history blend with the imaginations of future. Nowadays, art works are produced massively with abundant symbols and codes, which are appropriated readily and discarded arbitrarily. At the age seems to be free, people are still manipulated by the invisible strings of various regulations, customs and systems, staging one drama after another involuntarily.

The artists present in this exhibition, Rao FU, JHONG Jiang-Ze, and TANG Jo-Hung, are from diverse backgrounds and had different artistic training. They have different artistic pursuits and each has his unique style and expression. What they share in their works is the chaotic tension and dynamics, responding to the agitation of the world as well as the mind.

Despite having been lived in Germany and immersed in European culture since his early twenties, Rao FU do have profound cultivation in Chinese culture, especially benefited from childhood training in calligraphy and Chinese ink painting in terms of artistic practice. Being fascinated with the delicate shades of colors and the disposition of Romanticism, FU blends and splashes bitumen or oil paints to render works showing the charm alike that of ink paintings. Deep affection and magical imagination are staged in scenery with rich narrative. Apart from obscure disturbance and joy associating with the doomsday, there are also as dense emotion and romantic vagary in his work. The light of chaos is thus revealed from the absurd, unbounded and dim realm.

In contrast to the interwoven relationship between the figures and the scenery in Rao FU’s work, JHONG Jiang-Ze focuses more on depicting the state of mind. With unrestrained brushstrokes as well as deconstruction of time and space, JHONG remodels realms with their own laws. Chaos, fragmentation, misplacement, and contradiction are often found in his paintings, like a disquiet cry from deep down in response to the absurd reality and illustion. TANG Jo-Hung as an urban roamer, on the other hand, shows a temperament of alienation and calmness in his work, under which visual power stretches out quietly. With outstanding coloring and free but fluent rendering, TANG returns to the essence of painting, focusing on the interflow of colors, brushstrokes, forms and composition. In this exhibition, his paintings reveal the odds and unspeakable situations in the contemporary world, with rich implications and leading to a higher spiritual vibration.

When the boundaries are no longer clear, perception would flow, and words would be dissolved in disorder imagery. In the name of “Chaos,” Rao FU, JHONG Jiang-Ze, and TANG Jo-Hung open up a journey that crosses the boundary of time and space, where memory, thought, reality and illusion grow freely.