Mind Set Art Center is honored to present a solo exhibition by the important Taiwanese female artist Juin Shieh, titled "From Single to Dual. From Dual to Single". The exhibition takes a series of works created by the artist in 1997, titled "From Single to Dual. From Dual to Single", as its theme, and brings together her important creations from the past 15 years. Through different themes and visual presentations in different stages, the exhibition showcases the artist's exploration of various stages of self, and presents a complete portrayal of Shieh's life reflections in her paintings.
Using symbolic images, the artist portrays the consciousness of women in social structures. Her experiences of pregnancy and the changes that come with entering family life have led Shieh to use her brush to depict the energy interaction between new life and the mother's body, interpreting the dissection of female roles and the reproduction of self-awareness in the journey of women's lives, based on the concept of "From Single to Dual. From Dual to Single".
Virginia Woolf said, "As a woman, I have no country." Shieh's painting is a platform that projects the personal stages of life. The creative spirit is deeply influenced by the counter-classicism of mannerism, expressing enormous questioning of existing institutions and perceptions. And from such questioning, it shifts to a concern for marginal anti-orthodoxy, and the outcry of women's vulnerability also arises from this. The protagonist in her paintings is like an "organism" that frees itself from the constraints of the nation and borders, transcending the limitations of time and space. The fantasy world created by the painter's brushwork floats before the viewer, like the poems left behind in the dirge of purgatory, conveying the once silenced screams, with a sharp sense of indignation and passionate enthusiasm.
The works exhibited this time, "From Single to Dual. From Dual to Single" feature groups of tangled and contorted black female bodies floating in an endless white field. Each limb is plump, and the poses are vigorous and lively, resembling energetic living organisms twisting restlessly. The oppressive sense of survival competition is further intensified by the sticky, heavy oil paint texture and the melancholic black forms, filling the space with a helpless suffocating feeling. The bodies seem to have been reduced to pre-evolutionary cells, reproducing outside the realm of illusion. The silent world in the painting not only shows the physical bondage but also the spiritual detachment caused by the objective environment's oppression and limitations in the survival space of women.
The other significant artwork on display, "Being Covered by Flowers" echoes Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The Yellow Wallpaper." It describes how the protagonist, a postpartum woman, becomes trapped in a labyrinth of layered, torn, and uncontrollable floral patterns on the wallpaper, like the tendrils of a banyan tree. She sees her fictional self-crawling and creeping through the two-dimensional space of the wallpaper, while her physical self and her imaginary self-become increasingly intertwined, offering her a sense of attachment in her suspended melancholy.
Shieh looks back on her busy roles as a mother, daughter, wife, artist, and teacher, and draws on her personal experience of being confined within herself to conduct independent thinking in her creative work. By interweaving the physical and the spiritual, she uses her creative platform to navigate the visual contexts laid out at various stages of her life.
Through Shieh's works, we can either completely or intermittently linger in the shadow-like colors, seeing various experiences of interweaving and entanglement in our own lives. Also, through her layers of brushstrokes and intense visual language, we can awaken from the background trauma dance, and give birth to a deeper reflection and concern for the relationship between human nature and social structure.