Date｜April 23, 2022 – May 20, 2022
Location｜1st Floor, No. 20 Wenhu St., Taipei City
Opening Reception｜15:00-18:00, April 23, 2022
Mind Set Art Center is launching the newest works by artist Tang Jo-Hung. The presentation is set to run from April 23, 2022 through May 20, at the gallery’s Project Room. This is Tang’s latest showing since his 2021 solo exhibition “Ballade”. We are delighted to invite you to join us at the event’s opening, set at 3:00 pm on April 23.
Tang has always infused his paintings with theatrical elements. The figures on his canvas often stimulate our imagination for fictional realms and characters. The upcoming show presents his five newest paintings, the standout of which is a 2.5-meter-wide diptych named “Skating by the Lake”. The work consists of two paintings placed side by side, yet they do come together coherently to form a larger work. The artists used similar brush strokes, color palettes and forms on both canvases. However, a closer look reveals the finer differences between two: a giant tree dominates the frame on the left. Its tree trunk is filled with marvelously descriptive details, and everywhere the branches connect presents a change in colors or brush style. These seemingly irrational changes come together to form its own unique visual language. In the lower portion of the canvas, a gentleman sits and waits at the tree trunk, wearing a top hat and holding a cane, with his boots point toward the lake and his face illuminated by the light glowing from his phone screen. The lake is a fascinating mixture of black, grey, blue and purple, with tumbling waves in the distance. Meanwhile, a colossal pink figure wearing roller skates is gliding across the lake in the frame on the right.
These colorful tones and imaginative scenarios are a hallmark of Tang Jo-Hung’s paintings. Ms. Ping Lin, the former director of Taipei Fine Arts Museum, once remarked about his work, “For Tang, creating art is a process of the symbiosis between the self and the subject. It is as if a soul and its doppelganger are both looking for a body to inhabit. The canvas and paints serve as the fertile soil from which the painter cultivates his artistic seeds in his mind as daily ritual. With a gaze sometimes as piercing as an eagle and sometimes as innocent as a child, the artist watches his paintings grow from under his hands. Through his paint brushes, the artist’s “self” embarks on a remarkable journey, one that oscillates between emotional responses and logical judgments. If you ever get a chance to physically touch his canvas, a fiber board that seems to breathe on its own, you would understand why it is the perfect medium that allows the painter’s long, curvy lines and fluttering brush stokes to perfectly manifest. The art supplies he brings with him are his furniture on a journey, one allows him to extend, swirl, rub and scrape on his canvas to create rich and barren landscapes and to capture moments of ecstasy and sorrow. However, one must not rush to capture the illusive messages embedded in his paintings, nor mistaken them for his travelogue. If a viewer cannot immerse oneself in his painting and travel alongside his characters, one would gain nothing from Tang’s creation.”
