I remember reading Gabriel García Márquez’s short story “Light is Like Water” when I was young. It tells the tale of two brothers playing with a rowboat, which was a gift from their father. They then shattered a light bulb so they could sail the boat in the light that flooded their room. Towards the end of the story, the magic light released by the two brothers almost flooded the entire city. I was mesmerized by the imagery of shifting time and space created by the flowing light. The story is filled with fantasy, romance, poetry and vivid imagination, which I believe are the core elements of art. There has also been rich imagery of flowing light in Asian literature. Renowned Chinese poet Su Shi once wrote in his poem “The Former Ode on the Red Cliffs”, “The oars of laurel and the paddles of orchid strike the water that reflects the sparkling moon light as the boat moves upstream.” The poem paints a picture in which the moon in the sky and its reflection in the water come together to convey poetic emotions. The fabulous imagery portrayed in literature is the inspiration behind this opening exhibition for the fourth iteration of Mind Set Art Center. And we hope the flowing light, lines and shapes would transport the audience to a magic journey that blurs the line between reality and fantasy, between memories and imagination.
“Flowing Light” features the works of 21 artists. The list includes JIA Aili, Rao FU, SHI Jinsong, WU Yiming, YU Ji, SHI Jin-hua, LEE Ming-tse, Juin SHIEH, E.Y. Shih-chih YANG, TANG Jo-hung, LIN Wei-hsiang, Lee YANG, LEE Jo-mei, Shinji OHMAKI, Marina CRUZ, Ana Maria MICU, Nona GARCIA, Patricia EUSTAQUIO, Robert BITTENBENDER, Buen CALUBAYAN and Rinus Van de Velde. The artworks on display are created in a variety of media, including oil painting, ink brush painting, installation, concept and performance art. All of the artworks point to the exhibit’s title “Flight Light” in various ways. Some are made with light as the central element, some explore the possibilities and uncertainty of the flowing motion, one work in particular cycle three physical states of solid, liquid and gas. The idea behind “Flowing Light” isn’t limited to physical phenomena or religious symbolism. It is also an experiment for cross-disciplinary creativity and thinking, and an outlook for the future of the gallery.
The Flickering Light vs the Elusive Shadows
Two of the artworks are produced with light as their core element. The idea behind is Many artworks of the exhibition displays the flowing and shifting of light, and the light not only changes over time, but over different spaces as well. In “Gravity and Grace”, Shinji OHMAKI has created an installation artwork that transports us into a world of shifting lights and shadows, where an illumination of how small us humans are would lead us to a new appreciation of life and its gifts. On the other side of the exhibition hall is “Crumpled Memory IV”, another light-based installation by Juin HSIEH. The artist has crumpled and reshaped her draft paper and displayed their rich tones and content – a reflection of the inner thoughts and feelings of women. The crumpling of the pages also signifies the reshuffling and reforming of memories and history. The self-contained, introspective perspective in HSIEH’s art stands in sharp contrast to the dazzling, outward light in OHMAKI’s piece.
The change in light isn’t just interpreted within space, it is perceived along the axis of time as well. In “Pen Walking #171”, SHI Jin-hua drags his pencil along the canvas on the wall to portray a seascape with gleaming waves -- a metaphor for the river of time. Belgian artist Rinus VAN De VELDE has produced “Law number 127: If any one “”point a finger”” at a sister…”, a dynamic sketch of a snapshot of abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell working on her painting. With his finger painting techniques, the artist has managed to blur the boundary between sketching and painting and to infuse the characteristics of ink brush painting. Adding to the ensemble is Taiwanese female artist LEE Jo-mei’s new artwork “Landscape Remain 08”. LEE lays the foundation by making a sketching of a royal palm tree, and proceeds combine elements of origami and sculpture to produce an art mixture. By doing so, she has managed to conduct a dialogue on the linearity of aesthetics and to transform lines into three-dimensional existence in a space filled with shifting lights and shadows.
New Interpretation of the Eastern Context
Besides the installation artworks, many paintings have also shown a variety of interpretations on the changing light, shadows, time and space in a manner that is in tune with the contemporary zeitgeist. In her 2019 painting “Involuntary Landscape”, Nona GARCIA has imbued her frame with modern consciousness and eastern philosophy. She has managed to create an oil painting that’s akin to the wrapped up environmental installations of Christo & Jeanne-Claude while implicitly hinting at the passing of time in landscape. The artist has breathed new life in the medium with her fresh perspective and techniques. Other painters have also broken new grounds in their own ways: E.Y. Shih-chih YANG restructures eastern aesthetics in her paintings with collage, a distinctly western technique, whereas WU Yiming adopts cinematic compositions and deep, multilayered black in the background to revolutionize the language of ink brush painting. Rao FU, a Chinese painter residing in Germany, has fused his cultural background with German Expressionism and Romanticism to create paintings that address cross-cultural topics with distinctly mixed visual signatures.
Sculptor YU Ji has employed atypical materials and techniques to create her “Flesh in Stone” series, which consists of a series of statues that fuses the imagery of the western “torso” and the eastern Buddha. LEE Ming-the, on the other hand, has combined found objects, pulp, comic book-style draining and ink brush painting to create “Tai Chi”, a mixed media artwork. LEE has successfully infused elements from high and low art, as well as aesthetics from folklores and academia. Also pushing the envelope is SHI Jinsong, who has brought his “Jiangnan Grey No.1”. To make this series of paintings, SHI collected dust from the Jiangnan region of China and ground it into powder to mix into paint. The resulting paintings encapsulate the act of collecting as well as the journey of free-flowing brushstrokes. Beyond the spontaneous quality, SHI’s work also shows a potential direction where the medium of painting itself could further evolve.
Reflection and Pondering of Utopian Sentiments
While the element of “light” has been captured and harnessed by several artists as a key element for their works, several others in the exhibition focus their attention on the dynamics of the “flowing” and stimulate our imagination in a different manner. The large-scale installation art pieces stimulate our imagination of flowing light with shifting visual elements. In “Duino Elegies”, JIA Aili places an apparatus which displays the transformation from solid to liquid and gas alongside an image of Vladimir Lenin to express a romantic sentiment on idealism and revolution. Filipino artist Buen CALUBAYAN expresses similar sentiments in “Pasyon and Revolution”, an installation work in which he crafts a hammock with the pages from the book of the same title. The artist focuses on the key terms in the book, such as “revolution”, “decolonization” and “enlightenment”, and has created an artwork that exhibits characteristics of sculptures, concept and performance art. CALUBAYAN’s art challenges our positions in written history and provokes revision on the historical failures of utopianism and reflections on the trauma of our colonial past. Filipina artist Patricia Eustaquio also reflected on colonialism and its aftermath in her own way. With a mirror as base, she has added on top of it pieces of plaster and volcanic sand to complete “Land”, her installation art. The work leads the viewer to look back at the Age of Discovery from both the perspective of the colonizer and that of the colonized. It makes us reflect on the profound and long-lasting impact of the event on the Philippines and other colonies around the world, as well as force us to rethink the nature of so-called “history and civilization”.