Art is not only a visual language for expressing emotions but also an important medium for us to think and respond to the world. It is precisely because of our ability to think that humans generate activities such as memory, dreams, and stream of consciousness. In the latest group exhibition at the Contemporary Tang Art Center, each artist embarks on a journey through the galaxy of the mind, starting from three inspiring concepts: memory, playfulness, and stream of consciousness.
As an act, a process, a memory, or an illusion, painting constantly explores the essence of things. Nona Garcia’s work expresses attention to nature and ecology with its vivid realism style. Two large and detailed paintings in the exhibition depict the microscopic details of her surroundings.
Switching between memory and text, classical and contemporary, Zhang Ben’s paintings arrange complex and precise visual orders. Images of churches, pendulum clocks, compasses, towers of Babel, planets, and more constitute the rhetoric of his paintings. Everyday doodles, imagined scenes, associations from reading, photos from travels are categorized and organized into various folders by Zhang Ben. These fragments of memory unconsciously combine to form floating images, eventually creating the images in the paintings.
Cameron Platter uses a collision of mime, supernatural landscapes, kitsch aesthetics, and the absurdity between objects and their incarnations to convey unsettling aspects of human civilization, including issues of capitalism, conspiracy, colonialism, moral decay, humanity, and suffering in today’s generation. The artist overlaps images of desire and pleasure with images of fear and despair, enhancing the dramatic nature of the work.
Gao Yu’s works and names are mostly puns, related to responses and inquiries about the current situation. Lively images and vocabulary such as bitter gourd, puppies, and Zhu Bajie carry anthropomorphic and self-alienating characteristics, playfully realizing a certain exploration of the reality world and internal issues of the art system, lacking happiness and humor to loosen the insincere anxiety.
This kind of anxiety seems to be ineffective in Yang Na’s portrayal of various “doll-like” images, surrealistic techniques seem to depict a whimsical dream, permeated with the artist’s emotions and consciousness, he uses smooth cartoon images to express the distorted state of humanity. Rodel Tapaya recombines many image fragments, imitations are chosen, each one is narrated, metaphorized, and dispersed on the canvas.
Each artist expresses concerns about human society through dreamlike elements. While their works may appear light-hearted and humorous on the surface, they actually contain reflections on society. These paintings are like allegories of human civilization, waiting for the audience to explore one by one.
Group Exhibition – Memory, Playfulness, and Stream of Consciousness
Date: From now until March 16
Time: 11:00 AM to 7:00 PM
Location: Contemporary Tang Art Center, 10th Floor, H Queen’s, 80 Queen’s Road Central, Central
Image source and learn more: Contemporary Tang Art Center
