Surface Depth: Re-search new space of contemporary painting
Liu Shih-Tung 、Lai Chiu-Chen 、Chen Chien-Jung 、Shiau-Peng Chen 、Chen Kun-Feng
2004. 05. 15 — 2004. 06. 12

EXHIBITION

Surface Depth: Re-search new space of contemporary painting
Curator / Chang Ching-Wen

“Surface Depth: Re-search new space of contemporary painting” displays the recent works, based on acrylic paints, of Lai Chiu-Chen, Liu Shih-Tung, Chen Chien-Jung, Chen Kun-Feng, Shiau-Peng Chen. These young artists taking painting training in the institute are affected by the core artists returned from overseas in ’80; in style of their paintings, reveals double-sided textures as tactful and motley from purely colorful geometry to integral appearance of contemporary circumstance; at the same time, witnesses creative direction of young painters at the age in selection and control over inventive material. In mention of creative subject, their works could see how young painters take advantage of assorted knowledge and innovations of the space to show their vision to the world and extend the road to plane painting. The expressional intermediary- “painting”, most relying on skill and tending to lose its voice in a great swagger, toughly survives against the prediction and curse- “Painting is dead” for years. The bunch of young artists around age of 30 establishes with slow motions the dullest but most plentiful pictures to describe some kind of landscapes belonging to the age. So as depth of the painting is waiting to be excavated.

Within the picture, there’s a track with a mixture of sweetness and rustiness.

Lai Chiu-Chen’s works bring a series of new windows, reveal in standardized canvas a micro-universe hinted by toy parts. These painted subjects are reformed to a new mainland, and change their quality of unparticular quantification as industrial output. Through the painter’s picking and watching, they become independently differential individuals. Those helmet, warship, snack, and cartoon figure instantly construct the colorful composition in front of us. Bulges and notches in the toy kit readily for tenoned are shelled, enlarged, and peered here, their opposite protruding or hollow holes are staring at audiences, too. If Lai Chiu-Chen’s works prompt the importance and interest of “watch”, Liu Shih-Tung’s works of comprehensive pictures in a series of intermixing acrylic paints and scraps emerge the chewing over all kinds of feedback to life except watching. Seemingly free brushes and extemporaneous scraps wrap up an embarrassedly charming status of mingling lusciousness with fault. In Chen Chien-Jung’s invention, lumps and streaks accumulated by layers of paints make audiences used to straight expect and fall into a deep cave he planned. The depressive emotion trans-marks in space level with fluid significance. Bing in face of false and true space, Chen Kun-Feng describes a variant vision in intention to out of its reality; the second-hand transfers to another of course, picture containing countless flattened and faint scenery that the “watch” by audiences becomes an unknown exploration. If moving further, all of experiences are dropped into an addiction to the present world and abstract ideal. Shiau-Peng Chen’s works in a series of pure construction by color and form, integrate to the entirety that any possibility of flowing and communicating is eliminated and compressed inside geometric chunks. Assembling to the one from fragments; completing to the absolute fineness from irregular, the five artists’ works appear some kind of path to roam through the scope of contemporary painting.