Disenchantment, Exploded View, Glider vs. Airplane 2021 Ｇ Museum of Art
Chiang Ming Chun, Duan Shiyu, Guo Cheng, Sun Chin Hsing, wei, Ye Wuji, and Zhuolan
(This is an Exhibition About How to Make Art)
/ No era has been as abundant with choices as today. One could even say that life today is something we choose. Therefore, the quality of life today depends on the quality of decisions.
/ From this perspective, some of the joy in contemporary life is a product of the modern world. Online shopping is a scientific application, and product labels inherit rationality--Most of life today can be measured and planned. Regardless of whether you believe, as some philosophers have stated, that the human spirit died with modernity, the disenchanted, no-longer-mysterious world is a fact of life today.
/ However, a disenchanted world does not guarantee disenchanted mind. Rationality is not a genetic trait, and contemporary AI may be the true incarnation of rationality. Whether we want to live a good life or avoid being controlled by an algorithm, we must have the ability to identify differences so that we can maintain autonomy. To prevent these mental exercises from turning life upside down, it would be best if these substitutes, such as contemporary art, seemed nearly identical to live.
Anything can be art, and that is evident in exhibitions today. The boundary between art and life has started to blur, leading us to believe that art is also constant disenchantment. Thinking about this kind of art is worthwhile because disenchantment with art is also disenchantment with life.
A prerequisite for thinking about this kind of art is that definitions of art are useless. Due to discussions about the end of history or postmodern ideas—people are no longer interested in art definition—we need new ways of knowing. Duchamp’s urinal suggests that art is a signifier or nominalist. “What is art?” is now meaningless, and “Everyone is an artist” has grown stale.
/ It must be noted that, because useless and mysterious things run the risk of abuse or sophistry, we must be prudent or consider the utility. For example, what are artists creating today? We worked with seven young artists who explored their artistic methods, giving us something to hold.
/We want to understand art from several angles, like an exploded-view diagram or structural manual for art. We want to learn how subjects, images, and concepts in this exhibition work, how artists present artistic ideas, and how they reveal the secret relationship with life and the world. By this, we identify the structures and subtle differences in this world. It’s like identification that something with fixed wings but no engine is a glider but an airplane.
About the Exhibition (Exhibition Composition)
Exploded view: These illustrations, found in the instruction manuals that come with everyday products, offer a three-dimensional, disassembled view of the product, making its structure visible at a glance. It May be one of the wealthiest products of human intelligence: a species takes apart the things it makes and shows the principles that underpin it. So pervasive that it is hard not to consider it an achievement of modern life. Imagine that the manual in your hands had a long history, linking to the belief held by German sociologist Max Weber more than a century ago—that there is no longer a mysterious, unpredictable power playing its part.
This vision of knowledge and the disenchantment that Weber discussed does not disdain the ancient world. For example, the ancients may have better understood the implements in their lives than modern people. However, the present seems superior to the past because we have more knowledge.
Can an exhibition be understood this way?
Art stems from the relationship between the artist and the world. The exhibition attempts to understand artistic discernment and to show how artists create effective ways to identify what hide in everyday life.
The artworks in this exhibition can be considered an installation of each artist. They are combinations of multiple works that different parts lie different meanings; they calibrate one another and bring out the artists’ innermost emotions. The artist and the art are present.
And all it begins with Guard of Art.
In Chiang Ming Chun’s work, he undertook a Lantern Art Festival to make money as a graduate artist. With the intermeddle between business and governments, the young artist felt that he had to film himself and his fellows while working, which would likely pass into silence once the festival opened. The only period of art that exist.
The Guard of Art records the boredom of the everyday lives of art workers. And it is interesting for us to ask: How can boredom become art? When artists reveal and magnify these moments, the emotions caught between the art industry and young artists gain an artistic quality. Alternatively, we could call art “contextual boredom.”
Returning to the exhibition, Duan Shiyu translates human existence into two forms. We can see painting as an appendix to photography, woven into the artist’s expression of the circumstances of existence. The misunderstood logic of Sun Chih-Hsing’s DIYs points out that hopes for life often come from misconception (or imagination). wei’s work begins with a dead dog; his grammar of things derived from the sense of absurdity born from confronting death—things are the materials of narrative. Ye Wuji’s work comes from his systematic study of Central Asian culture. He refined his research into personal experience, fabricating a friend that does not exist as compensation for his studies. Zhuo Lan heard a story about her grandmother’s father, a four-time solder she had never met. She juxtaposed the war films from her memory with the family story, Kneading the imaginings of the great-grandfather into the movie scene. Guo Cheng’s manmade amber follows traces of humans. Based on the assumption that man-made objects will outlast the human race, the installation he designed shows objects in pieces of cement, allowing him to imagine, in advance, the Earth’s human-less future.
