Foreword

For "Solo Exhibition: Open Call Artists," the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) annually invites art experts and scholars in Taiwan to work with the museum and select open call proposals submitted by contemporary artists. The first solo exhibition series this year adopts a curatorial perspective and juxtaposes four artists’ solo exhibitions on the same floor with equal duration. As the exhibitions create dialogues with and serve as reference to each other, they collectively unfold contemporary issues discussed by these emerging and established artists. Making use of the four galleries, which form a cross in the center, the four exhibitions respectively demonstrate individual forms of art and distinctive artistic approaches.

Artist Ni Hao, an Honorable Mention recipient of the Taipei Art Awards, presents both his previous art series and new works in his solo exhibition, entitled Ambush, which immerses viewers in an atmosphere of dynamism and uncertainty. In the exhibition, viewers find themselves surrounded by shooting cards, spinning collage images, subtle mechanical compressions and projections of jump-cut videos, which gradually and implicitly stimulate viewers' nerves despite being displayed as still works. Moreover, these works are accompanied by on-going, irritating noises—sounds of clashing objects, drums, air compressors and wind instruments, submerging viewers in an inescapable, exhausting sensory experience senses. With the sense of restlessness collectively created through his works, the artist hopes to discuss forms of violence and the operation of power behind existing manipulation and control enabled by objects, foregrounding the circulation and use of credit cards, currencies, home appliances, guns and internet in contemporary society while outlining the invisible force that maneuvers international geopolitics and global financial system.

This solo exhibition also reviews and sheds new light on the creative development of the artist, who extends and reconstructs his previous works by incorporating the element of parody into different arrangements and combinations of parts of his Night Sculptures from 2014, including Cigarette, Residue, Fresh Tears, Hot Blood and Wet Kisses. Be it combined, reconstructed, remade or integrated into his new work featuring a glass office cubicle, these works reveal the fact that the supply of the internet, which serves as the contemporary field where the artist gathers his materials, originates from the inundating flow of unfiltered information unlimited by time. The ephemerality of messages indeed stirs the immediacy of the presence in time. Even though the mechanism of the supply might vary in terms of time and space, we are consistently influenced and conditioned by dissimilar structures of violence in this system. This is also the reason why the artist has continuously revisited his works to explore their existing as well as newly emerging meanings and situations.

Ping Lin, Director of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum