Preface by the Director
The TFAM Call for Artists: 2021 Solo Exhibitions can be traced back to 1986, when the museum introduced its application-based exhibition program. The first of its kind in Taiwan, the annual program has been providing a stage for pioneering and creative contemporary artists to showcase their art in solo exhibitions. It encourages the consistent production of art and has contributed to the vitality, richness, and diversity of the arts ecology in Taiwan. Ya-Wen Fu is one of the outstanding artists we selected for the 2019 program.
A graduate of media arts from the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, she now lives and works in Taiwan and Germany. Physicality, behavior, and rhythm have always been the source of inspiration for her works, which often focus on the relationship between the body and space. The connections, interplays, dialogues, and collisions between the two open up the viewers' feelings and imaginations about where they are, allowing room for them to challenge and interrogate the constantly changing external world that surrounds individuals.
Her exhibition Metamorphose is yet another creative attempt to work with the body. It accentuates her keen observations of herself as a cross-cultural artist living abroad and of the interesting interactions between technology and the human body. Addressing the idea of force, she uses the body to make objects move. Supposedly "perfect" in physics terms, the paths of their movement would nevertheless be disrupted since the artist had deliberately installed the objects in the way of one another. In the infinite creation, collision, and counterbalance of actions and reactions, the static equilibrium we are accustomed to is broken. The imperfection of the seemingly perfect paths is reiterated and magnified, exposing their constraint and oppression.
This installation-based exhibition incorporating multiple audiovisual technologies also includes a live performance by Ya-Wen and performing artist Shu-Yi Chou on the opening day. As Ya-Wen said in an interview, "[o]ur bodies were tied together with dark elastic bands, and when we moved and dodged within the installation, the resulting interactions and tensions described the interlocking layers of power in social systems, which could not be easily transcended or flipped around." Indeed, beyond the visible, physical deformation, the destruction and repression bring to mind invisible power structures' omnipresent suppression on and collision with individuals. Meanwhile, the project is also a subtle description of the artist's experience with cultural shocks and clashes. It could be taken further to describe artists' struggle with external forces as they strive to move forward. We witness how their never-ending defiance against such reality yields precious initiative and freedom, allowing them to score with a brilliant strike in the dialectic of technology vs. the body, stillness vs. change, and time vs. space.
Jun-Jieh Wang / Director, Taipei Fine Arts Museum