AN EXHIBITION BY CHIANG KAI-CHUN
KUANDU MUSUEM OF FINE ARTS
TAIPEI, TAIWAN
JANUARY 23 – FEBRUARY 12, 2017
This is about a person’s life after spending eight years in a foreign land, or perhaps a virtual journey without stepping out of his own room.
Chiang Kai-chun’s solo exhibition, titled “Third Person Traveler,” is curated by French curator Théo Robine-Langlois. For this exhibition, the curator wrote a short story to link together the artist’s creative works, video works and paintings. This exhibition is a synthesis of fiction and art; the exhibition itself is a story, taking the audience on a personal journey between reality and the imaginary.
The term “third person” reflects the artist’s existence as an outsider while he was studying in France. Being a non-native French speaker and living in a foreign cultural setting have sometimes detached him from what was going on around him. For the artist, the term “third person” possesses another significance: when one work is completed, no change will be made to it and the artist will view his own work as a detached viewer, a third person, or, an outsider. The word “traveler” in the exhibition’s title is inspired by poet Li Bai’s “Preface to A Spring Night’s Banquet at the Peach and Plum Garden”: “Oh, the world is the temporary shelter for all living beings while time sees people as travelers coming and going.”
The audience may not know exactly whether the artist has been on a trip in person or has just wandered on the Internet. The audience may find themselves enthralled by the semi-asleep, semi-awake ambience generated by the exhibition. With some presage, the curator tries to highlight the lightness of this exhibition. The idea of microhistory, which lies at the core of the exhibition, is inspired by Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, who did research on microhistory in the 1970s. At this exhibition, each work of art is a reflection of a time in art history. Everyday life has been an important source of inspiration for Chiang’s creative activities and his work is often linked with history or literature. In his work, history is presented through daily life experiences in subtle yet poetic ways.