Artists
Photo Credit: NIU Chun-Chiang
TING Chaong-Wen
TING Chaong-Wen
| Location | Japan / Sapporo |
|---|---|
| Residency | S-AIR |
| Year of the Grant | 2013 |
| Work | History of Hybrid Culture Movements |
| Personal Website | TING Chaong-Wen's Personal Website |
Artist Statement:
My expertise is in mixed media such as spatial installations that mixes images and found objects. In recent years, I have tried to concern myself with the multiplicity as well as the mediation of perceptions in contemporary experimental installations. I tried to observe the synesthetic relationship between history and emotive elements in these site-specific works. Then, microscopic and time-tested experiences created from personal use of languages could thus be developed.
Daily life exists in a rheological state that is difficult to distinguish within the flow of space and time, but the subtle changes can still be observed over a significant period of time. These differences gradually accumulate into what we interpret as ourselves and our surrounding environment as imagined. I try to cast a psychological space into the environment, depicting an imaginary field between the physical and poetic space. Therefore, this material can subtly display the personal, internal, and environmental experience of everyday lives.
Similar to a mirror, history has always been a reflection of our own self. Snow in Sapporo also bears the layer of history in the city. Snow tells us the limitations of human beings and their responsibilities. During my artist residency, I focused my research and work for the Sapporo2 Project on snow as a rheological retelling of history. Images of snow were the main works in this exhibition.
If making art is a process of measuring history and interpreting history, our actions in defining history and giving history forms (static or moving), meanings (essential value or simple appearances), and records exist in a pre-condition that ‘we forget history easily.’ With that being said, the arts industry demands that contemporary art renews itself constantly. If the development of ‘new’ things takes a long time, we are to reuse and reinterpret the things in the past and thus create something ‘new’ out of the old ‘files.’ This model has become the fountainhead for contemporary art.
History of Hybrid Culture Movements attempts to deal with the concept of geographical locations, climate conditions, native clans, and other ‘files’ related to Hokkaido in the modern Japanese history. Much like Cabinet of Curiosities, a collection of these issues was presented as an exhibition through ready-made objects, photographs, and a video interview with local residents. I tried to present a combination of the Ainu culture and the movement reacting to the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security movements with a perspective of “the Other” in understanding these parts of history. We are accustomed to the classification of modern museums, which obscure our multiple imaginations on different historical events and hide them under mainstream history. A person's cognition is affected in social mechanisms and systems, where my work attempts to offer new opportunities for all to reexamine the existing cultural pedigree and taxonomy.