Artists

Photo Credit: NIU Chun-Chiang

HUANG Jui-Fang (Vincent)

HUANG Vincent J.F. received his MFA from Gray’s School of Art, Scotland in 2000. He was the Assistant Professor of contemporary art in the Graduate School and Department of Visual communication Design at Shu-Te University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

HUANG was selected to participate The Arctic Circle and as the resident artist at the Pier-2 Art Center in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, the Doulun MoMa, Shanghai, China, the ArtSpace in Sydney, Australia. He received the 7th Presidential Cultural Award in 2013.

Huang has been focusing on the climate crisis and devoting his artistic efforts into climate emergency issues. He keeps bringing the issues into an art campaign involving public’s participation to raise attention to climate change.



Artist
Statement.

I created an artwork entitled Modern Atlantis during my two-month residency at ArtSpace, Sydney. I utilized an aquarium as a container for a living ecosystem and placed small models of famous capitalist landmarks in the aquarium. Live coral grew against the miniature models. The installation depicted the scene in which civilization became remnants on the ocean floor after the sea level had risen. Through this project, I recreated a version of the Atlantis portrayed by Plato.

As a part of the project, I let the coral grow freely inside of the aquarium until it ran out of resources and slowly calcified to death. The self-contained ecosystem inside the aquarium was a metaphor for a prediction of the global condition, in which humankind’s unwavering desire for materialistic advancement eventually exhausted the resources of the planet and brought upon sirens for disasters.

I sank the forms of the Taipei 101, the Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, the Burj Dubai, The Temple of Heaven (Tian Tan), the Great Wall of China, the Bird’s Nest, the street sign of Wall Street, and the logo for Apple into the bottom of the water. Colorful coral grew from these vestiges of our civilization almost humourously.

This project was the first attempt in my series that would investigate the condition of human civilization. The international landmarks sank into the bottom of the ‘sea,’ just as the Titanic, which was said unsinkable a hundred years before to be, sank 4 days after its first embarkment. I would continue developing works with more submerged symbols that were prided for by our civilization. These symbols may include the Louvre, the artifacts from the National Palace Museum in Taiwan, and other tokens of capitalism.

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