KUO Chia-ling
KUO Chia-Ling was born in Taoyuan, Taiwan, in 1979. She got her Master's Degree in Graduate Institute of Plastic Arts and Ph.D. in Doctoral Program in Art Creation and Theory at Tainan National University of the Arts. She has been awarded for "The 14th Taoyuan Contemporary Art Award" and "Taipei Arts Award" and sponsored by "S-An Arts Award" and "The National Culture and Arts Foundation," besides, she has been to Cité Internationale des Arts for residency. Her works are also collected by White Rabbit Gallery in Australia, National Taiwan Art Museum, Art Bank in Taiwan, and private collectors.
Her previous works often created an overtone of perception through the interplay images of body and languages. In her early works, A Mind of Skin Touch (2005) and Condition#2 (2004), KUO tended to capture fragments of daily life from a microcosmic view, using the human body as the media, she documented the performance in the form of video and manipulated visual images to express the psychological perception of experience.
In her "Red Lip" series, which created from 2006, she usually showed enlarged lips along with a repeated sound of reciting a sentence. Through her interpretation of action, a personal description of perception is embodied in the enlarged image of a partial body.
From 2014, KUO broadened the subject, apart from the artist herself, and turned her shot to frame her surroundings. In her "Sea Move" series, such as Sea Move (2014) and Sea Move-Duration (2016). The massive mechanical installation includes video projecting and Lycra screen, presenting the "haptic visuality" between body action and moving image. In 2018, she moved forward to create the depth of the image in the issue of "haptic visuality" by presenting the work Stars (2018) and Cloud Move (2018).
KUO carries on exploring her specific language and shows out "demonstrated, spoken, and imagined move" by the body action within her works.
- Location France / Paris
- Year of the Grant 2008
- Residency Cité Internationale des Arts
- Work Open KUO CHIA LING in Paris (solo exhibition)
- Personal Website KUO Chia-ling's Personal Website
My exhibition area at Cité International des Arts was a studio space with a unique spatial design. It had slanted ceilings and two clear windows facing out to a lit path. I made the studio into a warm and approachable space for presentation. There were lamps illuminating the small works made daily on the walls, projections of videos I created on the ceilings, chairs for the audience made from bed frames, and comfort food available for the visitors.
At Paris was a series I made during my residency in Paris. It was composed of glossy cardstock pasted onto white papers. Writings about my trips during the residency were stamped onto the cardstock with handmade letter types. Here There was a video piece filmed next to the window by my kitchen. The window framed a nostalgic scene reminiscent of the past: there were ancient roof lines, delicate morning light, sunset glow, and starry skies. I used tinted lens to capture fields of clouds passing by freely. ‘Here’ and ‘there’ and my own meditation met in the picture frame that I had created. ‘Red Shoes’ was a video piece filmed at the stairwell of the studio, depicting an up-and-down experience during a busy hour.
Life at the residency program was a series of repetition between the grocery stores, markets, and art spaces. Going to grocery stores and markets required minimum language skills and was a comfortable way to observe and experience local ways of living; whereas visiting art spaces was like being a tourist in search of the Parisian atmosphere within the artworks. During these 2 months of walking around in downtown Paris, I had gained much energy and realized how graceful and freely the French approached the idea of art. The people there already incorporate art into their daily lives. I saw how museums and art institutions turned classic art and artifacts into something new and fresh through innovative forms of expression, allowing the audience from different generations to interpret the timeless art classics.
During my residency, I created works different from my video pieces in the past. In addition to the imageries of the body often seen in my previous work, I attempted to include vestiges and traces of my actions in my new work. I had continued to develop my art along this track even after returning to Taiwan.