Chen-Hung CHIU｜Künstlerhaus Bethanien - Arts Residency Network Taiwan 藝術進駐網

Location	Germany / Berlin
Residency	Künstlerhaus Bethanien
Year of the Grant	2018
Personal Website	Chen-Hung CHIU's Personal Website Chen-Hung CHIU's Personal Website

Chen-Hung CHIU received a Master’s Degree from the Graduate School of Plastic Arts, National Taiwan University of Art. His creations are mostly installations and sculptures. He excavates the figures and trajectories that existed in another time and space as if archaeological expedition. Moreover, he reinterprets the logical rules that have been rationalized and designed through abstract techniques. Chiu reshapes them vividly, which develops many memory repairing methods.

His essential solo exhibitions in recent years include Embroidered Swallows Across Original Jungle, TKG+, Taipei(2021), Phototaxis, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Germany (2019), The Dust of Time, YIRI ARTS, Taipei (2017), and group exhibitions, including the 2019 Asian Art Biennia: The Strangers from beyond the Mountain and the Sea, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung (2019), Island Tales: Taiwan and Australia, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei (2019), and so forth.

Artist Statement
During my residency, I have two main presentations. The first is the "Open Studio." I introduce my artwork and ideas with static documents and dynamic videos. The second is the group exhibition of residency artists. The exhibition theme is "Phototaxis." I tried to metaphorically transform the "light" into a kind of figure and trajectory that once existed in the world today. I used video and relief artworks to conduct dialogues about biology, mineral, history, religion, and science in different time and space. I exhibited nine relief sculptures and two video works. In the relief work "Plants," I adopted the window scenes from a science fiction film and carved the plants, light, and shadow on the wooden boards. Matching with the film's voiceover, I re-positioned them in the exhibition space. It is like a whisper, intertwining a path between the unknown and completeness, life and death, artificiality and authenticity, desire, and reason. The other two video works, "GuanYin" and "The Marble Workers," were based on the Taiwanese marble industry and folk religions. Through a keen sense of my own family's life history and the geographical exploration of humanities and nature, I explored the mysterious film between material and spirit. From the above experience, I also developed a set of memory repairing methods in religion and art.

Künstlerhaus Bethanien has rich resources and sufficient facilities. Besides studios, factories, and technical staff support, there is also a solo exhibition space of about one hundred square feet. It is close to the level of an art museum. The organization arranged many curator exchange activities. There were exchanges with independent curators from the Germany Kassel Documenta, the Bangkok Art Biennale, and some local independent curators. After the residency, the Künstlerhaus Bethanien assembled artworks from the artists who resided in the same year to publish a catalog. Overall, it was a professional and excellent art residency experience.

Artists

Chen-Hung CHIU

Chen-Hung CHIU