Australia – Wu, Sih-Chin Solo Exhibition

【Australia – Wu, Sih-Chin Solo Exhibition】 Exhibition Duration｜2016/09/17-2016/10/23 Opening Reception + Artist Guide｜2016/09/17 15:00 Forum｜2016/10/08 15:00 Forum Panelists｜Wang, Sheng-Hung, Su, Yu-Hsien 【Statement】 The exhibition Australia is about the time, from 2013 to 2014, when I went to Australia for a year and six months and everything I experienced there. Australia is 214 times bigger than Taiwan but its population is a bit smaller than Taiwan’s; hence, the old land leaves a great and desolate wilderness. Living in the great wilderness, besides noticing the obvious difference of population density, I also observed the condition for man’s social-economic activities was weakened, let alone speaking of art. For this reason, it was not the cultural shock between Taiwan and Australia I underwent, but the reorganization of living status as to my moving from city to wilderness. Facing the area outside human activity –rain forest, desert, ocean, I could only be overwhelmed by the sublime that the endless and broad landscape bred, reduced to an incapable individual, which was like the situation that man is able to criticize the disaster brought by war but unable to blast the catastrophe caused by natural calamity. The sense of incapability comes from the lost of certain power –the power of maneuver, negotiation, and interpretation; in other words, all the basic abilities that man possesses while living in society become useless. Through the journey I took this time, I realize that the “mother nature” I used to know is written out of man’s “nature hypothesis” because man is never given the ability to interpret inhuman things. To live with animals, plants and natural environment, we make up a human world in which everything is epitomized into personified roles so as to cross the boundary between the human and the inhuman while in fact, we can never go beyond the border of our own. Australia seems to be an exhibition presented by showing a person’s travel experience to describe the look of a country; nevertheless, all works shown in the exhibition were commenced one to two years after I got back to Taiwan in 2014. In fact, these travel experiences have been digested into a kind of reminiscence. By rereading the smattering of historical and geographical background, the knowledge of animals and plants, as well as plenty of images and fragmented information on the Internet, the travel experience has been remodeled into a mixture of experience clumps. When it is turned into a work, every natural thing that was once existed in my experience has once again been revealed by the analogy with human beings.

Host｜Absolute space for the Arts Sponsor｜Ministry of Culture