Circle of the unqualified

【Circle of the unqualified】

Duration｜2017 / 12 / 09 - 2018/01 /14

Opening｜2017 / 12 / 29 Sat. 15:00

Forum｜2017 / 12 / 29 Sat. 15:30

Forum Panelists｜Yi-Hsin Lai Chia-Hsuan Yang

【Statement】

Labor refers to the service rendered during production, a means to satisfy material and spiritual needs of man. Laboring for material needs is fundamental to survival in society, whereas artistic creation is creative labor on spiritual aspect. The job of an artist is to create art works to obtain correspondent reward, which is the realization of self-worth and the support for material life. However, in reality, for most of the time, art works cannot get what they should be paid. If artists have difficulty supporting their lives through art, the minimal labor has to be realized to maintain spiritual labor for sure.

In retrospect, the works we have done for these years are the means to support our life. Most of the time, we chose to labor because it was considered purely physical and we hoped to leave our spiritual energy to creation. For artists, when they think about what kind of jobs they want to do, the pure labor without spiritual activity is considered a concession in order to survive and maintain the time for creation. Making the choice between “survival” and “ideal” generates contradiction. Under the effect of social system, this phenomenon may cause the vicious cycle for creation, meaning workers cannot concentrate on what they are doing; likewise, artists cannot concentrate on their creation and spend the original time and money for other purposes. The decision for survival turns to rule freedom, which makes fruitless laboring loose the definition for these two identities. The money artists get is not correspondent with time and strength they have put in. Artists are deprived of personal space in their laboring without self. The question like “Why am I here?”comes after these two situations and two identities occur in the same body.

In this exhibition, two artists will reinterpret non-artistic laboring experience in the past with their respective creative context. Through artistic laboring, they reproduce the works correspondent to the identity of an artist from the works made under the strain of survival. We try to write our history of personal laboring by our way of making art. We rewrite our working experiences from 2013 till now. We cannot represent the working environment in the past; however, we show our rumination and subjective descriptions to reflect it. These self-constructed ideas and working experiences we once participated in forms the record for our interpretation of dual identity.