Slow Slope

【Slow Slope – A Group Exhibition by Wang Yu-Song、Lin Ying-Chieh、Huang Ching-Han、Liu Szu-Yu】 Date｜2018/4/21 Sat. - 5/27 Sun. Opening｜4/21 Sat. 17:00

Opening Show｜4/21 Sat. 18:30 Forum｜5/12 Sat. 15:00 Guest｜Jai Lee

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【Statement】

“There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. A man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time. In existential mathematics that experience takes the form of two basic equations: The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”

Milan Kundera, Slowness

The phrase “slow slope” seems to describe an immature and soft region, as if the exhibition does not involve consideable issues or declaration, but only the time we share in college and interests and observations we have for these two years in Tainan. The image of slope, somehow, is a metaphor for the loose mental condition that we have when we’re studying, living next to Wushantou Dam. As for the external situation and things happening outside, we always receive them late.

Because of the need of work and personal affair, we spend much time commuting and stay in the north and south from time to time, making the familiar space overlapped by fresh vision as if in a strange land. However, the experience also carries the moment when we try to memorize something but are occupied by déjà vu reluctantly. Though Tainan is a slow city full of its own characters (still cannot resist being commercialized), we, settling in such a circumstance, live and make our works in a misplaced scene, straying from the weight of local.

Putting the above aside, we try to get back to the formula of memory and oblivion, reimagining the rhythm of slowness, and applying it in our creation. With a little reflection and clarity felt afterwards, we express the living condition of “slope” in our own context. Thick woods and lights lining on street, the morning air mixed with smoke of scooters, the guitar in studio and the stray dog by snack vendor, all these details not entirely exclusive to Tainan are illustrated with a more deep language, connecting things that are not so Tainan but still show its own temperament affected by the local pace.