Molding Island City - Taiwan-Vietnam Artist Residency Exchange Exhibition

【Molding Island City - Taiwan-Vietnam Artist Residency Exchange Exhibition】

Date｜1st June - 14th July 2019 Opening｜Sat. 1st June 3:00pm Artist talk｜Sat. 1st June 3:30pm

【Statement】 This residency and exhibition project use molds as the research theme. Through the interviews of mold industry workers, photography records, workshops, art creations and other forms, in addition to better understanding the mold culture and the life in Tainan, those changes and transitions also constantly affect artists on how they present their artworks and highlight the similarities and differences between Taiwan and Vietnam.

【About artist Bui Cong Khanh】 Born in Da Nang in Central Vietnam, graduated from the Oil Painting Department in Ho Chi Minh City of Fine Arts University, and now works and lives in Hoi An City. He founded the GO FISH Studio in 2017. He was invited to participate in the 2016 Singapore Biennale and has exhibited in Hong Kong, Myanmar, Indonesia, Germany, France and US. Bui Cong Khanh creates a variety of media, including graphic painting, digital photography, video, miniature sculpture, space installations. He focuses on the history of the country, changes in the social environment caused by military politics, and the mental state and identity of people, etc. Therefore, the materials the artist uses are diverse, and he often cares about the symbolic meaning of the material itself. The media includes tree materials, metals, porcelain, etc. He specializes in translating the construction and form of the media to question about today's society as well as to create completely different bodily feelings.

【About the artist residency exchange exhibition By Bui Cong Khanh】

This is my second opportunity to cooperate with Artist Shu-Kai Lin whom I really admire. We had enough time to understand each other via our backgrounds, our attentions to history and life, and our creation inspirations. I am very interested in Lin’s background. He grew up in his father’s mold foundry factory. Metal casting is a very hard job, but it can support the whole family. Lin liked to take his father’s molds to play around and also started to create a molding city with his own imagination. In addition to his father’s huge influence on Lin’s works, I personally believe that Lin also uses molds as a way of communicating with his father. In other words, he tells a story about his father: he is the present and his father is the past.

Compared to Lin’s experience, I also found out that I have the similar background like Lin’s. When I was a child, my father often took me to his wood factory. I liked carving the wood and then turned them into my own toys. Both his and my art spirit as well as creative imagination all originate from our fathers which I think that our artistic creativity is the outcome of fusing. The concept of fusing is closely connected to the Chinese Five Elements Philosophy: “All kinds of matters on the earth are made of five elements, namely that every matter consists of wood, fire, earth, metal and water, and each matter is the construction and assemblage of these five elements”.

According to the above mentioned, I return back to explain the process of casting conducted by Lin’s father. His father melted the aluminum bar (identified as the element of metal) into liquid (identified as the element of water) and finally poured the liquid into a wooden mold (identified as the element of wood) as a way of developing our creativity and imagination for the molding island city. We then transformed the wooden molds into potteries (identified as the element of earth). Throughout this process, we could understand those elements through the literal meaning of the materials we used as well as the various cycles of human consciousness from the symbolic system.

【About artist Lin Shu-Kai】 Born in 1983 in Tainan, Taiwan. Lin graduated from Department of Fine Arts, Taipei National University of the Arts, and acquired a master’s degree from the Graduate Institute of Fine Arts, Taipei National University of the Arts in 2012. His has exhibited in Hong Kong, Thailand, Japan, Korea, Netherlands and US. Lin's works often use various materials and forms such as painting and objects to construct his imagined spaces and our mental states in modern society, and always try to provide a new perspective to viewers. 【About the artist residency exchange exhibition By Lin Shu-Kai】

It is my second time to cooperate with Vietnamese Artist, Bui Cong Khanh. The first cooperation was five years ago. During the one month’s working together, due to the language communication problem, we could only communicate through the body language and paintings to understand each other’s different life experiences. Except the language barrier, the manuscripts written every day actually kept a lot of emotions (e.g. happy, upset, sad and joyful) that could not be communicated in the spoken words. We shared ourselves with each other and re-constructed our new identities. In this sense, this one-month cooperation left a subtle foreshadowing for our future project. Of course, we were not sure if we could have another chance to work together. Five years later, both of us have undergone different life experiences. Bui Cong Khanh returned to his hometown of Hoi An, Vietnam. We suddenly discovered that we both were highly interested in the subtlety of city as well as we had something in common that our artist creations were strongly connected to the family memories about the business all created by our grandfathers and fathers.

Therefore, the second collaboration project is carried out with the concept of “modeling”, and of course we both definitely continued to share ourselves as a way of cooperating and communicating. In Tainan, since my father’s mold foundry was closed down, we both had used the molds left by my father as the materials for our artistic creation. In particular, those molds were once used and had a glorious past. We had left our hometown for a long time, but in the end, we all came home to look for the family memories. In fact, those that once had gone could not be found forever although they were be part of our life and could not be erased. “Molding” does not simply have a literal meaning but yet it is a replicant that can regenerate life and give a new interpretation for life. In the process of socialization, everyone seems to be homogenized, but each life can regenerate and thrive. This homogeneity also symbolizes the problem faced by many cities in the current of time as well as in the process of transformation. Cities do not simply keep memories. Most important of all, we must reflect on what civilization really means to us and we need to contemplate the past and the present in order to give new values and meanings to the future civilization.

Organizer: Absolute Space for the Arts Sponsor: Ministry of Culture (Granted by Cultural Exchanges and Collaborative Projects with Personnel from Southeast Asia) Sponsor: National Culture and Arts Foundation, Cultural Affairs Bureau of Tainan City