On the Way to “ “

On the Way to “ “

Duration｜2025.06.15 (sun) - 07.20 (sun)

Curator｜ Shou-Yu Li

Artist｜ Mei-Huei Lyu, Zi-Ning Li, Wen-Xian Chen, Pei-Chen Tsai

Venue｜Absolute Space for the Arts

Opening｜2025.06.15 (sun) 15:00

Forum｜2025.06.15 (sun) 16:00

Forum Guest｜Yu-Chang Shen

 ‖ Statement by Shou-Yu Li

Looking back at the common experience of everyday conversation, there are moments suspended at certain junctures—where meaning has yet to crystallize, where statements remain unformed. These incomplete intervals are not merely linguistic apertures akin to a shutter poised before the “decisive moment,” but more crucially, they constitute a kind of emptied field, a space of invocation prior to the capture of language. Within this emptied field lies a tension between absence and possibility—a continuous unfolding suspended between saying and not-saying. How might we begin to grasp the texture of such a state? Is it like a spiral of wind, or the condensation of dew? Or perhaps it lingers along the narrow margins and thresholds of language itself—slits as fine as capillaries?

<On the Way to  “ ”> takes on a Heideggerian posture of waiting for unconcealment (Entbergung), a disposition of allowing things to emerge in their self-evident relations between works. The exhibition seeks not to fix or solidify language into structure, but rather to allow it to manifest materially and sensorially within the field—through drift, scent, displacement, and dislocation.

When the German poet Paul Celan wrote in his collection Sprachgitter:

Der Hauch deines Sprechens / trennt das Sprachgitter

(The breath of your speech / tears the language-grille)

—he was not invoking the sheer force of language, but listening to how it gently opens a fissure through which existence might reveal itself. The “language-grille” symbolizes both the limitations and failures of language, yet also marks the moment when a glimmer emerges through the other. In German, Hauch connotes a breath, a wisp of wind, a trace of fragrance, or an unformed emotion. It is the breeze left behind by Being’s gentle touch upon the world—a trace not of movement from point to point, but of the resonant paths traversed by what remains.

When Hauch is invoked in relation to the works within the exhibition, it gestures toward a lightness, an evasion of linguistic structure—a texture that may ignite new potentials through friction between works. Each “airstream” becomes an autonomous gesture of appearing, triggering variable frequencies of echo as it moves freely and curves through the space.

In this exhibition, the goal is not the concrete presentation of a fixed linguistic structure. Rather, it allows language to unfold through material and affective registers in situ—through reverberations, aromas, disruptions, and transpositions. The in-between of meaning and utterance is an unfinished mode of becoming, one that reveals presence through absence. It is the unsaid sliding through space, the bodily configuration of sense before it falls into lexical form. In the vacant zones outside familiar groupings, within the crevices bridging meaning, the exhibition attempts to offer shelter for those “in-progress” moments—like the flickering state of “typing…”—an ongoing tense that houses the instant just before completion.

Instead of affirming the inevitable dwelling of meaning within quotation marks, the exhibition carves open a space for what precedes signification: a terrain where the unnameable finds momentary effect. It is within this accidental field that meaning begins to stir—unfixed, contingent, and alive.

 ‖ About Curator

Shou-Yu Li

Born in 1996 in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Currently a first-year MFA student at the Graduate Institute of Plastic Arts, Tainan National University of the Arts, and is based in Tainan. He previously studied Applied Mathematics at National Chung Hsing University but withdrew in his third year. He later enrolled in the MA program in Fine Arts (Art History and Visual Culture division) at Taipei National University of the Arts, which he also left during his third year. These repeated interruptions in formal education, though unconventional, have nonetheless shaped alternative pathways for engaging with and reflecting on artistic practice—approaching the relationship between disciplines with a sensibility likened to the pairing of century egg and tofu. His writings on contemporary art and visual culture have appeared on AOFA.TW: Archive of Fieldnotes in Arts & Observations.

 ‖ About Artist

Mei-Huei Lyu

Born in 1997 in Hualien, Taiwan, currently pursuing an MFA at the Graduate Institute of Plastic Arts, Tainan National University of the Arts.

Her practice navigates the paradoxical state between reality and consciousness, using disappearance and remnants as methods of reconstruction. By loosening established thought patterns, she seeks to approach the truth embedded in lived experience.

Zi-Ning Li

Li Zining (b. 2001, Tainan) is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Plastic Arts at Tainan National University of the Arts. Her practice focuses primarily on spatial installations that respond to and deconstruct conventional perceptions of imagery. Engaging with the subtle flaws found in space and everyday life, her work explores the tension between the rationality of image-based thinking and the instinctive quality of emotion. Through a poetic and light-handed approach, she creates works that gesture toward a future yet to unfold—where perception lingers, and meaning oscillates within space.

Tsai Pei-Chen

Tsai Pei-Chen, born in Taichung in 2001, graduated in 2024 from the Department of Fine Arts, Sculpture Division at Taipei National University of the Arts. She is currently pursuing her master's degree at the Graduate Institute of Plastic Arts, Tainan National University of the Arts. Her practice centers on sculpture, with a focus on its interaction with space. Drawing from subtle and often contradictory emotional experiences in everyday life, her work explores the transformative relationship between materials and perception, revealing the tensions embedded within. Tsai’s artistic language merges rational structures with tactile sensibilities, seeking to construct new perspectives between concept and perception.

Wen-xian Chen

Born in 2000 in Chiayi, Taiwan, graduated from the Department of Fine Arts at National Changhua University of Education, and is currently studying at the Graduate Institute of Plastic Arts at Tainan National University of the Arts. Currently lives and works in Tainan.

The work primarily focuses on spatial installations and video. Early projects often employed methods such as assemblage to create a sense of labor-intensive beauty. By drawing meaning from everyday objects, these elements were deconstructed and reconstructed to form works that offer new perspectives.Recent projects tend to focus on subtle differences within space. Through minimal interventions, structures and objects in the environment—often regarded as stable or taken for granted—are re-examined. This approach offers a light and gentle way to rediscover and re-sensitize the perception of everyday surroundings.

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‖ Sponsor

臺南市政府文化局、國藝會