ART-PRESENTATION: HER Gaze

HER Gaze, presents the work of eight Taiwanese female artists who live in Taiwan or the United States. Feminism is not a main topic for these young female artists, but their work inadvertently reveals the female psyche and consciousness. Unrestrained by traditional aesthetics, they show considerable freedom in their individual styles used to impart their life experience and their creation of a surreal world as sanctuary and inner reality.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Taipei Cultural Center Archive

The participating artists in the exhibition “HER Gaze: Contemporary Women Artists from Taiwan” were all born in the ‘80s, more than 100 years after Virginia Woolf. They are not burdened with much baggage from the past. Growing up in the age of greater gender equality the artists,  “Although none of their work shows notable feminist ideas or gender awareness, the unique sensitivity and feminine qualities are naturally ingrained”, as says Josiane Lih-Huei Lai, Curator of the exhibition. Chang Chia-Yiang creates a seemingly peaceful yet strange and eerie world in “The Wolf and A Fairy Fox At the Magical Theatre”, juxtaposing Eastern and Western fairy tale characters but the central character has a pair of big dark eyes devoid of facial expression that sets it apart from the usual outpouring of emotions in fairy tales. Chang En-Tzu’s “Perfect Imperfection” offers an alternative interpretation of the familiar Snow White in a mixed media of paint and embroidery. It bespeaks the distance between reality and the imagined while simultaneously, attempts to bridge and close the gap between the two worlds. Fairytale elements also appear in the work of Joyce Ho. Her sculpture “Daydream” features a yellow bird with a disproportionately small body and disguise. The use of highly saturated colors accentuates a tense state of mind. In Ho’s Szu-Wei watercolor “Blue Egg I”, emerges a strange and delicate fantasy world. Yen Yi-Ting illustrates news events and their related visual elements. The elaborately rendered “Unbridled #2”, in the vein of Chinese landscape painting, depicts a news event.

Info: Curator: Josiane Lih-Huei, Taipei Cultural Center, Taipei Economic & Cultural Office, 1 East 42nd Street, 7th Floor, New York, Duration: 3-25/5/16, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 9:30-17:30, www.tpecc.org