CHIU Chien-Jen
Saying Goodbye to the World
- 2020, oil on canvas, 100 × 150 × 5 cm, 100 × 100 × 5 cm.
- Courtesy of the artist.
Curatorial Perspective
On the paths between cities, travelers search for the temporary “elsewhere.” Through their roles and sense of unfamiliarity, they generate a bystander perspective. Memories of personal experiences are used to construct the essential elements of creation and search for the urban landscapes that belong to a particular city. The work of Chiu Jyian-Ren puts humans back into an urban, manmade ecology, which has somehow become unfamiliar to us. In such unfamiliarity, humanity constructs itself, and becomes a witness to its own existence. Chiu’s eyes are like a digital camera. He records everyday scenes, and preserves in a spontaneous way or as fleeting impressions, which become his creative materials. In the manner of a flâneur, he saunters towards the borders of cities. On the edge of urbanization and modernization, he seems to search for different locations in the journey, and photograph topics related to the body, image, and cities. Architecture is a fixed entity, and has already been given its meaning when being designed, and it is as if humans are placed in architecture to complete a certain amalgamation conspired by capitalism and modernity. On the other hand, the space in Chiu’s painting is produced by society, and carries with it bodily experiences that present certain historical meanings. Utilizing photography as his technical medium, and employing the materiality of dripping oil paint, the artist evokes the spectators’ everyday bodily memories in modern cities. Chiu’s work echoes the fluid bodily characteristics embodied by artifacts and cities, rendering sentient beings in desolate cities real in the images of his monochrome paintings.
Creation Description
On the paths between cities, travelers search for the temporary “elsewhere.” Through their roles and sense of unfamiliarity, they generate a bystander perspective. Memories of personal experiences are used to construct the essential elements of creation and search for the urban landscapes that belong to a particular city. In a strange city, wander streets and alleyways, mingle with crowds of people, or stand at quiet intersections. Attempt to extract the elements of a city from its most popular places, such as parks, subways, stadiums, and museums, and move among various spaces, enabling body practices and experiencing the inertia of a visit to that particular city. Try to immerse yourself in the ever-changing city, reducing the massive amount of information and transforming it into visual images. Search for similar feelings about daily life in that city, distance yourself from invisible messages generated by individuals in regards to moving cities, and feel the presence of life.
Work
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Saying Goodbye to the World2020, oil on canvas, 100 × 150 × 5 cm, 100 × 100 × 5 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Artist Bio
Chiu Chien-Jen was born in Pingtung in 1981. He received the first prize in the Taipei Arts Award in 2004 and the Art Creation Excellence Award the following year. He held a solo exhibition at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in 2007, and was the winner of the 15th Li Zhongsheng Visual Arts Award in 2017. He has exhibited extensively in Shanghai, Paris, Japan, and Singapore, and his works are widely collected by important international collectors and museums.
Chiu's paintings are based on random images taken during his daily life or travels. The variety of travelogues capturing a fleeting glimpse of a scene or an atmosphere would then be transformed into images with paints on a canvas upon the re-viewing of the photographs. His complex and varied techniques include overlaying, erasure and scraping, splashing and running strokes which manifested a brisk and carefree approach and atmosphere, resulting in the effect that embodies sense of immediacy and fragmentation. His artworks are often in shades of black, brown, white, and grey, in which people and objects are faded into silhouettes, permeating a hint of poetic sentiment. For Chiu, these fragmented figures represent the ghostly protagonists of today's image and information society, wandering around, constantly consumed by the remnants of themselves.
The overlaying of paint and blurring of the specific references of the images also adds a sense of weight to the fragmented silhouettes, imposing, without a trace, the heaviness brought about by time on the space and implying more hints about the space in the image. Chiu’s artistic practice always focuses on the impact of images on the lives of the younger generation, and attempts to find an alternative visual balance between images and paintings; just as he once said 'so that images are no longer images and paintings are no longer just paintings'.