Exhibition

Chen Sung-Chih
Rambling Sentence

Duration_ March 22–May 19, 2018
Opening_ Thursday, March 22, 3–6 PM
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Installation Views / Press Release / Selected Press

Gallery Vacancy is pleased to announce Rambling Sentence, the first solo exhibition by artist Chen Sung-Chih in Shanghai. This exhibition presents the body of work he has developed in recent years and his personal observations that pertain to the idea of space and its perception to the viewer. The exhibition will run from March 22 through May 19, 2018.

Untitled 2017 (SH), 2018, consists of gold glitter over the space on the first floor with glass columns molded from plinth, which is usually used for display and stands in the gallery space as a symbol of counter-experience to the visual and physical confrontation to the tangible objective existence in the given circumstance. The varied sizes of glass columns, to Chen, may be understood as different perspectives which allow us to see the transformation of a defined system that we grow within, by nature in terms of scale, without being aware of its dominance in our consciousness and perception. The gold glitter then leaves and witness the traces of visitors while wandering around the exhibition.

Climbing up the staircase at End of the Show, 2018, a red-theater carpet running through the rest of the gallery space on the second and the third floor continues the exhibition. This work aims to reconstruct a surrounding that could be reminiscent of any ceremonial occasion. Each element refers directly to the architectural structures of these venues and events, so ordinary and typical that the viewer would not even pay attention to the work itself while being enclosed within it. The title, a phrase usually seen on-screen at the end of a movie or show, is taken as a denotation to the memories that we always try to retrieve but are always hunting, never seizing as a whole.

Each of the two smaller rooms on the second floor include a set of mattresses placed on top of the glass-mirrored floors. The work, Untitled – Room 5 (Still Life), 2018, allows the viewer to examine a daily routine that could happen to any one of us on any single day in a random room. It attempts to blur the boundary between the personal and the social, privacy and openness, perception and delusion in a narcissist manner.

Inverted Syntax 4,5,6, 2018, occupies the entire room on the third floor. The work is enclosed by empty walls, carpeted floors, and an illuminated locked door on the far side of the space connected to a terrace. Chen adopts vintage wall lamps for exterior use and attaches them to wood panels that are covered by dyed suede hide. The lamps pop up from the panel lifting the spare fabric drips. Each of the elements is such an inherent part of the room that the viewer would not notice the change in its function nor its disharmony among the others on the site. This work conflates the description of middle class aesthetics in the modern era, but in a deliberately reverted order.

Chen Sung-Chih, born in 1978 in Nantou, Taiwan, graduated from the Graduate Institute of Plastic Arts at Tainan National University of the Arts with emphasis on mixed media installation. Previous works include mixed media and ready-made objects. These ready-made materials taken from everyday life are assembled, combined, and transformed in order to present another aspect of original rough and cold materials, adding a delicately blended and complex psychological element. These artworks are imbued with warmth and poetic meaning. His previous work has received the Spirit of Travel–Espace Louis Vuitton Taipei Audition First Prize (2013); 35 Visual Artist Support Winner (2012); The 12th Visual Arts Prize of Li Chun-Shan Foundation; Taishin Arts Award – Top 7 of Visual Arts (2004); Taipei Arts Award Best-Selected (2003 & 2008); and S-An Aesthetics Award – Arts Creation Support (2001).
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