Since 2010, Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) has aimed to enhance the importance and significance of “Taipei Arts Award”. Starting from “Taipei Arts Award” 2011, TFAM offers grand prize winner of the year the opportunity to hold a solo exhibition at TFAM, in order to observe and support the creative development of the artist following the award. Chou Yu-Cheng, the grand prize winner of Taipei Arts Award 2012 has been invited by TFAM to open his new solo exhibition “Molyneux—Project by Chou Yu-Cheng” on October 4th. In the collaboration with British artist Geoff Molyneux (b. 1951), who was born in the 1950s, Chou reinterprets Molyneux’s creative works from different periods. Through compilation and representation, Chou exhibits another level of Geoff Molyneux, and at the same time, the exhibition triggers and explores contemporary questions such as copyright, reproduction, and the definition of an artwork.
“Molyneux—Project by Chou Yu-Cheng” is based on the reflections on the relations between sense of time in the development of art and personal creative journeys by two artists—Chou and Molyneux, who represent different generations, different systems of arts, and different cultures. The two artists have ultimately developed a cooperative creative model that adopts the perspectives of generation and time period. Chou and Molyneux met in the UK in 2013. Molyneux, being a western artist born in the 1950s, has participated and witnessed the development of western art in the 1970s and 1980s. On the other hand, Chou Yu-Cheng was received his education of the western art history in Taiwan in the 1990s; with temporal and spatial differences, the encounter with Molyneux ignited Chou’s journey of exploring western art. Chou believes that the development of art is closely related to generations, and by reflecting on the past, new things are created. In this project, Chou extracts creative and visual elements from Molyneux’s works, recompiles and recreates. The project includes two independent yet connected exhibition spaces; in one of them, Chou has “recreated” original works, such as paintings, murals, and sculptures on wall, by Molyneux using different methods. Walking through the corridor in the back of the first exhibition space, one enters another exhibition space that is the mirror image of the previous one, but all exhibits have been taken away; only the color blocks remain on the walls, creating a spatial state where all exhibits have disappeared. There are also two exhibition booklets with contents independent to one another: one is compiled by Molyneux, a white notebook-like catalogue; the other is a florescent orange booklet by Chou Yu-Cheng and writer Yang Chi-Chuan featuring interviews with Molyneux conducted over mails and pictures of Molyneux’s original works. Under black light, the two booklets resemble negatives where pictures and texts appear to be emerging through color filter.
For Chou, the presentation of this project resembles the scene where a movie adapted from real story is shot. In the exhibition, western and eastern systems of art and culture intertwine, and through materialistic cooperation and connection, Chou focuses on creating an alternative operational model of art from within the connections between ready-made objects. In his projects, Chou mostly acts as the “intermediary” that submits proposals and brings individuals, companies, and organizations he regards as “ready-made objects” together. The results created through “proposal-like” and “matched” creative projects of art, or produced by shifting, transferring, or manipulating “working procedures” such as time and space, present the dialectics between various inputs and results, ultimately creating the system which Chou refers to as “Design Treachery”.
About the exhibition
Dates: 4 Oct - 30 Nov 2014
Venue: Galleries E F, Taipei Fine Arts Museum
Courtesy of the artist and Taipei Fine Art Museum, for further information please visit www.tfam.museum.
