Action Through Inaction — CHOU Tai-Chun Solo Exhibition

Chou Tai-Chun holds his first personal exhibition at Liang Gallery under the title “Action Through Inaction.” Chou adopts a trilogy form to develop a narrative representing the relation between oneself and the environment. The three stages of the series, as shown in “Globe Silent”, “State of Flux”, and “Action Through Inaction”, visualize painter’s take on the external world and how he reflects upon his position in it. His painting often features one important signature, which is how paintings as they are respond to the epoch. Unlike photography or other practices related to mechanically produced images, the painting here in our discussion, as a narrative, reveals its allegorical character.

After the solo exhibition in 2016, Chou went over to Korea and Japan to work as a resident artist. Although he visited the area affected by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, and has found many subject matters from his surroundings. In the solo exhibition by this year, it is the continuation of his long-term artistic exploration. The series features the internalization of emotions and feelings to express the concern for the land to be healed. He attempts to create unmounted canvases represent temporary but yet flowing scenes. The artworks hang highly above, sometimes reminiscent of flaunts in the distance which is impossible for spectators to look at it closely. The unapproachable paintings imply the artist’s desire to accentuate a different, and more abstract, expression of emotions. Apart from the response to the close-range accident/event, he is concerned about the filtered and recollected opinion after a moment of contemplation.

With the passage of time, the scene of disaster that Chou presents is compromised by dazzling colors that would not fit in with the disaster at all, and by some transcendental forms mixed with the landscape of reality. Meanwhile, there is an icon image threading all the exhibits together – the tent, as a temporal residency, guarantees the minimum demand of living as it also offers humans a shelter and the place to take a rest. At the same time, the mobility of the tent also suggests a guerilla way of survival, fighting against the wild Nature beyond the grasp of humans. Here, Chou’s tent, with its door lifted open, symbolizes the direct encounter between humans and the outside world. On the other hand, the dents that appear in several works, which look like scratches on the surface of a plant encroached upon by tension, are stitched up with colorful putty and thread mixed with various boundaries and thoughts. At last, these messages are more hopeful than before. ‘Sweetness follows bitterness’, ‘Time is a great healer,’ as the saying goes. Since the wound is followed by healing and the disaster by recovery, it is still a world worth living in.
Artist Biography

Chou Tai-Chun was born in 1986 in Hsinchu, Taiwan. He received his MFA degree with a specialization in painting from the Taipei National University of the Arts in 2012. His artworks have become a part of various domestic and foreign museum collections. Chou’s paintings have been selected for the Made in Taiwan – Art Taipei Young Artist Discovery in 2012. His solo exhibition named the “State of Flux” was installed in Taipei Fine Arts Museum in 2016. From the earlier series of works Globe Silent and the series Beyond the Silence, which the artist has been working on since 2011, to the series Back to and Beyond the Mountains so far in 2018, Chou Tai-Chun has been gradually constructing a unique visual experience and imagination manifesting itself in the era the artist is living in now. He uses different ways to expands his artworks from paintings to installation arts to represent his perspectives on the environmental issues of the universe. Although the science-fictional setting and atmosphere he is portraying seems to be remote from reality, yet there are few signifiers in his paintings alluding to the current situation of the world. He had an experience for International Residency Exchange in OCI Museum, Seoul, Korea and BankART Studio NYK, Yokohama, Japan. His artworks are in the collection of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei Fine Arts Museum and White Rabbit Gallery in Sydney. He currently lives and works in Taiwan.