Lai Chiu-Chen: Bubble Kabushiki Kaisha

Lin & Lin Gallery is honored to announce Lai Chiu-Chen’s solo exhibition Bubble Kabushiki Kaisha. This is the 4th solo exhibition of Lai Chiu-Chen in Lin & Lin Gallery. Every bubble that refracts light into splendid colors is formed by a thin film sustained by surface tension which reflects everything around including our emotions and feelings. Every person is the producer and receiver of bubbles, and Lai Chiu-Chen is the very president of Bubble Kabushiki Kaisha, absorbing all the things reflected on the soap films on one hand, while also screening, creating, and refining all the things to be reflected onto the soap films of viewers. This is the way of creation that he always does: simulation and reconstruction. Amidst his cartoon and comic book ideas, Lai’s works could be said to be an assemblage of samples or specimens from life.

The difference between the featured works of this exhibition and the past works is that the spaces in the paintings are divided. Familiar anime characters weave through the structure that resembles interwoven window frames; partial natural images are added, which Lai rarely depicted before, to form visual vocabularies different from his past works; or, like old frames that have oval cut-outs, they display fragments of what he have seen or remember; these fragments search for and fuse with the lost halves among the images accumulated continuously online, to generate new meanings. And also, some artists’ compositions are still being appropriated by Lai for the structures of his paintings. This way, he can seamlessly fuse past eras and styles into modern works to carry out a conversion of time and meaning. The images of the works in this exhibition are dictated through spaces; toys that have been the main subject for years have ceded their position, and withdrawn into the background to play second fiddle to space leading the audience to think the multiphase meanings of image.

Lai Chiu-Chen was born in Jiufen, Taiwan in 1970. He graduated from Taipei National University of Arts, Graduate School of Fine Arts M.F.A. Program. Lai’s works receive international attention as well as support, and were collected by several significant art Museum, such as Long Museum (Shanghai), Taipei Fine Arts Museum and National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts. He has won many awards, including First Prize of 2003 Taipei Arts Award, Dr. Stanley Ho Foundation Art Award, First Prize of Kuo Po-Chuan Fine Arts Award, First Prize of Tunghua Rotary Club Fine Arts Award, First Prize of Grand Award of Prix de Paris, etc. He also won The Light of Transparent, Art Subsidization Program, National Culture and Arts Foundation in 2004 and Colonialism in Body, Art Subsidization Program, National Culture and Arts Foundation in 1997. The artist’s important exhibitions include: Rolling! Visual Art in Taiwan, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea, 2013; Have You Eaten Yet?- 2007 Asian Art Biennial, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, Taiwan, 2007; A Glimpse of Contemporary Art in Taiwan, Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, Taipei, Taiwan, 2006; Scylla and Charybdis in Love: The Challenges Facing Contemporary Taiwanese Artists, Gwangju Art Museum, Korea, 2004; Parts of Toys, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, 2003. Abnormal Temple, A Group Exhibition, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, 2000. 1997 Final Roam, Abnormal Temple, Sanchih, Taiwan, 1997, etc.