No.82, Sec. 3, Xinsheng N. Rd.
Exhibition date: 2017.06.03-07.01
Artist CHIU Chiehsen solo exhibition
Exhibition Location：FreeS Art Space, Taipei, Taiwan
More : https://www.facebook.com/events/1822219538094397/
Exhibition statement:
The map – it is no longer simply a guide. Our bodily senses have taken over the map. Through sensing, archiving, and reinterpreting symbols, the shapes and patterns on the map lose their authority, and we see instead a map of human desire and imagination. As Denis Wood says in his book The Power of Maps, “the map combines the relationship between the past and the future, the image and the reality, to show the relationship between knowledge and power. The map also connects people to their living environment; under specific, pre-existing patterns, it communicates our position and attitude with regard to the realm of nature. Motives, desires, plans, and actions – they are the reasons maps exist. The map is a noun, but seems more like a verb.”
Map – as a verb, interprets and deduces the relationship between people and space, while allowing for variations in personal development. However, when viewing a map, one does not experience the diversity created by mapping. A dissonance arises between the simplicity of the map image and our rich sensorial understanding of space; yet this simplicity simultaneously allows for imagination and interpretation. Using the act of map-making as a point of departure to question the postmodern lifestyle, through archiving and reinterpreting symbols, I directly challenge the idea of people and space. I aim to recreate a dissonance in our idea of space and to allow for a new spatial understanding.
In my process of creation, I trace the lineage of human cultural development and intertwine it with my personal understanding of the current environment. The works reveal a connection between the human thought process, bodies, environment, and space. Not only is the current relationship between humans, geography, and maps a focus of this series of works, the spatial concepts are also of great importance. I try to preserve the historical significance – deconstructed symbols and old memories are my materials for building an archive. By analyzing their forms and reinterpreting the connection between cartography and human existence, I reform the image of the map and reveal the play between reality and imagination.
The many desires and production of symbols we encounter in daily life; the disoriented feeling a moving body has in space while viewing a map; the scale created by the artist in an exhibition space; the interwoven system of bodily senses and archival information allows for a new dialogue between culture, society, and environment. By extension, I create a novel way of experiencing map-art and explore possible forms of collaboration between Art and the map in contemporary art.
This series of works investigates geography and cartography, and moreover the body in the concept of space. By fully employing the human perception and expression of space, the works allow us to focus on the relation of the subject to the world. Through the artistic process, I attempt to create an overwhelming feeling of worldliness, an abstracted place.
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