Colors of Taiwan.Zodiac

2018.12.27 - 2019.04.07 KMFA Galleries 101-103


Taking a retrospective glance at the 20th-century Taiwanese art history, the concept of local colors had a tremendous impact on the modernization of Taiwanese art. Rather than simply depicting and recording the beauty of Taiwanese culture and customs, artistic creation became a window to showcase the artistic landscape of a new era. Artists had often demonstrated fresh visual expressions informed by the social changes in Taiwan and revealed the meaning and zeitgeist of Taiwanese local characteristics, integrating nature and culture to create innovative visual beauty. Today, Taiwanese colors have already emerged as the pursuit and expression for future artistic knowledge.
 
Colors of Taiwan.Zodiac incorporates the interpretation of artistic creation to address traditional festivals and customs from a “colorful” perspective. Combining Xue Xue Foundation’s lasting endeavors in advocating the education of Taiwanese cultural colors and the preservation and continuation of local arts and their creations by the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, the exhibition embodies the essence of cultural value and leads the audience to explore local colors while identifying with nature, land, history as well as the cultural and humanistic landscape.
 


Since its establishment in 2007, Xue Xue Foundation has been promoting the education of Taiwanese colors and aesthetics for nearly eleven years. The Foundation launched a twelve-year scholarship program, known as “Zodiac by Artists,” which has started in the year of the mouse in 2008 and will last until the year of the pig in 2019. With the Chinese zodiac as its annual theme, the program invites renowned Taiwanese and international visual artist, graphic designers, architects, industrial designers, illustrators and dancers to adorn zodiac models with their creative inspiration. Funds raised through the zodiac works painted by artists have been fully used in financing the Foundation’s Taiwanese colors education programs around the island.
 


On view in this exhibition are the zodiac works painted by artists throughout the years, revealing a transdisciplinary style and diverse creativity. Meanwhile, a selection of artworks from the museum’s collection, including masterpieces by Lin Yu-Shan, Liu Chi-Hsiang and Chuang Shih-Ho, will be included in the Xue Xue Colors collection via its to further nourish Taiwanese cultural inspiration. Moreover, the exhibition also features works of ecological photography taken on the museum premises, presenting the natural landscape of the museum’s unique site that bridges the mountains and different bodies of water. As the photographic series reveals the colors of Taiwan’s southern cultural landscape, it also envisions the future of color education about the natural landscape in southern Taiwan informed and refined by the values of cultural and environmental education.

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