Forum for Creativity in Art│Unreached Ambiguity—Euglena Program of Art

2022.06.04 - 2022.08.28 KMFA 4th floor Galleries
Curator: Huang Chih-wei
Artist: Lu Mu-jen, Chiao Sheng-wei


This exhibition is curated by Huang Chih-wei (Associate Professor of the Department of Visual Communication Design at Kun Shan University). Taking the name of an art program, this exhibition is intended as a durational media experiment to explore diverse aspects and open possibilities in the process of artistic creation, allowing factors such as changes, differences, uncertainties, and accidents to come and go freely in the territory of artistic creation.
 
The “Euglena Program of Art” is a team jointly established by artists Lu Mu-jen and Chiao Sheng-wei in 2011 at the on-site creation location of the “Formosa Wall Painting Group” in Taipei. The Free Scenery series is the beginning of the two artists’ joint artistic creation. The name of the team is inspired by the characteristics of Euglena, which are both animals and plants, such as the capability of changing shapes freely, phototaxis, and the capability of conducting activities such as feeding, excretion, growth and reproduction both simultaneously and non-simultaneously. The “Euglena Program of Art” is an action of painting, competition, communication, and confrontation through mutual deletion and addition, through replaced and overlapped layers of images to highlight the characteristics and uncertainties of artistic creation.
 
When creating a painting for a site, the team will incorporate contents in their painting according to the site’s present and past history, environment, people and events. They will also have time-lapse video recording of their creation process. Between the video and the painting, there is a subtle relationship of mutual reference and dialogue. The two artists have childlike and romantic attitudes toward painting. Their unrestrained imagination is reflected in their series such as Super People, UFO People, L’esprit de la Terre and Le Monde Miraculaire, which feature rich and bright colors and figures in intriguing postures with topics centering on care and imagination about the environment and the land. Also in their works, there is a shift of artistic expression techniques from using layers translucent and blurry colors with rough and textures to layers of rich and bright colors with thick and opaque textures. The team has been continuously evolving with their work series in different periods of time. Their Sub-space series reflects their attempt to explore new possibilities by converting painting into space installation composed of different media and devices.
 
The process of the two artists’ artistic creation is like a painting action theater or a stage show. The Gaia Project series by Lu demonstrates his concerns about the land and the planet through the combination of his life and art practice. Chiao is an artist who is always in the state of artistic creation…always drawing images, which give birth to more images for his artistic creation like the constant division and reproduction of Euglena. The “Unreached Ambiguity” in the exhibition title refers to the imagination of all unknown possibilities, which is the most challenging element in joint artistic creation like the team of Lu and Chiao. This exhibition aims to inspire viewers to think from different perspectives about issues such as the possibilities of group artistic creation, painting action, and authorship/timing of artistic creation. By reviewing the artistic creation contexts of Lu and Chiao both as individual artists and as a team, the curator explores the core issues of group artistic creation and proposes solutions to break the stalemate-like inertia in such a mode of artistic creation. It is hoped that, through this exhibition, the stalemate can be turned into a new game that is both exciting and paradigm-shifting.


 
Supervised by: Bureau of Cultural Affairs, Kaohsiung City Government
Organized by: Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts
Appointed Deformaldehyde Coating Sponsor: HOPAX