The 2017 edition marks the fourth time TKG+ has participated in the Art Basel in Hong Kong. For this year’s Galleries sector, TKG+ presents Taiwanese artists Charwei Tsai (b. 1980), Joyce Ho (b. 1983), and Ching-Yuan Chen (b. 1984). Together their practices in photography, painting, and installation form in a raucous art fair setting an intimate narrative that resonates with their distinct perspectives on the quotidian.
Charwei Tsai brings her latest series “Universe of Possibilities” (2016) that examines the trivial and minute through enlarged images of ostensibly celestial bodies but in fact abandoned shells on the riverbank in Vietnam, inscribed with aphorisms in her own handwriting. This series is a continuation of her past practice, probing into the essence of truth in a poetic contrast of beauty and decay, transience and eternity. She recently exhibited in the Biennale of Sydney and Sharjah Calligraphy Biennial (both in 2016).
The presentation unfurls in the booth with the oil paintings of Ching-Yuan Chen interspersed with Joyce Ho’s installation work. A carpet, table, windows, shelves, and magazines strewn about, intertwine to conjure an atmosphere that is private and homely. Ching-Yuan Chen brings an array of paintings where he sifts through seemingly incoherent symbols of disorder and happenstance to reveal a sensibility that appears disengaged with the everyday context. Through a reorganization of these symbols, he conceives a pictorial language that speaks the tug between chaos and memory hidden in the ambiguous narrative of the image, and captures the space-time in his work.
Joyce Ho appropriates found objects with graceful absurdity to tell a tale of ritualized, mundane daily repetition. Her latest work Pull Me Up Softly (2017) is a kinetic installation overlooking the exhibition walls that propels a pair of red boots up only to let them free-fall and disappear from sight when observed from afar.
On behalf of TKG+, Joyce Ho is also a participant in the Encounters sector this year, which is curated by Alexie Glass-Kantor, executive director of Artspace Sydney, and provides an international platform at the Art Basel in Hong Kong for large-scale works of notable artists around the world. Joyce Ho has created for Encounters a site-specific installation On the second day, Saturday, your three minutes…, where performance, installation, and interaction are choreographed to mirror the relationship between people and space, phenomena and rituals, in an attempt to upturn the way art is viewed at art fairs, and the way time is experienced in the human mind.
Founded in Taipei in 2009, TKG+ is committed to supporting experimental, innovative, and critical Taiwanese contemporary art, while privileging artistic forms in diverse mediums, as well as open dialogue between different cultural groups. Presenting an observation of the everyday from the Taiwanese perspective, TKG+ aims to challenge the viewing habits at the Art Basel in Hong Kong with the manipulation of temporality, reinvigorating perceptions of contemporary art.