Inside the gallery space, mini video installation Rain Drop by artist Chiu Chih wanders around in tandem with Aluminum, in which seven aluminum blocks all seem to be imbued with free will. It’s hard to tell whether they are driving in the room unconsciously or not. Speaking of driving and traffic, in another of Chiu’s series, the artist resorts to car door and zebra cross as base materials and plays with people’s cognitive systems. 

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Works such as Zebra Cross, Zebra Treadmill and Exit all stand for signs and objects indispensable from the act of driving. Through the damaged car door which is patched with a soft sofa cushion, the artist brings the dynamics on the road into the gallery space, leading viewers to confront the result of road rage. At the sight of the aftermath and the unusually calm atmosphere, a sense of dissonance is evoked. Moreover, the wide leather belt patterned with zebra cross keep rolling, giving viewers the impression as if they were watching a single-channel video and revealing new vision and visual meaning from within the interplay between the symbolic objects and iconographic perception. 

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The two pieces selected from Afternoon Rain 03: Refracted Series by artist Chang Chia Ling render her personal impression of rain traces left on windows in the form of glass. Ultimately modern yet essentially elegant, her ingenious use of the Spring Pool Glass imbues the work with a sense of ephemerality and manages to capture the most beautiful moment from memories. Sequence 01: Cone hung from the ceiling in the other gallery room introduces notions such as materiality, relativity and tension into the exhibition, and presents our own place in time and space at this very moment. 

The exhibition invites audience to observe the works in the forms of new media and installation and through the perspectives of material and technology. Empathy and perception enable human beings to extend the center of senses, making art as a contemporary medium a product of both singularity and multiplicity. 

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Text: Melony Chiu

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Chiu Chih, Born in 1990, graduated in Innovation Design Engineering(IDE) from Royal College of Art(RCA) and Imperial College London, Chih worked as a design technologist in Volkswagen Group Innovation Center Asia. Therefore, most of the creations use modern industrial process media materials as materials; Chiu Chih is good at observing the relationship between the application and technology of daily life, and proposes another point of view and possibility.

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Chialing Chang is a designer who currently resides in Taipei and works globally. After joining Jin Kuramoto Studio as a product designer in Tokyo (2017-2019), she studied at ECAL(Écolecantonale d'art de Lausanne) in Design for Luxury and Craftsmanship (2019-2020). She was selected as Under30 young talents by Designart Tokyo twice in 2019 and 2022. In 2021, Chang established an interdisciplinary creative practice"messagingleaving". It extracts the distinct characteristic from each of us, tailors it to the individual, and embeds it as an integral part of the expression. Under the versatile understanding of the structure and material, messagingleaving places importance on ideology, seeking multiple perspectives across art and design.