“IN THE MOMENT” Debuts Taiwanese Painters Navigating a New Age
Installation view of IN THE MOMENT. Photo by Martin Seck. Courtesy of Nunu Fine Art
Scattered yellow cylinders punctuate the foliage in Ning Fu’s Supa Lonely (2023), where the lingering shadow of a solitary figure emerges from obscured leaves. Immersed in tropical vibrancy, this indistinct presence opens IN THE MOMENT: Six Artists from Taiwan, a group exhibition at Nunu Fine Art New York showcasing emerging Taiwanese painters whose visual languages share an eccentricity in their vivid styles.
Curated by art critic Ching-Wen Chang, IN THE MOMENT brings together Ning Fu, Chiao-Han Chueh, Bing-Ao Li, Guan-Hong Lu, Guan-Jhen Wang, and Qi-Heng Xiao to spotlight artists who came of age as digital natives during Taiwan’s transition towards democracy. Between the ages of 25 and 35, these contemporary artists represent a generation that unanimously embodies a distinctly Taiwanese identity. In her curatorial statement, Chang describes how “in contrast to previous generations, this group of painters convey more free, relaxed, and spontaneous world views and painting attitudes.” This observation speaks to the 16 eclectic paintings in the exhibition, demonstrating the young artists’ confidence in their lived experiences, one mediated through an image-saturated digital world.
Bing-Ao Li, No Name (2023). Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of Nunu Fine Art
Bing-Ao Li’s Rubbings of Life (2023) superimposes rectangular vignettes of landscapes onto one another. One composition depicts a scene from a driving vehicle’s side-view mirror, while another illustrates fanned-out rattan leaves against a salmon-colored block. Tricolor stripes outline an upside-down “L” on the canvas, enclosing the vignettes from a larger background landscape. This fragmented, flat arrangement is reminiscent of the ways we engage with media today through multiple screens, evoking several references simultaneously that may have little to no correlation with each other. This approach is reiterated in the larger painting No Name (2023), with rows of abstracted pictorial “screens” and a trompe l’oeil detail of a turning page, defining a framework Li describes as “contemporary archaeology” that excavates both personal and digital histories.
Ning Fu, Spirit Dog (2024). Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of Nunu Fine Art
Ning Fu similarly borrows from the internet’s growing digital archive, integrating open source materials into dynamic and peculiar still lifes. Spirit Dog (2024) portrays an outline of an Afghan hound with a distorted body and multiple legs, elongated across the canvas. This exaggeration is echoed throughout the painting: duplicate flames from a single candle, glitchy red blocks and hazard marker road signs, a rhythmic pink ribbon lacing around the dog and over various blurred landscapes. Like Li, Fu’s paintings reflect a prevailing habit of image consumption, with visuals that are often fabricated and disruptive. Her deliberate process of “collaging” references onto a single plane explores not only an “afterlife” of our media diet but also the ultimately flattening experience that the internet facilitates.
Qi-Heng Xiao, Flame Grass (2023). Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Nunu Fine Art
In Combo: Spaceship 3 (2023) and Flame Grass (2023), Qi-Heng Xiao foregrounds inanimate objects with a folding clip hanger in the former and an ablaze pink shrub in the latter. The works’ simple, descriptive titles evoke cosmic and precise material associations. Chiao-Han Chueh’s She-wolf (2024) and Big Falling Autumn Fruit (2024), on the other hand, are figurative paintings focusing on the unbridled female figure. The juxtaposition of Xiao and Chueh demonstrates the diverse painting focuses in this show, a difference in part informed by aspects of the artists’ identity beyond their shared origin. Chueh’s paintings highlight feminist explorations framed by her gender identity, while Xiao’s practice is concerned with memory, where he explores the disconnection between reality and recollection.
Guan-Hong Lu, Apocalypse Now: Pig Rider (2024). Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Nunu Fine Art
Guan-Hong Lu and Guan-Jhen Wang present the most defined figures in their surreal paintings, reminiscent of today’s prevalent digitally distorted or AI-generated imagery. Rendered in a photorealistic style, Lu’s Apocalypse Now: Pig Rider (2024) depicts two men under an overpass, one of whom is riding a pig walking towards oranges on the ground. This absurd scene represents Lu’s interest in constructing misaligned “vacuums of narration,” emphasizing misinterpretation that arises from decontextualization. Similarly, Wang explores the nonsensical and illusory of the everyday. In Wang’s Egg (2021), two women lean against each other, balancing an egg between their disproportionately large heads. The fury reds in the background suggest a tumultuous scene, offsetting the work’s overall muted tones and the delicate act of balancing an egg.
Guan-Jhen Wang, Egg (2021). Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Nunu Fine Art
IN THE MOMENT is a bold introduction to a generation of Taiwanese artists; born and raised after the end of martial law, they experienced an accelerating, uncensored world with the advent of Taiwan’s democracy and the rise of the digital age—a stark departure from the Taiwanese artists before them and their contemporaries in the region. As the New York debut for all the artists besides Chiao-Han Chueh, who presented in the US for the first time at Nunu Fine Art NY last year, the show highlights the gallery’s origins in Taipei and commitment to elevating contemporary art practices from Asia.
Chiao-Han Chueh, She-wolf (2024). Courtesy of Nunu Fine Art
IN THE MOMENT is on view at Nunu Fine Art, New York, until October 31st, 2024.
