Mind Set Art Center presents “Away from the Long Night” from the 5th to 31st of December, 2014, as a year-end exhibition endued with warmth, hope and inspirations. The exhibition shows works by 4 outstanding artists, Shi Jin-Hua, Song Dong, Yee I-Lann and Yin Xiuzhen, each sets off from his or her own creative context and probes into the relationship between individual and society nowadays. During the exhibition, artist Shi Jin-Hua will give a talk entitled “Scale of a Common Mortal- Relative Measurement” on 13 December afternoon at 3 pm.

Shi’s work has always related to “measurement” and “body” closely. Through the performance of his body, the artist measures the world with scales of his own definition as a common mortal. Hugging Project, in which friendship and people’s encounters are the subjects being measured was created during the artist’s residency at MoMA PS1 in New York during 2003-04. The transnational friendship between Shi as an individual and his fellow artists also implicates the diplomatic isolation and unique situation of Taiwan.

Performance as a form of self-cultivation also plays a major part in Song Dong’s work. Writing Time with Water: Beijing is a reflection on the nature of time, in which Song wrote down the time of the moment in a Hutong with brush and water as an attempt to capture the essence of time. As time passed, the written words evaporated into the air and a response to the Taoism philosophy was thus created.

The idea of body language finds perfect personification in I-Lann’s ongoing series about embraces – the arms, the only clearly visible form in the artwork, literally spell out a phrase. While Chapter 1 of this series The Sun Will Rise in the East and Deliver Us from This Long Night (2012) is currently on show at the Singapore Art Museum’s exhibition “AfterImage”, Chapter 2 In the dark dark heavy dark night I was listening to the secret sounds of the earth and I heard you and your sweat became that of fear didn't it in the dark dark heavy dark will be presented in “Away from the Long Night”.

The employment of used clothes has become a distinct feature of Yin Xiuzhen’s work, which often questions the fast development of contemporary China. In her work Bookshelf No.22, wood blocks are covered with used clothes and placed on a shelf also covered by fabric to imitate books on a shelf. Through a seemly simple manner, Yin created a sculptural work in which the lofty knowledge system is replaced with articles for daily use, and thus endued with warmth and emotion.

About the artists

Shi Jin-Hua is one of extremely rare conceptual and performance artists in Taiwan. Born in Penghu in 1964, he currently lives and works in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Being a diabetic, injections are a part of his life. Therefore, he has started his art movement of measurement and record when he was 17 and further made it a reason of his living and art career. He has participated in many important biennials and won the first prize of many major art awards in 2007, such as the Taipei Arts Award, the Kaohsiung award and the 10th Li Chun-Shan Foundation Visual Arts Award.

Beijing-based Song Dong (b. 1966, Beijing, China) has emerged from a strong Chinese avant-garde performing arts community and developed into a significant contemporary art figure in the progression of Chinese conceptual art. Song graduated from the fine arts department of Capital Normal University in Beijing in 1989. His work, which is often in collaboration with his wife and fellow Chinese artist, Yin Xiuzhen, ranges from performance and video to photography and sculpture. Song explores notions of impermanence and the transience of human endeavor.

Yee I-Lann was born in 1971 at Sabah, Malaysia. Her father is Kadazan-Dusun and her mother is Kiwi. She inherits her parent’s blended legacy and pursues the education from Malaysia, South Australia, to England. Her mixed culture background results her works always related to identity exploration. I-Lann has spoken of her works via pop culture, city landscape, and daily life. She explores the dialogue between traditional culture and new media via photograph, film, and installation, creating a beautiful visual graphic with infinite nostalgia and a sense of humor to interpret complex culture in the Southeast Asian archipelago. Her works express a unique feminine angle which responds the region history that has long been dominated by male.

A leading female figure in Chinese contemporary art, Yin Xiuzhen (b. 1963, Beijing, China) began her career in the early 1990s following her graduation from Capital Normal University in Beijing where she received a B.A. in oil painting from the Fine Arts Department in1989. Her artworks have since been shown extensively in various international exhibitions. Best known for her works that incorporate second-hand objects, Yin uses her artwork to explore modern issues of globalization and homogenization. By utilizing recycled materials such as sculptural documents of memory, she seeks to personalize objects and allude to the lives of specific individuals, which are often neglected in the drive toward excessive urbanization, rapid modern development and the growing global economy. The artist explains, "In a rapidly changing China, ‘memory’ seems to vanish more quickly than everything else. That’s why preserving memory has become an alternative way of life."

About the exhibition

Duration: 12/05/2014 - 12/31/2014

Venue: Mind Set Art Center

Address: No.16-1, Sec. 3, Xinsheng S. Rd., Da'an Dist., Taipei City 106, Taiwan

T: +886-2-23656008　F +886-2-23656028

E-mail: art.msac@gmail.com

Courtesy of the artists and Mind Set Art Center.