ESLITE GALLERY presents “SHIDA KUO: Shifting Lines and Evolving Forms” on 11 June, showing the artist’s twenty nine canvas works and sculptures. It has been six years since his last solo show at ESLITE GALLERY in 2010. During this interval, KUO continues searching for forgotten forms or creating new forms. Those patterns, crisscrossing and mutually inflating or compressing, appear on canvases and stands in two- or three-dimensional forms.

KUO does not employ realistic forms as creative subjects, which however have certain déjà vu quality. Some of his works make people smile, some quietly exist, and others are like flashing inspiration. They seem to embody the artist’s abstract thinking or feelings drifting here and there. The works thus invite viewers to experience, speculate on, and decode their mysteries. For instance, is it possible to consider Untitled No. 08-06 a piece of wineware, drunken and delighted, dancing to itself? Or, one may say that Untitled No. 15-05 is a plump woman raising her leg and doing yoga, while another people may regard it as a submarine raising a telescope above sea level, inspecting its surroundings.

SHIDA KUO, Untitled P 05-15, 2015; Acrylic on canvas, 122x122cm

Regarding his plane works, KUO opts for square canvases, and he doesn’t emphasize much about composition nor narrative content. As such, his works can be approached from a variety of angles without being visually distorted. Three artistic endeavors of his can be discerned since 2007: First, he keeps using the images resembling some flattened containers; the subjects are presented to contain internal space, like some hollowed ceramic sculptures, as illustrated by Untitled P02-15. Second, he addresses spatial and architectural forms on canvas and identifies space via simplest lines, as shown by Untitled P01-14. Third, he focuses on such basics as point, line, plane, texture, and material, without making narrative expression, for which Untitled P06-15 is a good example, since it introduces burlap between the acrylic paint and the canvas and thus highlights disparate visual effects of materials.

SHIDA KUO, Untitled P 06-15, 2015; Acrylic, Burlap on canvas, 122x122cm

Shida KUO’s creation, sculptures or canvas works, is his response to the primitive summoning from his inner self. Accordingly, his works appear both remote and familiar, natural and industrial, concrete and abstract, Eastern and Western—they feel intimate to us, yet they resist thorough interpretation.

About the exhibition

Date: 11 Jun 2016 - 10 Jul 2016

Venue: ESLITE GALLERY

Courtesy of the artist and ESLITE GALLERY.