• Duration：2017.11.11. Sat. – 2017.12.03. Sun.
• Opening：2017.11.11. Sat. 3:00pm
• Press Preview：2017.11.10 Fri. 12:00pm
• Artist：HU Chao-Tsung

After three years, artist Hu Chau-Tsung is back, once again holding his new solo exhibition “Becoming a Place to Be” at the Liang Gallery. A place is not just something material and visible, but also space where memory, imagination, and identity mix together. Whether showing the viewing angle of a deserted place, cutting the rational lines and brushwork of reality or turning an existing space into surreal perceptual strokes, Hu constantly goes back to the depth of consciousness, the reconstruction of pictures, exploring how space is made into a habitable “place.”

The works of this solo exhibition are not displayed as single paintings. They are instead coupled to form groups, which explore the possibility of dialogues and narratives through comparison. Hu tries to establish a connection with nature through framed landscape paintings, imagining them as capable of breathing fresh air. At the same time, he questions spatial changes: artificial intervention certainly caused plants to be moved from outdoor to indoor environments, modifying the interior scene. However, because of human factors, outdoor sceneries have also been gradually altered, and the expansion of architectural spaces has resulted in the fading, or even disappearance, of natural green areas. With the extinction of natural green spaces, there seem to be more people wanting to have plants indoor, a sort of “greenness compensation.” In such paradoxical relation, meaning the cross-references between indoor and outdoor spaces, the private and the public domain outline “approaches on spatial intervention,” also exploring people’s imagination about settlements, as well as “how” they become places.

If, as to say, reaching a utopian realm is the path that everyone tries to follow, then Hu focuses on the “process” of reaching towards that end: it is initiated by his own creativity, extends to this solo exhibition, and gradually paves the important way to creative concepts. “Becoming a Place to Be” is the end of that road, but the process and method of shaping a place are the core themes of Hu’s latest exhibition.

Artist Biography 

Hu Chau-Tsung was born in 1981 in Taipei, Taiwan. He received his MFA from the Taipei National University of the Arts in 2017. The artist continually focuses on observing and researching the symbiosis of humanity and nature. In his artworks, Hu is aiming to express the common boundary of a natural environment and artificial scene – a vague, ambiguous and untouchable relationship, and a penetrating and contradictory sense of space. Hu’s artworks In a Better Future (2012), In Between (2014), Under the Gaze of Unknown (2013), and Home – Private Paradise (2016) have been collected by the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung.