"Daydreamer" brings together five artists from Taiwan, France, the Czech Republic, and Japan. Each artist addresses the anxieties and uncertainties of daily life, exploring the blurred lines between individual and society, fantasy and reality. This approach, akin to the autopilot mode of daydreaming, challenges the boundaries of reality, transforming restlessness into a new kind of adventure.
Before the 20th century, daydreaming was often dismissed as an impractical waste of time. However, contemporary research increasingly suggests that daydreaming is a vital outlet for imagination and creativity. Artist Keng Chieh-Sheng utilizes modern technology to guide visual perception and generate imagination, leading viewers into a dreamlike space of imbalance and ethereality. Shusuke Tanaka addresses the anxiety stemming from everyday life and societal pressures, using painting to navigate the restlessness and uncertainty of reality. Yan Jheng-Hao and Jan Soumar are like lucid dreamers, depicting distorted bodies and scenes that merge and dissolve, presenting a state of constant transformation and flow, exploring the connections and identities between self and group. Lou Ros transforms natural landscapes to create storm-ravaged scenes, offering an unstable viewing experience that brings the audience to the brink of meditation and reality perception. Through their creations, the artists pose questions within their daydreams, re-encoding the reality of society, with the hidden truths within the fiction becoming the richest material.
We cannot fully understand the paths of the artists' creations or the relationship between their works and their dreams, but perhaps we can consider the meaning of dreaming from a more open perspective. Daydreaming should not merely be an illusion, but a powerful display of ambition. Sleepwalking, besides its mysterious and romantic connotations, also carries intentions of action and innovation. The artists step out of their fantasies with a daydreaming stance, seeking a new distant reality from a suspended perspective.
