Text/ Lin Shih-Yung
I cannot remember the joy of blooming flowers
Yet I continually celebrate the proof of sprouting
Constantly anticipating the revival of withered plants with hot water
My paintings are like organizing a complex, distant autobiography, transforming indigestible elements into something digestible through the act of painting. Each piece becomes part of a larger feast.
The exhibition, titled “Wish Longevity Banquet," is a banquet celebrating my work. Through this exhibition, I aim to highlight three aspects of my pratices: "Wish," "Longevity," and "Banquet." "Wish" symbolizes mutual hope; "Longevity" signifies the accumulation of time; and "Banquet" represents the ritual of gathering. To reflect these themes, I've chosen three series: "Shuiyuan Recipe" for "Wish," "Give Time Files" for "Longevity," and "The Garden of Earthly Delights" for "Banquet." Through the dialogue among these series, I hope to create a more complete human form and a clearer autobiography, ready to face the unknown developments following the ritual feast.
In the "Shuiyuan Recipe" series, I explore the gifts and offerings in life, focusing on the relationship between mother, child and my birthplace. I document my mother's daily dishes, turning them into a family recipe. Dishes like chive omelet, pan-fried white pomfret, chicken fat rice, and nightshade egg drop soup become subjects in my work. This series also captures the rhythm of food, where images of life and death intertwine, allowing the chaotic, symbiotic, and subversive language of maternal space to roam freely. Bedtime stories are no longer distant tales of abandonment but become anticipated, meaty allegories after rituals, highlighting the mutual hope formed by the "Wish" in rituals and creating a reciprocal relationship of feeding and being fed.
The "Give Time Files" series started with family photos, emphasizing the accumulation of time and the significance of these photos as historical documents. I sculpted my family members' faces in clay, transforming the lightness of photos into the weight of clay and plaster. This connects to my father's profession as a painter of Buddhist statues, bridging the relationship between humans, deities, and idols. The photos mostly depict childhood moments, fragments I can no longer remember. This series emphasizes the long accumulation of "Longevity," using old photos as clues to guide my exploration.
"The Garden of Earthly Delights" is a new series that attempts to return to and distill the discoveries of my early work, gathering and summoning them in a "Banquet" manner. Bosch, an artist who deeply influenced me, provides a language through which I return to my initial approach to art. Bosch's depiction of absurd yet real human interactions fascinates me, allowing detailed exploration of individual relationships. Through his work, I discovered the nakedness of human nature and the diversity of faith. This series intervenes with group portraits of longevity plays, using folk longevity banquets as a theme to blur the line between the real and the fictional human world.
Creating is a long-term exploration, and through the "Wish Longevity Banquet" exhibition, I aim to contemplate and digest this complex, tumultuous human longevity drama.