The exhibition entitled 'Earthworm and Dust' marks a momentous collaboration between two distinguished artists, Tang Ya-Wen and Wei Po-Jen. The title suggests the small-scale, fragmented energies that permeate everyday life and the natural world, magnified through a microscopic lens to encompass the broader spectrum of existence. This exhibition explores the artists' shared perspectives, reflecting the whole through the partial and showcasing the interconnectedness of their works. Fragmenting everyday scenes, they evoke a collective comprehension of the tangible realm, resonating on both intimate and universal levels.
Tang Ya-Wen regards the exhibition space as a vessel for her site-specific installations, where she orchestrates the interplay of light and wind to create her work. In the bright interior, dust rises and falls, settling in corners and on curtains, with no human intervention to interfere with its free circulation. Over time, the reversible and irreversible changes and influences between materials become apparent, akin to the ripple effect of wind on water or the gradual fading of colors in sunlight. Elements often overlooked and disregarded in daily life take center stage in this exhibition.
Wei Po-Jen, on the other hand, deftly employs the subtle sounds of worm movement as a metaphor to immerse the viewer into the unfathomable depths of the human body. Within the exhibition space, he artfully interweaves sound, sculpture, and painting, illuminating the nexus between the coiled body and the natural world and evoking sensory impressions similar to the flickering of night lights. The monumental metal sculptures, suggestive of fragments extracted from the earth, convey the passage of time through their myriad rust traces adorning every nook and cranny. Meanwhile, the monochrome sketches depict flattened spheroids, eggs, and nests, revealing the complexities of mineral crystals, sponge-like layers of eggshells, and intertwined neural systems, all beyond the unaided human eye's perception. By exploring the material world's depths and pondering its various constituents' interconnections, this exhibition seeks to unearth the hidden interplay between nature and humanity, laying bare the enigmatic relationships that lie beneath the surface of everyday existence.