Venue : Tenri Cultural Institute, 43A West 13th Street, NYC
Exhibition Date : July 2nd – 30th , 2012.

“LANDSCAPE” features three artists from Taiwan, QUO YING-SHENG, YEH TZU-CHI and CHEN CHIEN-JUNG, respectively in Photography, Oil Paint and Acrylic. Each investigates their individual life experience, and explores their own unique style and exquisite aesthetics while maintaining their cultural integrity to sensitively express their experience within an international world. LANDSCAPE strives to retrace Art’s primitive, simple essence and come back to the original core of the artist’s heart and mind. This exhibition explores not so much the realistic or actual landscape that one can see with one’s eyes, but more by revealing to the audience the impressions from the artist’s inner landscape that the artist generates from a realistic landscape.

QUO YING-SHENG, born in 1950, started his photography profession at age 19. He traveled to Paris in 1975 and studied photography in the Université Paris 8. He settled back in Taiwan in 1992. In this exhibition, he shows a series of 16 photos entitled “The Vistas of My Memory”. These works are part of the photographic negatives which were lost and rediscovered by Quo’s ex-wife in 2002 while cleaning up their old residence in France. This group of black and white photographic works are Quo’s early recorded slices of life from various times and scenes; when put together, they construct the private, secret landscape deep down in the artist’s heart. Although the time frame of these photographs stretches from 1980 to 1992, and their settings span from European to Japan; the expression is consistent with a desolate, bewildered mood. The grading of black, white and grey, a beauty of cleanness and coldness, an ambiguity intertwined with melancholy and sorrow, it is this universal, empathetic emotion that Quo charms his audience.

YEH TZU-CHI, born in 1957 in Yu-Li Town in Hualien. In 1987 Yeh came to the US and entered the graduate school of Brooklyn College, CUNY, in New York City. 19 years later, Yeh and his family returned to Taiwan and settled in his old hometown in Hualien. During this period in New York, he developed his unique, intense painting style. The four landscape paintings in this exhibition are the work Yeh completed after he returned to his hometown; their themes are the Banyan Tree of Tainan, the Ocean in Hualien, the Mountain of Tarogo and the Sha-Mao Mountain in Taipei, respectively. For Yeh, “Landscape” is the “outdoor still life”. He captures the moments of mountain, tree and ocean scenery on a canvas to transform moving moments into an everlasting poetic picture. Their seemingly straightforward, classical, lucid and powerful composition is not a simple-minded re-emergence of Nature, but a manifestation of a firm belief coming from the deeply held respect for Nature and the Creator.

CHEN CHIEN-JUNG was born in 1972. He received a MFA from the Graduate Institute of Plastic Arts, Tainan National College of the Arts. Acrylic is his medium, through which he develops his personal, uniquely distinguishable abstract language in describing a landscape. He has created a series of landscape works using lines and volumes similar to that of an architectural structure, patches and layers of color similar to a machine. In this way, he creates an intellectual and cold tone that gives the audience a certain degree of familiarity associated with the landscape of a city’s downfall or an architectural ruin, an intimate sense coming from the way we decode the common denominators in our civilized urban life.

In this exhibition, Quo Ying-Sheng’s “Mood photography” and Yeh Tzu-Chi’s “Moodscapes” reveal their individual loneliness and quietness, and yet they uncover a shared nostalgia and poetic romanticism. Perhaps because of their nearly 20 years of common experience living abroad. Meanwhile, Chen Chien-Jung builds his inner scene out of his living environment. Though virtually fabricated, it portrays a certain visual familiarity as well as a sense of danger and gloomy. The three artists each exhibit one section of the landscape in their individual life journeys, not only embodying their inner feeling, but also their philosophy of art.