Ting Chaong Wen
ㅇ Stay in ㅣ 2015
ㅇ Email ㅣ tingchenwen@gmail.com
ㅇ Homepage | tingchaongwen.weebly.com
TING Chaong-Wen is an installation artist and a visual designer. TING's works are often inspired by his own experiences and often include ready-made objects, which through the context of a particular exhibition, become part of a particular historical narrative. Thus artist deconstructs, interprets, and reinterprets our shared history in surprising and innovate ways. He examines dominant values, historical conflicts such as colonialism, migration, and cultural collective memory and their cross-border existence.
Recent exhibitions include Now Is Nowhere, ITPARK, Taipei, 2014; Day After Day, Fremantle Arts Centre, Fremantle, 2014; History of Hybrid Culture Movements, Contemporary Art Institute 2, Sapporo, 2013; URBAN SYNESTHESIA, ARKI GALERIA, Taipei, 2012; Taste Memory, idolonstudio, Berlin, 2010; Kuroshio Campur, Okinawa Prefectural University of Arts, Okinawa, 2010; Home - Taiwan Biennial, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan, 2008; Have You Eaten Yet? - Asian Art Biennial, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan, 2007. His artist-in-residence projects include Artspace, Sydney, 2014; Shiro Oni Studio Arts Residency Program, Japen, 2014; Asialink's Arts Residency Program, Fremantle, 2014; S-AIR Artist-In-Residence Programme /Sapporo2™ Project, Sapporo, 2013; Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris, 2010. Currently, He lives in Taichung, Taiwan.
ㅇ Works
Civilization Laboratory, Artist collections and Steel structure, 2013
Heroine: Searching for White Rose, Windshield and Single-channel video ( 9’16") , 2014
History of Hybrid Culture Movements, Artist collections and Fluorescent lamp, 2013
Now is Nowhere, Concrete and Straw, 2014
Systematology, Food and Aquarium System, 2012
The Collapse of Cool, Cement and Woofer, 2013
The Rhyme of Forms, Concrete and Single-channel video ( 2’28”), 2014
The Tsuo Chen Man Project, Microscope and Turntables, 2012
Heroine: Searching for White Rose, Windshield and Single-channel video ( 9’16") , 2014
History of Hybrid Culture Movements, Artist collections and Fluorescent lamp, 2013
Now is Nowhere, Concrete and Straw, 2014
Systematology, Food and Aquarium System, 2012
The Collapse of Cool, Cement and Woofer, 2013
The Rhyme of Forms, Concrete and Single-channel video ( 2’28”), 2014
The Tsuo Chen Man Project, Microscope and Turntables, 2012
Turn Turn Turn – A Musing on the Industry of Time
Ron Hanson
“Turnstile” is an installation or spatial construction of sorts by Taiwan artist Ting Chaong Wen, an inquisitive response to his time spent in Seoul.
Before musing on the ensuing selection of cultural debris in this sculptural landscape, it is important to note that Ting is atypical for a Taiwanese artist exhibiting abroad in that he is based in Taichung City, rather than Taipei, the island’s “international” city which contains most of the networks and platforms for contemporary art.
It means that the transition from Taichung City to Seoul is different to what it would have been if he were traveling from Taipei.
It is also important in the kind of work Ting makes, particularly in regard to its temporality; if Ting’s work is not atemporal, it possesses at least a skewed kind of temporality or a complicating of its essence.
Based in the center of Taiwan, Ting is certainly operating in his own time and space.
I’m not sure if there is an intended acerbic tone to the title “Turnstile”, but I do know that the artist has an outlier’s perspective when it comes to urbanization and modernization.
Ting is often reaching back in his thoughts and research for inspiration.
He came to Korea with an interest in the nation’s excavation history, in particular in the mysterious dolmens – megalithic tombs from the Neolithic period – which were heavily concentrated in Korea.
But what he entered into in Seoul was the hyper-temporal digitized landscape of the contemporary city, a myriad of infinite but extremely regulated transactions and exchanges.
If postmodernity offered us the dissolution of the subject, somehow we found ourselves caught adrift in the fluidity of life that resembled the stock exchange.
The vast cultural deterritorialization of the world’s complex histories and signs was quickly absorbed into global financial capitalism which had adapted itself to embrace the world its totality.
I guess a turnstile is a one-way mechanism for administering flows in a commercial system, crude but effective in its delivery. But more than a critique, Ting’s installation creates a world that feels at once both primitive and future dystopian.
In these fractured spaces are a visual diary of the scavenging mind of one of many wanderers in the contemporary wasteland of instant obsolescence; Terry Smith talks about the terrain of contemporary art in terms of “aftermath”.
In “Turnstile” Ting creates ersatz drama from his collected specimens which contain rocks as well the colors and visual markings of the ultramodern.
In “Turnstile” a pair of Korean army boots stands upright in a puddle of oil. Other objects, such as gloves suggest an absent present.
This feels like an environment which has suddenly been evacuated and now stands dissolute. Should we settle into the scene or flee the premises. Or to borrow from popular vernacular, “Should I stay or should I go?”
