Winter connects us, then spring arrives
The process of documentation gradually stirs and alters the happening of events. Far from being passive, it offers structure to its subjects; it ritualizes their daily existence, both private and professional. It participates in events and further generates energy or regulates progress. The act of documenting possesses certain forms, and this work seeks to recognize their various facades that simultaneously replace the original and acquire authenticity.
This work includes documentation of traces in domestic and exterior environments. It combines senses of representation and interpretation within a personal context that lends itself to fictional readings. Its inherent shift of perspectives might relate to an autobiographical or ideological intent in which body becomes a political presence, and space turns into an arena for testing and examining hypothetical perfection. As an anticipation of the uprising of new generations and the transition of authority, this work is about the process of looking at self as past.
The earth rotates, and the sun rises and sets. Seasons change, snow melts, and spring comes. Life reveals its rotative form, as new generations sprout, confronting and rebelling. The conflict between the past and the future implies a challenging process of destructing and balancing, reaching for harmony in a new order. Looking at the growth and the development of my now 8-year-old son, I question the role of father, caretaker and educator, and wonder about the imagination I have encouraged and the limits I have unconsciously set. In observing the universe he has at once disturbed and generated, I feel inspired by the overlapping perceptions of fiction and reality.
Photographs and videos gently intertwine in the exhibition space to construct a cohesive environmental and visual context that refers to various interests, including transition, fiction, space, body, power, will and narrative. This photographic and video imagery proposes a self-contained world where objects bear witness to quotidian gestures and fragments resonate to an abstracted form of everyday life. These elements rotate as they take part in the endless circle of a personal life, within which one ultimately longs for a sky and the ability to fly.
- Chih-Chien Wang
The gallery is proud that this exhibition was chosen as one of the satellite exhibitions of the Momenta Biennale
The artist thanks the Canada Council for the Arts
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Chih-Chien Wang was born in Taiwan and has resided in Montreal since 2002, where he obtained a MFA degree at Concordia University following studies at the Chinese Culture University in Taipei, Taiwan. His recent solo exhibitions could be seen at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin (2016) the Art Gallery of Mississauga (2015), the Darling Foundry in Montreal (2015), Expression in Saint-Hyacinthe (2014), the Musée régional de Rimouski (2013) and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2012), and he has been included in group exhibitions, including the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, The Quebec Triennial at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the National Gallery of Canada, Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery in Montreal, Zenith Gallery in Beijing, Aperture in New York, Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne Switzerland. His work can be seen this Fall at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal (« Hommage to collector Roy Heenan » ), at the Kamloops Art Gallery in British Columbia (« Since Then » group exhibition) and at the at Art Museum at the University of Toronto/ Justina M. Barnicke Gallery ( « Far and Near: the Distance(s) between Us »). The Canada Council of the Arts awarded Chih-Chien Wang the 2017 Duke and Duchess of York Prize in photography.
His works figure prominently in several public collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Ville de Montréal - and in corporate and private collections such as Hydro Quebec, Royal Bank of Canada, TD Bank Group, Fédération des Caisses Desjardins, Banque nationale, Giverny Capital and Caisse de dépôt et placement.
