Chi-Wen Gallery at Art Collaboration Kyoto (ACK) 2023

Dates | Sat. October 28−Mon. October 30, 2023
Preview | Fri. October 27 *by invitation only
Hours |
Sat. October 28  noon–7pm
Sun.October 29  11am–7pm
Mon.October 30  11am–5pm

Venue | Kyoto International Conference Center
Takaragaike, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-0001
Japan 
nearest station: Kokusaikaikan Station on the Karasuma Subway Line (5-minute walk)

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Gallery Collaborations – C22
Host – Standing Pine (Nagoya)
Guest – Chi-Wen Gallery (Taipei)
More info

Chi-Wen Gallery is pleased to announce its collaboration with STANDING PINE for the third edition of the “Art Collaboration Kyoto” (ACK 2023). ACK 2023 will bring together 64 galleries from 16 countries and 24 cities, with 33 exhibitors making their debut at the fair. The event will be held at the Kyoto International Conference Center from October 28 to October 30, 2023, with a preview day on October 27, 2023.

STANDING PINE and Chi-Wen Gallery are delighted to co-curate a special exhibition for ACK, featuring four internationally renowned artists from different countries: Jawshing Arthur Liou, Yu Cheng-Ta, Noritoshi Hirakawa, and Joël Andrianomearisoa. These artists have created artworks specifically for the fair, showcasing their unique perspectives. The exhibition aims to foster a dialogue among the artworks, transcending individual concepts and creating a space where diverse meanings resonate together.

Jawshing Arthur Liou (Taiwan, 1968), currently lives and works in USA, is an artist with a background in photography, digital media, film, and journalism. Liou works with lens-based materials and electronic imaging to create installations depicting mental and surreal spaces.

Yu Cheng-Ta (Taiwan, 1983), currently lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan, is working primarily with non-professional actors in staged performances. Yu has developed a body of work that deals with the interstitial spaces and humorous misunderstandings that arise when different languages and cultures collide.

Noritoshi Hirakawa (Japan, 1960), residing in New York since 1993. His creation proposes to extend the capacity of human perception for furthering this culture, pushing the boundaries of perception, altering aesthetic views for the future.

Joël Andrianomearisoa (Madagascar, 1977) currently lives and works between Antananarivo and Paris. His works are often made from textiles, paper, sometimes wood, or unexpected objects that cause a non-explicit and abstract emotion and stories, which people perceive yet cannot describe in words.

About ACK 2023

Founded in 2021, Art Collaboration Kyoto presents a new model of art fair that is rooted in the spirit of collaboration, as well as Kyoto’s welcoming ethos and rich history of art and culture. Its “Gallery Collaborations” section pairs a local Japanese gallery with its international peer in a shared booth to co-present a unique and thoughtful exhibition, while “Kyoto Meetings” features artists with distinct connections to Kyoto. Driven by a commitment to enriching and developing the art ecosystem in Kyoto and beyond, the fair also hosts additional programs, including the fair’s Public Program, which welcomes Greg Dvorak, a specialist in Pacific and Asian history and gender studies, as its guest curator.

ACK 2023 | Artwork Intro 

Jawshing Arthur Liou | Human Cannabis II: ASA | 2020

Single-channel 4K Video, colour, stereo sound,15 minutes 33 seconds ©Jawshing Arthur Liou. Courtesy the artist and Chi-Wen Gallery. 

Watch Trailer

Film Screening & Artist Talk | Kyoto University of Art and Design | 2pm, Fri. October 27, 2023

Inspired by the ancient worship of hemp in Japan, Human-Cannabis II: ASA (2020) is a memorial of the plant’s cultural heritage, enduring spiritual connections, and untold histories. The film depicts a story of a medieval hemp farmer, his relationship to the crop, and memories of a young girl. The first-person narration combines elements of poetry and fiction as one of Jawshing Liou’s first attempts to broaden his visual work into text-based expression. 

Liou’s interest with cannabis stemmed from a 2012 collaboration with Dr. Alex Straiker, a research scientist at Indiana University in the U.S. Their discussion centered around human brains’ ability to produce close equivalence of THC and  CBD, known substances from cannabis plants. These substances are responsible for a wide range of cognitive functions including the ability to learn and to forget. The result of their collaboration was a 4-channel video, Human-Cannabis I: Sonnet 27—featuring a prehistoric encounter between human and cannabis. The images in the video suggest a primordial force both in nature and in our minds. It is a journey of someone’s memories both of a child and as a child, blurred between the lines of remembering and forgetting. 

As Liou turns his attention to the world’s cannabis history and culture, he discovers the beautiful and mysterious hemp tradition in Japan. In the Shinto coronation ceremony (Daijōsai), the emperor wears a hemp robe and receives an offering of hemp as a symbolic domain of the plant realm and silk as the animal realm. Hemp rope, paper, and fiber could be seen strung around Shinto temples and spiritual sites. Human-Cannabis II: Asa portrays hemp as a religious medium for the supernatural. The unsettled timeline is a metaphor for the mirrored images between illusion and reality, a notion of life that continues to be the main course of Liou’s work. 

Jawshing Arthur Liou | Jigoku Series – Aso | 2020

Single-channel 4K video, colour, sound, 5 minutes 39 seconds ©Jawshing Arthur Liou. Courtesy the artist and Chi-Wen Gallery. 

Watch Trailer

Jigoku (2020) is a series of landscape videos of geothermal sites in Kyushu, Japan. Many of them are based in Beppu, a small town with over 2900 hot spring vents. Eight of these hot springs are renowned for the dramatic physical appearance and are named Jigoku, a Japanese word for “Hell.” Those included in the series are “Blood Hell” (Chinoike Jigoku), “Sea Hell” (Umi Jigoku), “White Pond Hell” (Shiraike Jigoku), and “Ghost Buddhist Monk Hell” (Oniishi Bozu Jigoku). Mount Aso, the largest active volcano in Japan, is located just 100km in the southwest of these hot springs. With the influence of Animism and Buddhism, these locations have been regarded as sites of worship since the ancient time. The videos aim to capture the profound spiritual quality of the landscape, while contemplating on the relationship between change and perpetuity in a geological scale. 

Yu Cheng-Ta | adj. Dance |  2010

Single-channel video, colour, sound, 5 minutes 11 seconds © Yu Cheng-Ta. Courtesy the artist and Chi-Wen Gallery. 

Watch Trailer

The video, adj. Dance, takes the form of a teaching video, a kind of video widely available on the market or frequently seen on a TV channel. This work transforms the abstract adjectives into a series of dynamic codes such as physical movements/dancing movements, which allows viewers to interpret and imitate these movements on their own. Through the rhythms and the subtitle explanation in the video, viewers can experience a kind of common sentiments in certain abstract emotions. Viewers can also see or peep at the private reactions and emotions of those people doing the demonstration performance on the screen. This video in collaboration with two dancers, Alumi Liu and Damula Chuyoji. 

ACK 2023 | Artist Intro 

Jawshing Arthur Liou (b. 1968) currently lives and works in USA.

Jawshing Arthur Liou is an artist with a background in photography, digital media, film, and journalism. His recent projects include a pilgrimage in the sacred mountains in Tibet, a journey through the tsunami-ravaged coastline of Japan, and a cinematic collaboration with a brain scientist regarding the connection between endocannabinoids and memory. Liou works with lens-based materials and electronic imaging to create installations depicting mental and surreal spaces. Many of his videos do not contain clear narratives but are meditative in nature, allowing time to slow to a ruminative pace while spatial scales oscillate between the microcosmic and infinitely expansive. Using sources ranging from landscapes and oil paint to human body, much of Liou’s work is related to notions of impermanence, human tragedy, and spiritual sanctuary.

Liou was born in Zhongli, Taiwan in 1968. He received a BA in Journalism at the National Chengchi University in Taipei, Taiwan in 1990 and worked as a video journalist before emigrating to the United States at the age of 25. He pursued a study in Fine Arts and received an MFA in Photography and Electronic Intermedia from the University of Florida, Gainesville in 1998. He was selected as a member of the 1997 National Graduate Seminar in American Photography Institution in New York. While in Florida, Liou studied photography with the renowned surrealist Jerry Uelsmann and Evon Streetman. During this time Liou’s work became more personal and conceptual, and his practice expanded to incorporate video. Liou has been a faculty at Indiana University, Bloomington since 1999. He is currently the Associate Dean and Herman B. Wells Professor of Digital Art at the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design. 

Jawshing Arthur Liou Introduction Video

Yu Cheng-Ta (b.1983) currently lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan.

Working primarily with non-professional actors in staged performances, Yu has developed a body of work that deals with the interstitial spaces and humorous misunderstandings that arise when different languages and cultures collide. His work has been presented by institutions including Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei; Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai; Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Gyeonggi; Centre National de la Danse, Paris; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Gwangju City Museum of Art, Gwangju; National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung and OK Center for Contemporary Art, Linz.

Born in 1983 and coming of age amid the rise of internet culture, digital technology, and social media, Yu created his alter ego FAMEME for Performa in 2019: a fictional influencer from Asia with an American dream to promote the ‘king of fruit,’ the durian, in New York City. As part of this project, Yu opened the Museum of Durian, released a theme song, and broadcast a commercial to promote his brand in Times Square, where he also shot a live music video.