IDENTITY & Reappearance – Reality in Paintings
- 展期時間
- Oct 04 − Nov 04. 2018
- 展覽地點
- Cloud Gallery (1F, No.471, Mingshui Rd., Zhongshan Dist., Taipei City)
- 開幕茶會
- Oct 04. 2018 Thu. 11:30 PM
This exhibition draws inspiration in part from Milan Kundera's book Identity. From birth, every individual possesses an identity, existing within invisible constraints that govern behavior—it can be a designation, a prejudice, a shackle, or a symbol that one person projects onto another. A person may carry two, three, or even more identities. In Kundera's Identity, the protagonist navigates multiple roles: one as a lover in daily life, another as a secret correspondent writing ambiguous love letters, and beyond these, the book explores various social and psychological constructs that shape identity.
Similarly, the question arises: what roles do artists assume within their work? What kinds of identities are embedded in and enacted through a piece of art? Like stories, artworks carry traces of the artist's choices and intentions. Every form, color, and gesture can convey an identity the artist chooses to reveal or conceal. The relationship between identity and representation is intricate, sometimes near, sometimes distant, reflecting both experience and existence.
Leon Battista Alberti, in On Painting, emphasized the artist's mission as discovering new images and subjects, reflecting the richness and diversity of lived experience. When viewing art, beyond the visible composition or formal qualities, we are drawn to the artist's mode of representation—the process of translating memory, atmosphere, or inner reflection into a tangible form. Representation may not merely reproduce external appearance; it can convey mood, emotion, or memory—a scent, a strand of hair, a fleeting gaze at a stranger on a certain day. In this sense, identity and experience are inseparable from artistic creation, and the work becomes a vessel through which the artist's hidden selves are made perceptible, inspiring continuous reflection and engagement.