海市－張致中個展
Date:
2020/08/22 - 2020/09/26
Venue:
Soka Art Center Taipei
After finishing his residency at Kaohsiung's Pier-2 Art Center in 2018, Chang has embarked on a two-year art project inspired by a model ship from his childhood. Using the ship as a symbol, port as the metaphor, he traced an ambiguous horizon of the port at Kaohsiung, on that is perpetually shifting at the visual boundaries and sits at the junction of land and sea, where ebb and flow are perpetual.
Opening and closing temporal and spatial dimensions, Port of Fata Morgana presents a three-act play structure composed of family history and naval architecture; history of war and religions and beliefs, disasters in history and national planning. The work seeks to explore disorderly intrinsic qualities, forgotten history, and trajectories of the human mind, which are found swaying in the midst of today's increasingly more divergent social values, as it examines how art could be used to respond to the will and blind spots of the times.
The artist creates an allegorical scene, using the dry dock where ships are repaired as a symbol; it is here, the great port of Kaohsiung, where migrants and passersby had once arrived with hope of building a better future. In the end, however, they had discovered that the reality is like an unattainable mirage. That so-called homeland on the opposite side was a “Fata Morgana” – a complex mirage that’s even more fragmented, spectacular, rare and illusory.
