Time and Space

‘Time and Space’ is the second exhibition of ATISMIC's annual curatorial project – Black Humour of Mine, featuring Sean TSENG, Sara WU, WU MeiChi, Petra CORTRIGHT, LAI Tsung-Yun and Funny Sandwich. Through their work, the artists convey their understanding and imagination of time and space.

The constant exploration of the relationship between body perception and objective space is a particularly important part of Sean Tseng's work. By presenting video, photography and sound works in combination, ‘On Shaky Ground’ demonstrates Tseng’s reflection on the concept of 'physical sites’ from his previous works. Through the visible and the invisible, the tangible and the intangible, the artist hopes to explore how the visual, the physical and the spatial would be drawn into each other in a virtual world, so that the weight of perception can manifest itself.

Appearing like colour field paintings at first glance, Sara Wu’s new series of 'Practice with Space’ has used many of the installation images from her previous physical exhibitions. Whilst Wu re-experiences the works in these images, allowing them to meet in different narratives of time and space, the artist is also experimenting on how the works and space are in a reconstructed system, echoing, alienating, obscuring and abstracting each other.

Specialising in setting up magical object scenes with her bare hands, Wu MeiChi has created a series of still life images in recent years. Looking at ‘Pandora's Box’ and ‘Picnic’ series, it’s like entering into the artist's lucid dreams and memories. The seemingly careless display of objects and post-processing drawings not only transcend the objects' colour, form and material characteristics, but also convey an endless excitement to travel through time and space and explore multiple universes.

Lai Tsung-Yun’s ‘The Ancestors’ is an anthropological portrait of an aboriginal elder with a facial tattoo in Taiwan. Since the colonial government during the Japanese rule banned this tradition on civilizational grounds, this precious culture has officially disappeared with the death of the last aboriginal elder to be documented. Lai integrated the collected images of the tattooed aborigines with other human tissue image databases, allowing the computer to generate the virtual digital aboriginal people it imagined. This is an attempt the artist made to let these extinct aboriginal cultures to continue to exist in different forms and spaces.

Funny Sandwich’s new series ‘Straight Maze’ shows three different spaces which vary in size and lightness. The artist presents these videos from the audience's viewpoint that go infinitely deeper into the screen, guiding them into a virtual maze with no end in sight, where the viewers can’t tell day from night, can’t change direction at will, and can simply follow the only way to keep going forward, creating a hypnotising effect and a sense of oppression as if pushed by time.

In ‘Pink_Para_1stchoice’, Petra Cortright performs a fragmented self-portrait, playing with the relationship between the computer screen and voyeurism, and the Internet’s effect on how we perceive subjectivity. Recently exhibited in physical spaces such as Times Square NYC and UTA Artist Space LA, the work is on loan from Petra Cortright Studios for ATISMIC’s ‘Time and Space’ online viewing room only and is not available for sale. With public screenings in different contexts, this work has become an ever-changing statement about the way women engage with the propagation of images on the Internet.

Since the invention of photography in the 19th century, the emergence of new media art in the 20th century and the introduction of NFTs in the 21st century, time and space have always been themes that artists are keen to explore, regardless of the evolution of technology and media. Through the documentation of events, objects and behaviours, the fading, preservation and revisiting of individual/collective experiences, the exploration of living environments and virtual worlds, artists continue to translate their perception of time and space, attempting to capture what once existed and repeatedly debating its authenticity.

[From 11 November 2022 to 10 February 2023, the exhibition will be presented simultaneously on GOXR and CYBER. For information on acquiring artworks, please refer to the curation sector on akaSwap.]