COSMOS OF THOUGHTS: The Future Drawings Liu Cheng-Hsiang Art Exhibition

Pre­vi­ously trained in eco­lo­gic­al archi­tec­ture, and as a self-taught, suc­cess­ful pho­to­graph­er, Liu star­ted cre­at­ing tech-based art in 2015. Primar­ily inter­ested in the logic used in cre­at­ing vari­ous graph­ics — an apple, a build­ing, and the uni­verse, Liu also, as one artic­u­late rep­res­ent­at­ive of “The Big Data Gen­er­a­tion”, closely fol­lows how sci­ent­ists, artists and the soci­ety per­ceive the mam­moth pool of digit­al inform­a­tion in recent years, and it us. Liu cre­ated intric­ate draw­ings that slowly evolved based on giv­en para­met­ers and algorithm. Seem­ingly duplic­at­ing the pro­ced­ure of the nat­ur­al growth with fractal the­or­ies, the com­puter-assisted art­works depicts a man-made Uni­verse with dots, lines and col­ors, what the artist dubbed “the digit­al equi­val­ents of the DNA chains”. The ever- evolving series — like the pro­gram­ming lan­guages used to cre­ate it — titled Cos­mos of Thoughts (cur­rently with ten gen­er­a­tions in total) behaves and per­forms in the unpre­ced­en­ted way, in both micro and macro dimen­sions.

Liu’s tech-based art prac­tice is inspir­ing and very much digest­ible for most of the view­ers, who, even with our smart phones, high-tech drones and digit­al home assist­ant “Alexa”, are dan­ger­ously untrained for com­puter sci­ence or engin­eer­ing. Care­fully tuck­ing away the long digit­al sequences and com­plex 3D ren­der­ings (which the art­work designs were ori­gin­ally blue­prin­ted), the artist presents fine art prints using state-of-the-art print­ing tech­niques. Resem­bling tra­di­tion­al Asi­an paint­ings with metic­u­lous Gong­bib­rushes, the pieces are com­pleted in a fine and slow pro­cess, deeply con­nec­ted to the artist’s inner self and ever-self-bet­ter­ing spir­its. Lend­ing the art space a magic­al pres­ence of galax­ies, neb­u­las and cos­mic rays with mes­mer­iz­ing col­ors and great depth. Always sleek, quick-wit­ted and incred­ibly tech-savvy, Liu has one time said slowly, “I cre­ated a digit­al uni­verse for view­ers to store their true thoughts. Through that, I hope they find their true self”. “The uni­verse” high­lights the rela­tion­ship between­ma­chine and man­kind, tech­no­logy and cre­ativ­ity, inner and out­er self; those exquis­ite works in it are inev­it­ably the future draw­ings.

Liu Cheng-Hsiang’s digit­al art has been exhib­ited extens­ively with acclaimed Taiwan art insti­tu­tions and organ­iz­a­tions includ­ing Nation­al Taiwan Museum of Fine Art and Kaohsiung Fine Art Museum. Cos­mos of Thoughts was the win­ner of Tain­an New Arts Award (2019) and the Nation­al Min­istry of Cul­ture MIT New Art Recom­mend­a­tion (2019). He cur­rently lives and works in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. In Septem­ber 2021, Liu has been selec­ted as the res­id­ent artist of Young-Artist-in- Residence@V54 scheme organ­ized by Po Leung Kuk, which not only houses his first Hong Kong art present­a­tion, but also offers the artist a rare oppor­tun­ity of loc­al com­munity exchange. Cos­mos of Thoughts and the pro­gram centered around the art series are part of the “Y‑Lot SciTech series”, designed by the char­it­able organ­iz­a­tion to increase access­ib­il­ity to Sci­ence and Tech­no­logy ini­ti­at­ives.