Where the River Twists

Spark­ing in the late 1950s art world of the United States were the Pop Art and Min­im­al­ism, two primary move­ments that depar­ted from the ges­tur­al and sub­ject­ive nature of the pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tion. Pop artists blurred the bound­ar­ies between “high” and “low” cul­ture by cre­at­ing art pieces of mass cul­ture objects, media and polit­ic­al stars. Min­im­al­ism not­ably intro­duced highly sim­pli­fied geo­met­ric forms, reduct­ive seri­al com­pos­i­tions, and the use of unmod­i­fied indus­tri­al mater­i­als and fab­ric­a­tion meth­ods. Mean­while, the show also fea­tures European artists that are not asso­ci­ated with either move­ment, but mas­ter the tech­niques, pro­ced­ures, and style res­on­at­ing these move­ments.

Apart from the oth­ers, the exhib­i­tion cre­ates anoth­er extraordin­ary dia­logue from artist to artist: from the Ji’an-born Chinese artist Liu Jian­hua, and one of the closest Bel­gian asso­ci­ates of Zero Group, Wal­ter Leb­lanc. Both known for their non-tra­di­tion­al mater­i­als, Liu stands away from the pre­vail­ing styles in con­tem­por­ary art, and trans­fers paper, leaves, and ink drops into curi­ous and fra­gile por­cel­ain sculp­tures. Firm believ­er in strategies for paint­ing without pig­ment, LeB­lanc intro­duced “tor­sion” (twists) to his work— he tightened and twis­ted cot­ton threads, and even­tu­ally plastic rib­bons, over tra­di­tion­al sup­ports to cre­ate ray-like pat­terns and simple geo­met­ric shapes. Both tal­ents have been primar­ily inter­ested in motion, and the per­fect bal­ance between objects and space.

Taipei’s Song­shan dis­trict was ori­gin­ally named Malysyakkaw, a low­land Ket­agalan word mean­ing, “where the river twists”. Geo­graph­ic­ally, it most likely sug­gests that the dis­trict is where the Kee­lung River twists, flows, and nour­ishes. “We hope that the exhib­i­tion upends the nar­rat­ive of aggress­ive pro­gresses by inde­pend­ent art move­ments and bridges the twis­ted rivers from the east and the west, and have forces gen­er­ated from vari­ous artist prac­tices mix, twist and flow in their very free, true and effort­less forms”, stated the Dir­ect­or of Wang­sim, Adel Wang.

The exhib­i­tion is gen­er­ously sup­por­ted by Pace Gal­lery (Beijing / Hong Kong), Edou­ard Simoens Gal­lery (Knokke, Bel­gi­um), and QG Gal­lery (Brus­sels, Bel­gi­um).