Comments on the Finalist

Entitled “An Open Ending,” the exhibition is founded on in-depth research as well as a thorough understanding of Huang Hua-Cheng. The exhibition comprehensively demonstrates the artist’s artistic concept and personal life while delineating the contour of Taiwan’s modernism as well as the social and political milieu in an early period. In terms of its curatorial approaches, the combination of archive display, spatial arrangement and recreation of scenes, together with SU Yu-Hsien’s “re-enactment” of Huang’s The Prophet in 2017, elevates the exhibition to a level of spiritual refinement and a contemporary response instead of being a common retrospective or archive exhibition. (Commentator / KAO Jun-Honn)

Artwork Introduction

Based on HUANG Hua-Cheng’s manuscripts, documentation of his works and research on historical materials, this exhibition combines field study, reorganization of archives, imagery representation and monograph publication to retrace and imagine the crucial trajectories of Huang’s creative career.  As a representative figure of Taiwan’s avant-garde art in the 60s, as well as someone who was “progressive” but “untimely” at the same time, the pursuit, exploration and retrospection of Huang’s work resembles an endeavor to locate a lost discourse with scant context. The exhibition is therefore an attempt to comprehend the “modern” imagination that Huang represents, and by doing so, reflects on its meaning in the contemporary context.

About the Artist

CHANG Shih-Lun is an art critic and a researcher of photography history. He was an art museum worker and a journalist for magazines. He holds an MA in Journalism from National Cheng-Chi University and is a Ph.D. Candidate from the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmith College, University of London. He is the translator of Understanding a Photograph (John Berger), Another Way of Telling: A Possible Theory of Photography (John Berger & Jean Mohr), and The Photograph as Contemporary Art (Charlotte Cotton). His articles can be found in various publications, and he is the author of A Quest of Reality (tentative title; 2021). His research interest lies in photography history, contemporary art, music criticism, film studies, modernity of aesthetics and the history of the Cold War. While continuing engaging in photography criticism, he is currently working on a writing project about Taiwanese visuality and photography history.