Featuring work by YinHua Chu and Ta-Wei Huang
Curated by Jodi Waynberg, in association with Residency Unlimited
Exhibition Dates: August 9 – September 7, 2014
Opening Reception: Saturday, August 16; 5-7pm
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Sunday, 12-6pm
Location: 120 Essex Street NY, NY 10002
(inside Essex Street Market)
Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space and Residency Unlimited are pleased to present Afterimage, a month-long generative project by Taiwanese artists YinHua Chu and Ta-Wei Huang. Taking process as a central subject, Chu and Huang will use the gallery for both exhibition and studio, creating an ever-changing workspace to consider the visual resonance of an image, place or narrative once it has ceased to exist.
Throughout the exhibition, Chu will collect discarded materials from the market vendors, bringing them into the gallery to construct the setting and scenario of “non-place,” a transient site between destinations. Using photography to dislocate the collected object from a sense of time or origin, Chu’s surreal vignettes will transform the everyday into a moment abstracted from reality, coaxing the viewer’s experience of perception to the space between foreign and familiar. Additionally on display is a selection from Chu’s random-access-memories, for which she collected old family photographs, given to her by the curator of the previous installation of this project, that were then reproduced as etchings on copper plates. Using the figures and stories of a family that is not her own, Chu challenges the pliability of memory by reducing and reinterpreting displaced photographs through only the impressions of images.
Working daily, Huang will assemble an evolving installation layered with painting, drawing, video, collage, and three-dimensional frames. An extension of his ongoing practice, this composite will reflect and respond to Huang’s own encounters within the space, blending together the fragments of his observations, and the impressions left by his experience. Building on this palimpsest, Huang will experiment with the notion of the “missing artwork”—the imprint of an image once it has been removed—by painting vendors and visitors to the market and then cutting them from the picture, leaving only the frames.
By creating a transparent workspace, both artists give form to the intersection of the real and imaginary, threading new narratives with the impression of fragments collected over time.
For YinHua Chu, constant travel between different cities has caused the ideas and images associated with each to bleed into one another, and provided a stock of urban memories and associations that allows her to feel on intimate terms with any foreign city. She believes that one’s perception of the city is made up of layers of different images that can be made to coalesce into a single image only with great difficulty, and she has found it necessary to develop a variety of observational methods in order to do justice to the organic complexity of this perception. YinHua uses photography as medium to explore different ways of seeing, treating the photographic image as a fragment frozen and extracted from the flow of time, and the camera as a bridge between mental image and visual perception. Her experiments have introduced new variables into some of the standard operations of both photography and urban geography. Chu has obtained her practice-based Ph.D at the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media, University of Westminster, London. Her work has been published in magazines and exhibited internationally, at the 2008 Biennale at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, the 2009 London Design Festival, the 2010 Fringe Arts Bath, and the 2010 Cuneo ZooArt Exhibition in Italy. In 2010 Chu also exhibited work at the Taiwan Photo Museum and presented a solo show at London’s Gallery West. In 2009 she was invited to represent the Taipei Artist Village in an exchanging artist with Tokyo Wonder Site. Chu is now working as Assistant Professor in Fine Arts, Tung-Hai University, Taiwan.
Ta-Wei Huang does not have an academic background in art. As a child he drew compulsively but discovered he wanted to become an artist when he studied marketing in college. As an artist, Huang understands creativity as a moving and fluid process. Whereas he considers that future and past belong to the realm of imagination, Huang focuses solely on moments that are happening in the status of “now”. Walking and observing structures and details of environments and surroundings form the core of his practice. Through the use of paintings, installations, photography, sound recording and videography. He places the emphasis on interaction and interplay between each structure as well as with society, in his effort to invite people to communicate with the elements from daily life.
This exhibition is presented in collaboration with Residency Unlimited within the AAI Art (Inter)Actions program. We are grateful to the Ministry of Culture, R.O.C.(Taiwan) for supporting the residencies of both Ta-Wei Huang and Yinhua Chu at Residency Unlimited and Artists Alliance Inc.
Cuchifritos is FREE to the public and handicap accessible. Located inside Essex Street Market at the south end nearest Delancey.
Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space is a program of Artists Alliance Inc., a 501c3 not for profit organization located on the Lower East Side of New York City within the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center. Cuchifritos is supported in part by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. This program is made possible by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. We thank the following for their generous support: Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York City Economic Development Corporation and individual supporters of Artists Alliance Inc. Special thanks go to our team of dedicated volunteers, without whom this program would not be possible.