MAY 27th - JUNE 9th, 2010
OPNING RECEPTION : MAY 27th, 6 - 8 pm
Chelsea West Gallery is pleased to announce the contemporary photo exhibition, Upfront, opening Thursday, May 27th, which juxtaposes the urban landscape work of Taiwanese artist Liang-Pin Tsao and Japanese artist Yojiro Imasaka.
Yojiro Imasaka was born and raised in Hiroshima, Japan, where as a child he often visited the Atomic Bomb Dome, the building that remained intact after the bombing and later became a peace memorial. For Imasaka, the catastrophic imagery from the bombing and the site that are lodged in his mind motivates him to explore photographically the psychological effects of living under such a constant reminder of the possibility of sudden death and destruction. In his photographic investigation of urban space in New York and Chicago, he has found a unique perspective on the tall buildings that create these cities’ skylines. Shooting straight up between adjacent tall buildings towards the sky, he creates a narrow vista, like a long tunnel, that ends in open sky; up and down are reversed and the viewer feels as if he were standing over a bottomless abyss. The view is unsettling and generates a sense of vertigo. His impressive large-scale black and white prints monumentalize that uneasy loss of equilibrium. As his Pratt Institute professor Allen Frame comments, writing in a catalogue for the group show Durations, "The mood verges on apocalyptic, relieved somewhat by the engaging details of the buildings’ skin, the muscularity of materials and the line patterns of fire escapes. As a native of Hiroshima, he has internalized the anxiety of sudden catastrophe, and his vision of impending threat is intentional and autobiographical."
The images of Liang-Pin Tsao, by contrast, are quiet and calm, but tinged with elements of restlessness and film-noir atmosphere. Tsao roams through deserted streets of his Brooklyn neighborhood after midnight, alone with his camera, encountering scenes that look like movie sets in their dramatic stillness. His walks stem from a desire for retreat, into the contemplative; his confrontation is not with the past but with the present, seeking an existential dialogue with nature, the city, his own mind and its projections. According to Frame, his photographic work “brings to mind projects by Robert Adams, Henry Wessel, and William Gedney,” who also created bodies of work at night, roaming through landscapes both urban and rural. This wandering approach to street photography is a classic one, embraced by many great photographers of the 20th century. What both Imasaka and Tsao bring to the tradition is an intense psychological motivation that personalizes their results and creates a sense of subjectivity even in the depiction of external reality.
Tsao was born and raised in Hsinchu, Taiwan. After studying English Language and Literature as an undergraduate. and finishing the mandatory two-year military service, he moved to Cardiff, Wales, to study in a graduate program in Journalism where he began to develop strong interests in photography. More interested in pursuing the fine art possibilities of photography, he enrolled in the MFA program at Pratt Institute in 2008 and, like Imasaka, will receive his degree in December.
Path to Homeland, Chen’s recent solo exhibition on view at IT Park, consists of two mixed media video artworks, “Path to Homeland” and “Swimming Over.” The two pieces are installed into the second floor and third floor of gallery space respectively. Chen is inspired by a meditative persuading of homeland memory, accompanied with an estranged adulthood reality experience and a wondering memorial space in between familiarity and aloofness, thus he presents the two rotating mental trips between sky and ocean. The 15-minute wandering path, and a rotationally-flying airplane, together the two seek for the end of sky. There are remaining glass pieces and reflection of the sky light on the grey brick wall. Through the holes on the grey wall, one can see the height of tides. Inside the wall, one swims over and over. On the other end of the ocean, out of the wall, it is the distance of home coming.
