Solo exhibitions by LIN Yen Wei

“LIN Yen Wei” presents LIN’s recent painting series of such statues as well as toys. The works follow the same sequence of thought regarding images, painting, and LIN’s investigation of the continuums inhabited by these talismanic objects.

  • Exhibition Period:08 Nov 2014 - 07 Dec 2014
  • Address:ESLITE GALLERY∣5F, No. 11, Songgao Rd., Taipei 11073, Taiwan
  • Opening Hours:8 Nov 2014 15:00~17:00

A lot of us remember those animal statues from our childhoods, made on a real-life scale. It seems that they once flashed through our memories, but their faces were unclear, and what we really recall is that feeling of closeness and familiarity. “What I remember most is a big pair of hands lifting me up, setting me up on a giraffe's back at twice my own height. The way those statues towered over us, they seemed to belong completely to the same continuum as those adults who watched over us.” But, over time, their closeness and familiarity have disappeared. Looking at them again, LIN finds an air of strangeness as they smile apologetically from that space they now inappropriately inhabit. Their smiles have not diminished, but time has added a layer of wear and weariness, which sardonically highlights the helplessness and paradox of their existence. “LIN Yen Wei” presents LIN’s recent painting series of such statues as well as toys. The works follow the same sequence of thought regarding images, painting, and LIN’s investigation of the continuums inhabited by these talismanic objects. Those continuums are ambiguous, located between what is real and what is false, between present and past, and between our uncertainties about our experience. An unusual feeling of distance now surrounds those toys and statues, once they've been bizarrely decorated by a third party, along with the extra surrealism of photography and the narratives of painting. That distance signals us that another kind of real existence is there for them, once their original reality has been rewritten and reworked.

LIN Yen Wei

LIN Yen Wei uses digital cameras to capture close-ups of animal heads and busts. Using depth of field, he deploys a painting style similar to that of photo-realism in the late 1960s. The animals in his paintings are actually renderings of ready-made sculpture objects found in the human world, all of them domesticated without exception, and has even become a pet. Their image is both directly and indirectly influenced by the forms of Disney animals.

Although his portraits are not of man, LIN Yen Wei’s cheap and coarse animal statues touches upon the real world, alluding to the industrialization and commercialization of the contemporary life. Human existence has long become materialized and is continuously changing due to the high turnover rate of commodities. The animal statues in his paintings contain human-like eyes and smiles, and can be regarded as a zoomorphic portrayal of man’s self-alienation in an age of consumerism.

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