Rewoven: Innovative Fiber Art is a collaboration between the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan, Taiwanese American Arts Council, New York, the Godwin-Ternbach Museum, Queens Colleege and the QCC Art Gallery / CUNY. The exhibition showcases twenty-four artists whose extraordinary creativity and commitment to nature, environmental, and social issues are addressed in a convergence of painted, woven, netted, sewn, assembled and installed artworks.
The conceptual art in this exhibition forms an enchanting dialogue, a reimagining and rediscovery of prosaic materials reborn greater than the sum of their parts. As Wen Fu Yu, one of the artists asserts: “The cloud exists in a quiet state, but youth is passionate”.
Ordinary objects are transformed, and their mere appearance finds liberation through the progressive process: form over content. Reshaped and valued anew as art, we marvel at their creator’s skills.
Encountering these uncomplicated forms, rebalanced and brought into life, the viewer is challenged to inquire, feel, and experience revelations – the dreams artist Yang Wei-Lin says are truth. Through the magic of Huang Wen Ying’s “Electromagnetics, the fragility of the human condition” is evoked, as well as a metaphysical sense of conflict between heaven, earth, and humankind. Brought closer to self-awareness in the presence of these pieces, we sense the impermanence of life, drawing us into nature and its myriad qualities – those that Chuang Hui Lin suggests abandoning the quotidian pursuit of the mundane and commercial and leads toward nature, originality, and a spiritual state of being.
An inventory of signs and themes from popular culture is presented in the work of these artists – an unstoppable flow of variants, or rather a succession of classic memes that infuse the spectator in a continuous, transformative flow. Closely studying the objects, we are immersed in a new sensibility, a fresh awareness; look too quickly, and this meaning will be lost. To paraphrase Andr Breton, true humor reveals itself in a work through the profound initiation of feeling.
Art is form, and form is a perpetual metamorphosis, forever undergoing change that evolves dynamic visions of perceived reality. Here are forms with historic and legendary power, forever in conflict, yet without heroes or ideas, here are forces suspended in a magnetically-levitated space above the pull of gravity. To see these works not as exhibits, but as questions to solve, we discover these objects changing rhythmically, vibrating with tension, and reinventing their forms.
We would like to thank those who have lent their talent to create the exhibit and those who have offered their devoted commitment to this project.
