NEVVEN is proud to present Liquid Crystals Rose Upon Your Lips a solo show by Taiwanese artist Chin Tsao featuring a new body of sculptural works presented digitally in the intimate off—site setting of her apartment in Vienna, Austria. Inspired by the historical context and the aesthetics of Art Deco, Tsao uses porcelain, one of her main materials of choice, to create a new body of work that in her intentions wants to re-interpret the style and optimistic frenzy of this modernist movement, to adapt it to a very personal portrayal of the changing narrative of our times.
The act of reinterpretation charges the artworks with new meanings, as it ontologically questions the rejection of the past and blind faith in the future characterising Art Deco. Through the use of a material with such a long history as porcelain, Tsao materialises the contemporary digital aesthetics of our times in an intriguing contrast where the relations between future and past, between nowadays and the times of the art movement she’s appropriating are playfully and conceptually confused. Art Deco becomes futuristic and rétro at the same time. Tsao places then the results of her research into the very environment in which she has been spending most of the year 2020, her apartment. There, the dim light illuminates these fascinating artefacts of semi-organic shape while they lie in room corners or on the naked body of the artist herself. Looking at these works in this familiar, protective, yet slightly claustrophobic environment, we can’t avoid to wonder how to venture again ’out there’ and into the future and if, somehow, in the modernist inspired shapes and in the smooth and luscious surfaces of Chin Tsao’s sculptures, we can really find the optimism we need for it.
Chin Tsao’s (Taiwan, 1989) art practice uses sculpture, installation, music and performance as style bending instruments where multi- media objects are able to take organic and nightmarish forms while playing with meaning, interpretation, power-roles and history. Her works are classic and futuristic at once, reminding of old science- fiction. Her art delicately brings to mind how even the visions of the future can become part of our past, and how history itself can turn into a sharp tool of investigation of our current times. She obtained a MFA at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna in 2017 and was exhibited (among others) at Künstlerhaus Klagenfurt (2020), Whitedwarf Projects (Vienna, 2020) and Parallel Vienna (with a solo presentation in the ’Artist Statement’ section, 2019). Chin Tsao lives and works in Vienna, Austria.
NEVVEN ON SITE is a format of exhibitions that wants to question and expand both the classic idea of art shows and the artist’s agency in the curatorial process. Using the possibilities given by the digital dissemination of artistic contents, the artists are invited to conceive not only a body of new works for an exhibition but also to define an off— site setting in which the works are installed and documented. These exhibitions are non—viable to visit in person and would be impossible to fit a gallery space. The goal is to expand the program of the gallery and the possibilities of the invited artists, specifically their control over the very environment in which the works are presented and their perception. NEVVEN ON SITE is a regular program of 6 exhibitions per year that from May 2020 sidelines the regular events hosted by NEVVEN’s gallery space in Göteborg.
Dinosaurer och Digital Keramik på NEVVEN gallery
Göteborgs Posten — Oct 31, 2020