展覽預告 Upcoming

補天- 陳廷彰個展

Mending the Sky - Chen Ting Chang Solo Exhibition

     

 陳廷彰 Chen Ting Chang ｜補天 Mending the Sky , 水墨紙本設色 Colored ink on paper, 70x70 cm, 2024

 

陳廷彰 Chen Ting Chang ｜補天-漸 Mending the Sky- Gradually ,
水墨紙本設色 Colored ink on paper, 125x60 cm, 2025
 

 

 
陳廷彰 Chen Ting Chang ｜ 玄牝之門Secret Source of Creation ,
水墨紙本設色 Colored ink on paper, 45.5x40 cm, 2025
 

     美國心理學家霍赫伯格說過「即便是我們對一張靜態圖像的感知，也會需要將一定時間跨度內的多次連續掃視加以整合，因而靜態圖像感知主要由回憶和期待所構成」。我們的觀看是伴隨著我們的存活在時間裡不斷綿延下去的，觀看是隨著觀看經驗的消失與再發生組合起來的輪迴。我們的觀看有著不可思議的虛幻性，我們可能永遠難以界定當下的看，和觀看對象的真實，觀看的大部份實則充滿過去、回憶、與想像的填充。觀看的當下有其朦朧性，我們還依賴很多過去的經驗累積來接收它。補天作品中看似碎片化的象徵元素，事實上也是一種對於觀者凝視的邀請。在持續流動的物理時間中，觀者若意識到被凝視的靜止畫面具有流動性──被激發的過去記憶與眼前所見融合時，那麼這些看似無關、矛盾的圖像元素將成為該經驗過程的具象化。
 

陳廷彰 Chen Ting Chang ｜亙 Everlasting , 水墨紙本設色 Colored ink on paper, 52x42 cm, 2025

     廷彰將現象的內在平衡機制，寄託在神話的想像中，也散見於日常生活的譜寫裡。在觀看此次個展的畫作時，我們常常下意識地執著於畫面的圖像，而忘卻空間的存在。於是廷彰刻意調轉兩者的關係，只描繪線條卻不填充對應顏色。在我們的生活裡，我們不也不經意地執著於特定事物，而忘了觀照自己的處境? 期許我們能回歸本心生活，找到心中的平衡點。
 
 

 Mythology often reaches beyond the confines of knowledge, speaking in obscure yet genuine tones. 

   Rooted once more in folk tales and myths intertwined with observations of daily life, Ting-Chang Chen’s new exhibition Mending the Sky draws from the cosmological ideas of unity through opposites. His contemplative visual practice ground the body of work, where everyday reflection and myth converge to form his artistic propositions.

   The title, Mending the Sky (女媧補天), an ancient Chinese legend long steeped in history, is evoked as the compensation and metaphor for human fragility in Ting-Chang interpretation. Beginning with the fundamental question—why the sky needs to be mended at all— his reflections probe the essence of all things and the phenomenon of Buddhist concepts of cyclical process, where all things move through four stages of emergence and return. From there, he proceeds to investigate the chaotic aftermaths with regards to the use of Mending Stone, with which Nüwa (女媧) repairs the sky. A psychological parallel with this aspect is that we could overcompensate for what is lacking in our daily life and for unsatisfactory desires. As such, Mending the sky series tightly clutches this dialectic of unity of the opposites and points towards the subtleties of human experience.

   The formal technique of the Mending the Sky series also reflects its conceptual tensions. Ting-Chang employs sparse, graphic lines to delineate his forms, while their content is filled with the same hues as their backgrounds— only the lines themselves diverge in colour. This treatment of an image in relation to its space, which is allowed for a subjective perspective that sees the image itself becoming rather an object or a background, blurs the distinction between figure and ground. While it may resemble a figure-ground reversal, the intent is not to establish hierarchy but to suspend it. His method engenders a paradoxical, and yet, natural sentiment which he hopes will re-infiltrate our everyday life. With this approach in mind, Ting-Chang also responds directly to his earlier Ballad of Lethe series, where he disrupted the relationship between front and verso of the inked paper during working process, subjectively selecting one side as presentable, "finished" one.  In works such as Mending the Sky – Gradually, the trembling of earth and sky is felt instinctively through the skew outlines as well as the lumpy colour patches sweeping the surface. As a result, Ting-Chang creates a complex image — that conjures both the idea of negative space and a refusal of fixed subjectivity — of simultaneously familiar and alienated daily experiences. 

   As American psychologist Julian Hochberg once put it, “Even perceiving a static image requires us to integrate multiple successive glances over a certain span of time. Thus, our perception of viewing still picture is built mainly from memory and expectation.” It turns out that our practice of viewing is not only a perceptual extension of our being always in the present moment in a never-ending sequence, but a cycle that repeats itself with the emergence and the disappearance of multiple past impressions. Our way of seeing is elusive, for we might never be able to define our viewing practice in the present tense as well as the observed reality, which is infused with memories and imagined projections of the past. The moment of viewing is thus indefinite and will still depend on accumulations of the past viewing experience. In Mending the sky, the seemingly fragmentation of symbolic motifs becomes an invitation: as time flows and upon our realisation that the still image we are looking at is a dynamic site—where memories, imagination, and present commingle—the fragmented reality is transformed into a visual display of the whole process of seeing itself. 

   Ting-Chang entrusts the inner mechanism of balance not only to myth, but also to his own reflective writings of everyday life. As viewers, we may initially fixate on making sense of his ambiguous motifs, while overlooking the presence of space within. That is perhaps why Ting -Chang draws only the outlines without filling them with responding colours—to guide us into a different kind of attention. In life, too, do we not often encounter similar situations in which we unnecessarily cling to certain things and forget to inspect ourselves in the first place? Mending the Sky ultimately gestures toward an inner equilibrium, urging us to return but to ourselves, and the silence where genuine balance may yet be found.