Shih-Chieh Huang "Snake Alley"
The Gabarron Foundation Carriage House Center for the Arts
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The Gabarron Foundation Carriage House Center for the Arts presents in the Asian Contemporary Art Week a two-venue group exhibition of cutting-edge Taiwanese contemporary art. As part of the collaborative exchange, artist Shih-Chieh Huang presents an installation of his massive and billowing work Organic Concept in the Gabarron Foundation’s historic Carriage House Center for the Arts.
Deep in the midst of Taiwan’s capital of Taipei lies the Wanhua District, the city’s oldest area and home to the Longshan Temple, the city’s most historic religious structure. It was also home to Taipei’s red light district and a tourist attraction called Snake Alley where live animals including snakes, turtles and monkeys were displayed in small cages until animal rights activists successfully brought the practice to a stop in the 1990s. Today, it is a place filled with restaurants, night markets and shopping reflective of the bustling hub of the gleaming modern city that surrounds it. Yet, at the heart of Wanhua lie the secrets of Taipei’s past, a conceptual zone that artists from Taiwan have looked to again and again for subject matter that is often plays out in their work. In Snake Alley, the work of many of Taiwan’s most prominent contemporary artists will show how they are negotiating the epic changes that have occurred over the last two decades in Taiwan as the nation has exploded economically, and how they rectify those changes with an, at-times, troubling past.
A representative of Taiwan at the 2007 Venice Biennale, Huang is known for using junk technology as the primary material in his work. Highlighter fluid, cheap plastic shopping bags, remote control toy motors and other odd elements all come together in Huang’s flashing and whirring contraptions as if to bring a sense of optimism to the patchwork nature of life in the here-and-now. For , his massive work consists of just a few box fans and meter-upon-meter of reconstituted plastic bags, that take a billowing snake form. The results inhabit the entire space and are both menacing and tranquil in equal measure.
Media
Schedule
from March 21, 2008 to April 04, 2008