NYAB Event - Liang-Pin Tsao “Shimmers in the Drawer”

Liang-Pin Tsao “Shimmers in the Drawer”

Gallery 456 in Chinese-American Arts Council

This event has ended.

The exhibition title, Shimmers in the Drawer, is by and large an euphemistic metaphor. The word “shimmers” alludes to the departed and bygones, while “drawer” refers to one’s mind. It is essentially about people and events that had left long-lasting imprints in one’s life. Despite separation or the passage of time, the memories and things they left behind still intertwine subtly with the lives of the keepers, revealing their close connection in the past as well as the disconnection at present.

Opening the drawer, and looking back at the items and memories that scattered inside. What do we do with the things that were once endowed with intimate feelings after breaking up? How do we settle down the memories that were displaced in reality? In terms of form, this exhibition may be comparable to a lost-and-found. Moreover, while waiting the lost items to be reclaimed by their owners, it also aims to evoke the diasporic memories.

Apart from the passive wait-and-see and wishful evocation, S.K., the video work to be shown in the exhibition, attempts proactively to reunite the deceased with the living through actual practice of commemoration, hoping to embody the positive meanings of the unity between the heavenly and human or in Coleridge’s words, the one life within us and abroad; simultaneously preventing from indulging in acute nostalgia.

The people and events involved in the exhibition are trivial. Besides, it seems to be behind the times to look back on the past, especially considering the current development of materialism that almost always centers around the new. But perhaps it is precisely a case in point to illustrate reversely the lack of humaneness in our pursuit of material growth and the imbalance in the relations of mind and matter.

This exhibition tries to explore the meanings and values of our sentience and mind in modern life, reflecting on the relations between self and other as well as mind and matter that seems to be vulnerably close and deceptively alienated in today’s world.