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Conceptual artist Chou Yu-cheng to represent Taiwan at Lyon biennale

  • Date:2019-09-18~2020-01-05
Conceptual artist Chou Yu-cheng to represent Taiwan at Lyon biennale

Taiwan artist Chou Yu-cheng (周育正) is one of the 55 international artists who have been invited to participate in the 2019 Lyon Contemporary Art Biennale from Sept. 18, 2019 to Jan. 5, 2020. The biennale's 15th edition has embraced the theme "Where water comes together with other water" to pursue deeper discourse on environmental issues through art.

 

A specialist in manipulating the pairing of aesthetics and society, the Taipei-born conceptual artist's works emphasize the rationale behind visual styling, focusing instead on the production of alternative modes of thinking and acting within existing systems while also revealing the problems with reality as it exists.

 

The 43-year-old works in a broad range of media, often acting as a sort of "intermediary" who blends what he sees as his "subjects" — individuals, enterprises, and institutions — to produce a dialectic between source and result through transfer or transplantation, or through differences in time and place.

 

Inspired by the late French sociologist Jean Baudrillard's interest in modern objects, Chou often labels his projects with a string of seemingly unrelated keywords to make a point. For example, a juxtaposition of hygiene-related keywords such as "Refresh, Sacrifice, New Hygiene, Infection, Clean, Robot, Air, Housekeeping, www.ayibang.com, Cigarette, Dyson, Modern People" refer to how sanitary habits and standards are used as yardsticks to gauge modernization.

 

He will be bringing "Goods, Acceleration, Package, Express, Convenience, Borrow, Digestion, Regeneration, PAPREC Group" to the Lyon biennale. The site-specific installation has been created using approximately 250 tons of discarded cardboard provided by the recycling group PAPREC to engage the themes of reuse, recreate, and reengineer, prompt re-evaluation of our industrial ecosystems, and illustrate the monetization of human relations.

 

This year's 55-artist lineup has been curated by Parisian contemporary arts center Palais de Tokyo. More information is available at https://www.biennaledelyon.com/en/artistes/yu-cheng-chou-2/.