“From the moment I was informed that the house would be reclaimed, I began thinking about what I could do for it. I wanted to preserve the house, but ultimately, it did not belong to me.”

This reflection on a house is excerpted from a 60,000-word novella by Shih Yung Chun, published in conjunction with his 2019 solo exhibition. Whether through installation, sculpture, photography, or painting, a sense of nostalgia permeates Shih’s artistic practice. Since his university years, he has consistently developed assemblage works that combine sculpture with aged found objects. To the young Shih, the abandoned military dependents’ villages scattered across Taiwan were akin to playgrounds. He frequently wandered through these forgotten spaces, imagining himself as a fictional character while drawing upon fragments of his own childhood memories. Within these abandoned environments and collections of antique objects, he gathered both tangible and imaginary elements that would later become the foundation of his artistic creations.

For this exhibition centered on antique objects, Shih presents a worn sofa that he used for over a decade, an old blue dress, and a corresponding painting. After years of exposure to sunlight filtering through a nearby window, the sofa’s cushion eventually collapsed under use. Shih removed its leather upholstery, attached bird-shaped plaster sculptures to the backrest, and covered the exposed spring seat with numerous aged spheres collected from various locations, transforming the object into a whimsical bird-shooting game apparatus. On the plain blue dress, resembling a school uniform, he meticulously stitched faded seven-colored birds across its surface.

Like an uncorrupted child, Shih possesses an instinct for inventing his own language and narratives. After wandering through worlds of imagination, he returns with remarkable clarity, embellishing the details of everyday life through fantasy. In doing so, he scripts and stages a personal adult fairy tale, one that continually challenges the viewer’s ability to decipher and interpret its meanings.

15 June – 15 July 2018
YIRI ARTS
Curator Chang Sheng Kun