Global Citizens - Asia
Hypeart and THE SHOPHOUSE have joined forces to showcase a group exhibition titled Global Citizens – Asia. The exhibition seeks to celebrate and showcase the works of emerging Asian artists from different parts of the world, providing a platform for these artists to share their unique perspectives and artistic visions.
This diverse group of artists brings unique perspectives to the exhibition, which explores the futurist implications of portraiture in contemporary society. Participating artists include Auto Moai, Ei Kaneko, Gwen Hollingsworth, Lee Jaeheon, Natisa Jones, Nobody Here, Shih Yung-Chun, Wang Qingyuan, Yang Du, Xue Ruozhe, ¥ouada, Yutaka Watanabe, Zhang Haoyan and Zhou Xinyu. Each artist brings their unique artistic vision to the exhibition, exploring themes such as identity, memory, and the impermanence of human life.
Overall, the Global Citizens – Asia exhibition provides a platform for emerging Asian artists to showcase their work and celebrate their creativity. The exhibition is a testament to the power of art to bring people together and create meaningful connections. It offers visitors a chance to engage with contemporary art and elevate their personal journey in the ever-evolving world of art.
Q&A
How do you interpret portraiture in your practice?
In today’s age of convenient technology, “reality” seems to be insignificant, and if I were to propose a new look for portraits in the contemporary world, the first thing that comes to mind is “faking”. Although painting is a way of creation that can be embellished at will, as it has been from ancient times to the present, I used two common retouching software to process my painting references in my two works, Toy packaging.J – swap face – Find your Best Face and Make you Prettier, first “embellishing” the reference material before drawing, and temporarily relegating the “embellishment” of the painting to a later stage.
Could you explain this further?
At the same time, I did some research on the definition of “portrait”. One of the definitions: According to the official definition of portrait in the the Ministry of Education’s Mandarin Dictionary, “Portrait refers to a portrait of a person that shows the five senses, whether it is a photograph, a statue or a painting, and whether it is a full body, a half body or only a face, as long as it involves the “five senses” of a person, it is a portrait. In Toy packaging.J – swap face – Find your Best Face, I propose a “Guess You Better” face pairing through the face swap software, just like putting on a new mask, except for the replacement of the five senses, all other faces remain in their original form. Of course, this is only a software game, now you do not need to buy a physical mask, this toy packaging is set to show you how easy it is to change the face of the way. Maybe you can come up with a more suitable facial features than your original face through the cell phone software, and possibly randomly selected, our original real expressions, probably can not do so abruptly interesting, but also can not get a laugh. The work Make you Prettier makes the original plump and round blonde princess doll become more in line with current fashion tastes, the face and body you want just need to move your fingers to liquefy, even if the whole background has been distorted and deformed, it does not even know the real face of the blonde princess, but who cares? The act of retouching before showing a photo of your face has become more everyday than ever.
How do you incorporate these methods in your practice?
In terms of the topic, I have always been interested in the “absurdity of human behavior” in society. Therefore, I try to translate the acts of “faking”, “faking”, and “pretending” into the steps before painting, and I leap over the beautification process that painting should undertake.
