LIANG Chia-Ning

LIANG Chia-Ning Solo Show: Metaphorical Glacier

2022.06.11th — 07.10th

by LIANG Chia-Ning

One day, I received a gift from a friend who was traveling in the glaciers; it was a crystallized stone. What seemed like a simple picture, created fictional words and whimsical imagination. The sight and touch of the stone brought sensory feeling from its journey of being selected, carried, moved – giving it a commemorative meaning. Because the ice age is far away in the past, the sense of space being used as a metaphor, comes from people’s daydreams of glaciers and the projection of the inner landscape from a foreign world. If the ice age from tens of thousands of years ago used to be unreachable, but has now turned into tourist attractions, there is no doubt that the ongoing time series still exists and never seemed to disappear. They were only intervened by people’s viewpoints; hence the ideas have been brought about metaphorically. Contents are created by perspectives, based on a distant geographic location and a boundless space in which no one lives in. Drift intentions, migrations, signs of human habitation, sense of distance, other places, and climates, all of which differ from existing experience, that is to say, we, who enjoy convenient information, were actually on a pseudo-journey fabricated by unfamiliar experience that were read beforehand mounted in the brains.

A gift from the glacier, 2022/ Installation: Stone、Wooden light box、Acrylic、Software program、Text、Mixed media / Dimensions variable / Light box Size: 26.5x35x14cm

On the other hand, I suddenly remembered a travel advertisement billboard I came across when I was backpacking in the Southern Hemisphere; it had a picturesque scenery with green trees and the blue sea, with the word “Escape!” largely written on it. This brings out a state of shock. The meaning of “escape” at present time, may be more inclined to the escape from reality, transformed into inquires of the contemporary philosophical and current situation. From being in the era of overworking, to life being surrounded in international issues like diseases and war, it is a collective goal for everyone around the world, to return to normal life. It is overall a complex and indescribable time.

In my past creations, I took habitation, non-habitation, sense of space, nowhere, and the call from perception of coming back and forth from places, as my propositions. This time, my exhibition is focused on people’s feeling of “yearning”, “longing”, and “wanting to get out and travel.” After the experience of the internalization, it may also be an experience of pseudo-existence, generating an optical illusion or illusion through thoughts. To create a situation that is a familiar place that you have been to. Perhaps it is because I have never been there, so I keep elaborating the words about the experience that I have never had hoping to create some kind of illusion while traveling. In the exhibition, I display the memory and moments of personal experience through this space and other people’s sharing of their travel experience, among which I organized it in the way of covering, retelling, intervention, and through souvenirs while traveling from different time to translate different state of space. In the part of creating art, I will attempt to think about how to measure my sensibility and draw a coordinate to cover boundless thoughts or mental map to lead the imagination of the viewers.

About Artist

LIANG Chia-Ning

1989 Born in Taipei, Taiwan

M.A. Fine Art College, National Taiwan University of Art

Bachelor of Fine Arts, National Taiwan University of Art

Liang Chia-Ning (b. 1989) is adept at utilizing installations, concepts, images, and paintings as creative mediums, and has been concerning herself with the spatiality of the present moment. She creates works that are integrated with their surroundings, intending to evoke the perceptual experience of a particular point in time. In her works, she often uses text as the core concept that revolves around the blurred boundaries between people, spaces, and fields, reminding herself of the state in each space at each time as the pursuit of a sort of meaning. In addition, she retraces the relationship between spaces and their uses by wandering and roaming over the places and therefore creates works with a poetic path and spatiality.

Selected works