Yi-Hsin TZENG
I am an artist who is extremely loyal to painting, finding various media or forms in order to discover the definition of "new painting". Whether it is sculpture, photography, installation, or interactive performance, I see them as a piece of painting. I often focus on finding the shape and color of human desires by combining ready-made and brushstrokes. My early works appeared in a form of semi-liquid (I call it "flow"). Flows not only suggested the invisible relationship between figures in the pictures, but also projected my weird fantasies and ironic comments on the capitalist society. My flow had stayed on the pages of fashion magazines (Copy Fashion, My Dear Miss Goodman Series), vintage pornographic photos (Hyper Girl Series), portraits of Eastern and Western politicians, faces of celebrities and so on. In the end, it developed into an approach of "de-facing" and extended into another series of artwork, My Dear Lovers Series.
In addition to deconstructing the mainstream idea of beauty and authority, the approach of de-facing provides me a chance to regain the power of speaking over images as well as to reconnect with my own identity. Based on my distrust of images and memories, I apply ways of smearing, collage, covering, stacking and other methods to remove faces, forcing these people in the pictures to lose their abilities of gazing, tempting, or even smiling. Under the colorful icing, I unknowingly build a "grotesque" style of aesthetics, which is intrusive, seductive, uncomfortable but humorous. This monster-look image unexpectedly becomes the representation of the author’s self-identity and shows her criticism or reminder about the heterosexual society. A similar critical eye was also laid on the area of art history and art education. I intended to remove master/classical paintings from the public domain of white cubic to the private space of queer communities in a form of interaction and performance (Master Painting Series).
To be announced