Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

Jury’s Comments for the Visual Arts Award Winner 

Hungchih Peng creates a multi-media exhibition that combines video and found objects to question idolatry in secular religions, and the relationship between technology and humanity. Beware of GOD embodies the neo-figurative language of contemporary art today, Peng uses humor through the manipulation between the symbol of God and a domestic dog. The installation critiques the common desire for material wealth through the juxtaposition of the ancient and the new, the digital and craft, and the text and the image.  Beware of GOD contributes to a global dialogue about existence in the age of merging cultural identities. 

Comments on the Finalist 

PENG employs low tech devices to investigate the relations between the human and the divinity. In his exhibition, Beware of God, PENG uses the local religious phenomena as a point of the entry for the hysterical states between the sacred and the profane. His work is an reference that the individual desire always postpones its realization, and , therefore,  an imperfect simulacrum bordering on the grey area between  reality and imagination. In other words, PENG maintains the subtle linkage from the imaginary to the reality, yet also distant them.   PENG’s work refers to the short circuit of the symbolic order that the domesticated animals turns our vision upside down,   and thus contains the author’s   psychological state of mind   toward  the local socio-culture conditions. 

（By Committee Member Hongjohn LIN）

Artwork Introduction

Peng Hung-Chih creates a multi-media exhibition that combines video and found objects to question idolatry in secular religions, and the relationship between technology and humanity. Beware of GOD embodies the neo-figurative language of contemporary art today, Peng uses humor through the manipulation between the symbol of God and a domestic dog. The installation critiques the common desire for material wealth through the juxtaposition of the ancient and the new, the digital and craft, and the text and the image.  Beware of GOD contributes to a global dialogue about existence in the age of merging cultural identities.

教授