Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

Comments on the Finalist

"Superficiality" is an invented anxiety of modern man. As a believer in capitalism, the modern man lives according to globalized trends. He is necessarily homogenized through the all-powerful media, including television culture, political propaganda and Internet connectivity, in order to adapt to the rhythms and attitudes of society at large. But is the media's cultural content and information, riding as it does on the tides of fashion, properly reviewed and overseen? Yu-cheng CHOU's works lay bare the process of how we receive, decode and recode the elements of consumer culture. Television operates according to the cycle of consume, recycle, reprocess and repeat. The virtual scenes that are filmed attempt to reconstruct "reality" by playing with viewers' cognitive abilities and fulfilling their desires for simulation. The author would like to take all of this, once it is recorded onto video and canned by the media, and offer it back to modern man for the daily consumption. The veracity of these images would then become uncertain, slow-acting and periodic. The surface of "superficiality" would in turn reveal a deeper media conspiracy. Committee  member: Guan-Jun CHEN

Artwork Introduction

Yu-Cheng CHOU's solo exhibition Superb Superficialness was organized by Galerie Grand Siècle and co-organized by Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture. Chou presented his non-narrative video installations, video works and images produced since 2005.

Chou's art focuses on the criticism of images in mass media. Digital imagery plays a dominant role in contemporary life and Chou explores how we unwittingly accept such imagery without question.  He believes that today's digital imagery surrounding us has become a modern landscape; although, differing from the natural landscape, the imagery that we are exposed to alters our experience and perception of the world. As a result, Chou considers his videos as a type of field work in which he searches for the rhythm or the structural principle underlying these images. 

By using the vocabulary of digital media to examine how we perceive such images, Chou manipulates or makes minute changes to the borrowed images and symbols. His recent video Woods III is a good example.  The video shows a broad expanse of woods, with the trees swaying gently in the breeze. However, this is not a film of a real forest; it is a computer-generated 3D animation. The work shows us how unreliable our sense of sight is, while also demonstrating the complexity of our sensory experience.

About the Artist

Artist Yu-Cheng CHOU lives and works in Paris. After graduating from National Taiwan University of Arts in 1999, Chou continued his study in Paris. He received his Post-Dîploma at Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts and Post-Dîploma of AII at l'Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs through 2005-2007 in Paris. He has just completed his 3rd stage of artistic creation at the Programme La Seine of l'Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts in 2008. 

Since 1999, Chou has participated in various group exhibitions in Asia and Europe. In 2009 he will have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, Colorado.