Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

Comments in the Finalists

Personal Tortuous History of Flesh replaces faces and bodily functions with viscous and decaying membranes, diaphragms, organs, muscles, as well as flesh and kernels of fruits, along with vividly bloody and meaty fluids, portraying the fragmented masses of life after exhausting screams and cries, as if they were moving lively a moment ago but have been torn apart suddenly and left to be on their last breaths. Embodied as large-scale ceramic structures with strong vocabularies, such as the stringy details, the color variations, the sagging forms, and the decomposing organs, the fruits and bodies guide the viewing of a theater of cruelty. The screams and cries posited between complete withering and fresh plumpness are not a celebration of total decay but to mourn the pain and colorfulness emerged from the process of decline. (Commentator / GONG Jow-Jiun)

Artwork Introduction 

Personal Tortuous History of Flesh is a ceramic art series created by Tsai between 2019 and 2022. She focuses on the union between the states of her body and the material of her creations, and reaches certain indescribable forms in the flow and exchange of sensory experiences. Her works reveal multiple dimensions of relations, and one of them is the interface of transferring and projecting emotions, which also serves as a site of presence and healing. In this cruel theatre of the flesh, spectators are able to uncover life experiences closely related to themselves—even though the series constitutes a landscape pointing to inner experiences of an individual, at its deepest lies something that is universal in life. 

About the Artist

TSAI Jia-Hong is a visual designer and artist working with ceramics and mixed media. Her art practice deals with the states of individual bodies and flesh memory, with an emphasis on evoking potential emotions driving through the process of creation. Tsai repeatedly experiments with the state of things coiling around each other between soil and body, allowing consciousness, flesh, and material to engender new relations therein and re-structure, as if going beyond the logic in skin, organs and tissues by slicing open a separating and protective membrane, which is both proactive and passive, as well as permeable yet impenetrable.

Production Team

Artist｜Tsai Jiahong

Visual design｜Tsai Jiahong

Exhibition Design｜Tsai Jiahong

Setup Staff｜Yang Yaxiang

Management Staff｜Jiang Yueling, Huang Shangrong

Live Streaming Support｜Guo Yuchen

Exhibition Executive｜Zhan Ruohe, Gao Chenxiang

Carpenter｜Lin Hongyi

Website Design｜Chen Zhengdao

Main Organizer｜New Taipei City Government

Support Organizer｜Cultural Affairs Department, New Taipei City Government, New Taipei Gallery