Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

◌ Date│2024.3.11 - 4.19

◌ Venue│1F Lobby of Taishin Holding（9 am – 6 pm, Mon - Fri）

I imagined a labyrinth of labyrinths, a maze of mazes, a twisting, turning, ever-widening labyrinth that contained both past and future and somehow implied the stars. ── Jorge Luis Borges

▌Artwork Introduction

Garden. Cement, objects found along Tamsui River. Dimensions variable. 2021

In 2021, Wang Yu-Song walked along Tamsui River, picking up seashells, rocks, and other found items along the way. He later mixed these found objects with cement to produce spheres of various sizes. During his walks along the riverbank and throughout this process of collecting found objects, the objects themselves, the light and shadows in the environment, as well as the sounds and tactile feelings that he perceived seemed to send out messages that speak of their own temporal and spatial dimensions. To the artist, he felt like being immersed in a labyrinth encompassing the space-time of different things. 

The title of the exhibition, Garden, is inspired by the short story “The Garden of Forking Paths” by Jorge Luis Borges, who creates a literary labyrinth constructed with interwoven events in time, producing an illusory feeling of books within books and events within events when reading the story. “Every sphere is the condensation and sampling of a space I have visited. In other words, it seems to have encompassed the space. When these spheres are displayed in an exhibition, it is as if there is a space within another.

I have been thinking: this riverbed surface that I was digging might become a plane section buried in the ground one thousand years from now.” In a way, the audience also seems to transform into different planets when viewing this exhibition, where we encounter, pass by each other, and become a certain plane section or fragment in the strata of each other’s life.

▌About the Artist｜Wang Yu-Song

Wang Yu-Song (b. 1994) was born in Hualien. He holds an MFA in Plastic Arts from the Tainan National University of the Arts. Mainly working with mixed media, Wang draws inspiration from his observations and life experiences, which are combined with bodily perception and spatial sites to achieve a more expansive social consciousness and group relations. Through his work, he explores the ambiguity between fiction and reality, as well as the possibilities of artistic creation in life. Wang is the recipient of the Grand Prize at the 2017 Taipei Art Awards.