Sewing Image – An Experiment in Hong-Gah Museum Collection

Sewing Image – An Experiment in Hong-Gah Museum Collection is a conceptual appropriation of Hong-Gah Museum’s embroidery artwork collection as well as the attempt to initiate the conversation between contemporary art and classical embroidery culture. When it comes to “embroidery”, there are two levels of definition of problematic. One is the dissimilation of embroidery amidst the process of capitalization and its modern outlook. The other follows the pattern of the abovementioned, and ponders further on the contemporary link between image and the production of image. The exhibition combs through the rich collection of Hong-Gah Museum’s embroidery artworks and data, trying to clarify the transformation of “technique” in modern times and probe into how it attains the field of “art”, so as to define the cultural value of embroidery in contemporary society. In addition, this shall be our marking of the entrance into the production location of contemporary art. In particular, when life of capitalism becomes the primary appearance of us, how should the relationship between the decorative and symbolic meaning of images produced by embroidery and contemporary image production be practiced in the contemporary context as the experience perspective that transcends space and time.

Let us transform “embroidery” from a constrictive condition of medium into an action of contemporary translation. “Image” is not just an “icon” in the context of embroidery, but the expansion to that of pictures and moving images. “Platform” is deemed as the venue for culture preservation as well as contemporary translation that art ponders. In “Sewing Image”, the heterogeneity of contemporary images often portrays different appearances amidst the transformation of mediums. Such production process bears multiple identities. It not only preserves the puzzles to be solved and chunks of meanings, but dissembles the possibility of code meanings for image consideration via its own critique on capitalism world. In the process of acquiring and naming image identity, it further reconstructs experience versus. perception, action versus thought, society versus individual into activities of same frequency.

The artworks of Hou I-Ting often come from the antecedent of space domain, which serves as the context for the subsequent development. With such, she dissimilates the mediums in the works like body, space, and image, so as to create the metaphors of political and cultural imagination behind the images. This exhibition shall present you her previous works “Complexing Body”. These works are more of Hou’s practice deriving from her conceptual reflection on the inside of image production than an exploration of techniques of embroidery images. As for the clothing over photography created with heterogeneous mediums, is it to cover the existing reality of images, or to gently portray the positions of power and political angle? Is it to mark the title of author, or to warn of daily life flooded with images? To answer the questions above, we shall take advantage of Hong-Gah Museum’s embroidery collection “Yi An Ci Yi – Fertile Green & Lean Red” which employ dual variant embroidery technique. As such, we would engage in an experimental creation, in an attempt to unlock the power transition within image capital, and the mode of contemporary language that transcends the dimensions of culture and time involved in the process.