bear hole

Ting Chaong-Wen & Wang Hsiang-Lin: bear hole
March 4th – April 29th 2023 in Solid Art Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan

By Hung-Fei Wu

The first exhibition, "bear hole", refers to specific waterfilled spots in swampland, muskeg, often referred to in Canadian Indigenous oral storytelling as places where injured animals go to heal in the mineral-rich water. Drawing on the personal experiences of the two artists in the exhibition, Ting Chaong-Wen and Wang Hsiang-Lin, the exhibition explores the creative burnout in art production and the state of physical and mental exhaustion in the wake of the milieus of homogenization of time, linear development and capital growth as a whole.

By rethinking and resetting the notion of one-dimensional time perspective, the exhibition presents alternative flows, scales, and forms of life that initiate a more dialogic relationship, thus allowing ways of worldmaking to become more sustainable and creative.

The artworks on show bring into focus TING’s and WANG’s experiences of short breaks, returns, dreams and road trips as sources of creative inspiration for them. The barren and solitude landscape scenes in their works act as portals to other worlds. In moments of retrospection, monologues, and getting lost in unconscious dialogues with the “good-for-nothing” frontiers, one no longer perceives time as linear when being present in nature and witnessing its intersectionalities of accumulation and being recycled back into the environment, which render one’s vision and sensation sharper.

Entrance to bear hole exhibition. Black curtain covering a doorway in a white wall.

A person is watching a video installation in a dark room. There is a fire burning in a dark landscape. Some clouds in the sky are visible.

Exhibition view. In the front there is a bright red dome of sand-like material. On the left three photographs and six black rectangulars of the size of those photographs form a diamond shape. Next to the back wall is a tall, sparkly, metallic curtain attached to a high scaffolding on wheels, with a pink and blue shadow of the structure reflected on the wall.

Exhibition view of a light space with big windows on the right side. There are six photographs on the white wall, some depicting landscapes with hay and blue sky, some photographs further back have people and built environment depicted in them.

Exhibition room with an object that looks like a solar panel, and photographs further on the back wall.

Exhibition view of the solar panel and a TV screen that has a black and white image of a person in a landscape.

Images: ANPIS FOTO