01 Oct Juming Museum Explores 'Local Matter' Through Sculpture

Source Credit:  Content and images from Ocula Magazine.  Read the original article - https://ocula.com/magazine/art-news/juming-museum-explores-local-matter/

The museum is showing works made of unusual materials including insects, tobacco, and spices by artists including Lee James Ming-Hsueh, Heri Dono, Torimitsu Momoyo, and Lo Yi-Chun.

Juming Museum, located in Taiwan’s New Taipei City, has just opened an ambitious new sculpture exhibition. Fāng Wù — Asian Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition features 20 artists from across Asia. The Chinese term fāng wù can be translated as ‘local matter’, a term that in ancient texts referred to products from a certain area.

The exhibition is curated by Liu Chu-Lan, the Dean of the College of Fine Arts at National Taiwan University of Arts, and Choi Tae-Man, a professor in the Department of Fine Arts at Kookmin University’s College of Arts. They see matter not just as a medium for humans to use to express themselves, but different entities with their own agency. Whether something is seen as global or merely local, they suggest, should not be decided by human beings alone. Stripped of their human geopolitical baggage, Taiwan and Asia become decentralised and, potentially decolonised.

Lo Yi-Chun, Bagasse Missiles (2024). Bagasse, tobacco, sulphur powder, bamboo. Various sizes. Courtesy the artist and Juming Museum.

Artists engage with a wide range of materials in the show, including living tobacco plants, insect specimens, soap, spices, and giant balloons. Among the highlights are works by Taiwanese artists Lo Yi-Chun and Lee James Ming-Hsueh.

Lo Yi-Chun’s Bagasse Missiles (2024) are made of the fibrous material left over after juicing sugar cane. The works have handles to help visitors exercise with them, emphasising how sugar, once a driver of colonisation and the slave trade, is now a ubiquitous source of excess calories.

Liu said, ‘this work not only reveals the influence and energy conversion of materials but also highlights the power dynamics behind cash crops and the contradictions and conflicts inherent in contemporary geopolitics.’

Lee James Ming-Hsueh, An Irrelevant Relationship (2024). Pepper, nutmeg, clove, cinnamon, salt, file cabinet, wooden ladder, litsea cubeba, electric wire, light bulb. Dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Juming Museum.

James Ming-Hsueh Lee also alludes to colonial histories in his work An Irrelevant Relationship (2024). The artist mixed various spices together to build sandcastles he displays on filing cabinets. Contrasting with the tentacle-like geographical reach of the global spice trade, the installation includes 200 insect specimens native to Taiwan.

‘Castles made from powder no longer convey nobility, permanence, or strength,’ Liu said.

International artists taking part in the exhibition include Indonesia’s Heri Dono, whose kinetic sculpture Donosaurus (2017) is a half-human, half-beast inspired by traditional shadow puppet theatre, and Yeesookyung, who creates creatures by piecing together broken ceramics—kintsugi Frankenstein’s monsters.

Heri Dono, Genetic Manipulation (2017). Fibreglass, wood, electronic devices, fan. Five pieces, 82 x 69 x 133 cm each. Courtesy the artist and Juming Museum.

Choi said Yeesookyung’s works, made between 2015 and 2023, evoke ‘the terrifying yet fascinating forms that appear when matter, subjected to human violence in the name of civilization, turns back to seek vengeance on humanity.’

Fāng Wù — Asian Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition continues through 12 January 2025.

Yeesookyung, Translated vase (2016–2023). Ceramic shards, epoxy, 24 karat gold leaf. 11 pieces, various sizes. Courtesy the artist and Juming Museum.

Established in 1999, the Juming Museum takes its name from the founder and artist Ju Ming (1938–2023). Juming Museum established the Research Center for Contemporary Taiwanese Sculpture in 2023. It has since engaged in international art exchanges and presented related exhibitions, seminars, and publications.

For their next major exhibition, in February 2025 Juming Museum will present eight Taiwanese sculptors in Berlin. —[O]

Source Credit:  Content and images from Ocula Magazine.  Read the original article - https://ocula.com/magazine/art-news/juming-museum-explores-local-matter/