‘Instant d’entre’ - Chun-Yi Chang’s solo exhibition

By Yu-Kuan Hou

From Artco 2015/2 - No.269

Chun-Yi Chang is an artist who lived in France. Her first solo exhibition ‘Instant d’entre’ in Taiwan uses multiple LCD displays to create dream-like emotions. The exhibition contains three series using three floors in the Crane Gallery. 

On the first floor, the ‘Sky Blue±1’ series. Chun-Yi Chang incorporated well the tilting angles of her works with the exhibition space: multiple small paintings with the color blue, black and yellow to divide the sky, sea level and the sloping ground. Her video work utilises a LCD display in portrait mode with a large portion of the sky, the fluctuation of the sea moves up, down and tilting, making a minimal amount of movement, causing the audience to have a second look at this ‘normal’ image with some suspicion. 

On the second floor, the ‘Fairy Lake’ series. The artist utilises the wall to form a tortuous passage, placing a LCD display in landscape mode at every corner. The displays play a video recording of a little girl in red dress playing hide and seek on a lakeside in a forest. At the end of the passage, the recording is projected onto a wall which fill the whole wall,  with the little girl leaning on a tree trunk counting. The little girl circles around the tree trunk and disappeared behind the tree while the sound of counting echoing in our ears. The visual interchanges between the static and dynamic. The movement of the reflection on the lake is not in sync with the movement of the little girl. The space and the recording enhances the audiences’ emotional experience about the work. 

On the third floor, ‘The Carousel Waltz’. The artist filmed multiple carousels in France. The carousels rotates continuously and showed different styles and texture from different eras. LCD displays are connected adjacently surrounding the exhibition space with the accompanying music of the “Carousel Waltz” in music box style. Allowing the audience to feel the histories and memories of these carousels. 

Chun-Yi Chang uses the corresponding relationship between video recording and the space to enhance people’s emotion toward video recording. Creating a dream-like environment allowing people to loose themselves in time and space. Like entering a magical scenery, happy, sweet and everyday experiences start to change, affecting the way we view our world.