Foreword
"Solo Exhibitions: Open Call Artists" is a platform provided by our museum for artists to showcase their artworks. A panel of jurors consisting of art scholars and experts and also senior staffers from the museum is formed annually to evaluate and select several outstanding art projects to be exhibited in the following year. The objective is to motivate artists to persevere with their creative endeavors. Our museum underwent renovation that was completed in 2018; therefore, exhibitions selected for the years 2017 and 2018 (with four artists selected each year) are concurrently presented this year, with two joint exhibitions presented for the eight artists selected. Showing richly vibrant creative energies, these eight artists are all creatively unique and have already garnered substantial experiences and recognitions in the art communities in Taiwan and overseas.
Working with a diverse range of themes, different media and formats are employed by the four artists in this particular exhibition, with multifaceted contents and imageries collectively presented to spark interactions with the audience. Four art projects are simultaneously presented in the "#-shaped" corridor on the 3rd floor of the museum. Showing art's diverse qualities, the presentations also evoke new inspirations and imaginations in the viewers.
James Ming-Hsueh Lee obtained his doctoral degree in 2013 from Loughborough University in the U.K. His exhibition, In the Sunshine of the Relaxed Majorities, adapts its name from Jean Baudrillard's In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities. Under the seemingly harmless title is an investigation on how we exist in a consumer system, and how nobody is spared from this vast system and the symbols it embodies. Familiar everyday features are observed in the exhibition, showing how we deal with consumption and the relationship we hold with surplus value. Although amusing to see, we also sense how small and helpless we are at the same time. Employing a comical approach to present his art, ordinary occurrences and things are reinterpreted by the artist, with rigid, calcified methods of understanding the world applied to induce new ways of seeing.
The Taipei Fine Arts Museum is immensely pleased to play a role during such a critical time in the careers of these four artists and to be able to publically present their well-thought-out art projects. In addition to the artists' dedication and hard work throughout the preparation of the exhibition, we are also deeply moved by the generous support shown by private companies, which has made it possible for the exhibition to be successfully realized.
Ping Lin
Director, Taipei Fine Ar ts Museum
In the Sunshine of the Relaxed Majorities
“In the Sunshine of the Relaxed Majorities” adapts its name from philosopher Jean Baudrillard's treatise “In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities.” It explores the possible meanings behind visual symbols and experiences, the societal values, and the linguistic habitus created by arrays of several types of products. The artist, James Ming-Hsueh Lee, plies his own sense of humor to reinterpret the items that surround us in our daily lives. Absurdity and comical misreadings allow the ideas and received ideas derived from the work to cross, transform, and recombine. Rigid, calcified methods of understanding the world here produce multiple roads or detour s by which new opportunities are found. In other words, the understanding of what the products and items mean, in their involvement in aesthetics, give free play to the inertia of experience and cognition, and thereby produce difference in meaning.