Reaching

The image of a window frame, light playing through the glass and onto the wood, paint and metal captures the stillness, sense of transparency and the uncanniness of the everyday that have become emblematic of Chih-Chien Wang’s work. In Vertical #1 – Wall, a single pane of glass – an object both permeable and impervious – marks the defining feature of Wang’s new body of work: the separation between the individual and the world. the inspiration for A Person Who Disappears was a news report recounting the mysterious disappearance of a woman and her child who boarded an elevator bound for the top floor of a building and were never seen again. taking this as his point of departure, Wang began to think about the idea of whether it is possible to disappear from society, positing a kind of existence where one can see others but not be seen, where one is present but ignored. through the resulting images Wang explores the inherent gap between cognition of the self and of its environment, that lonely in-between space through which we reach out into the world in the hopes of making even a fleeting connection.

In this photo-based installation, Wang builds on the quiet interior, still life images that he is known for, and turns them outward, both in physical space and in their metaphoric significance. Scenes of water, woods, and sky – devoid of human traces - suggest the vastness of the loneliness felt when we are unable to connect with others and with our surroundings. How does physical space shape how we enact our identities and interactions with others? Wang uses surfaces like water, glass, and wood to suggest that barriers between the personal and the public, the individual and the communal, can be deceptive, as they can be both apparently imperceptible and porous, and at the same time inviolable. In conversation, Wang points out that our physical senses can exacerbate an existential loneliness created by lack of connection – placing a hand against the surface of a wall only serves to remind us that there are other people and experiences on the other side that we cannot reach. Similarly, looking out on large expanses of water calls our own insignificance and vulnerability into sharp relief. Of particular interest is Wang’s focus on the lines that bisect our physical and internal worlds. Many of his titles include the terms ‘vertical’ or ‘horizontal,’ and feature these geometric planar elements. For Wang these lines evoke both the separation and point of congress between here and there, us and them. In Horizontal Water, a single thread hangs across an ever so slightly unsettled aqueous body, at once suggestive of a horizon line (cleaving land and sky, near and far), and a bridge (connecting two disparate realms).

Perhaps Wang draws attention to these liminal spaces to suggest that we are all at times a person who disappears, and that disappearance is not an absolute state. We move in and out of physical, social and psychological spaces with a great deal of fluidity, sometimes meeting barriers and at others breaking them down, but always reaching out.

Curator: Kendra Ainsworth
Art Gallery of Mississauga

"Reaching" Kendra Ainsworth, Art Gallery of Mississauga, 30 April, 2015