歡迎來到2014粉樂町官網

Let’s embrace!

- inspired by the artwork title Let Us Hug Each Other Today (2010) by Chieh-Hsin Tsai

Entering its 9th consecutive year, the 2014 Very Fun Park Contemporary Art Exhibition in Taipei’s East District is a credit to the Fubon Art Foundation’s continued commitment to promoting the concept of integrating art into our everyday lives. Following the rhythm of daily city life, every summer after the spring rains the artworks of VFP are seen blossoming, sprouting up over the parks, street corners and alleyways of East Taipei. Every year we move forward in our pursuit to interweave art with daily life, resisting temptations to follow the status quo. In so doing we diffuse an aesthetic mode of seeing, inviting those wandering the area to experience first-hand Very Fun Park wonderland.

The Keyword for 2014: Embrace

This year the positive living keyword is embrace, a verb symbolizing the paramount role of action and physical presence at the multiple exhibition sites. Following the VFP blueprint, the curatorial team has knocked on the doors of local stores in East Taipei, working together with them in order to understand the local community economy and the changing trends. We have explored land use of idle derelict spaces, researching local history and the urban layout. We have personally visited the locals, as missionaries entering into careful dialogue, sharing the enlightening possibilities of merging art into our everyday lives. We have established a fluid platform for people to interact and provided the district with new topics for discussion. The curatorial team has become the catalyst of this reaction, bringing group memories and our common stories into the neighborhood. And it is here, beyond pure ‘art’, where Very Fun Park’s unique charm still really lies.

Embrace is what Very Fun Park proposes for the city in 2014. Embrace implies an open, all-encompassing acceptance without preconceptions. Embrace is supporting and encouraging, opening our hearts and minds to all that enter our horizons. Embrace uses action to foster warm emotions, connecting people contagiously in a series of interpersonal interactions. We don’t just embrace the fun and laughters but also all the upcoming challenges. By confronting our challenges courageously with open arms, we become stronger and freer spirits. During the 2014 Very Fun Park exhibition we will launch a series of activities under the general title ‘Embrace’. With artist Chieh-Hsin Tsai’s work as our point of departure, we invite the public to join in and draw with us, strengthening this positive energy and putting fledgling ideas into action.

Migrating spaces, new ways of seeing

For this year’s Very Fun Park, we have journeyed beyond our more familiar realm, the Zhongxiao Dunhua crossroad area, adventuring to the Lane 553 community on Section 4, Zhongxiao East Road and the Songshan Cultural and Creative Park. With the drifting and transforming street silhouettes of East Taipei, one can make new discoveries in one’s wanderings, subtle artworks which blend in organically with the local rhythms of life. In the exhibition areas, viewers can visit historical monuments, green ecological sites, residential blocks and various stores. Diverse types of space, layered architectural styles, and distinctive neighborhood characteristics combine to create a novel experience. The Fubon Life Plaza and the Fubon Financial Center in the Zhongxiao Dunhua area have always been our two main exhibition spaces. In this area lined with expensive and efficient high-rises, these two Fubon locations are among the few open places that people can approach; it symbolizes the center of corporate support for Very Fun Park. Furthermore, for the first time, the owner of a private residence in Lane 117 Dunhua S. Road offered the outer wall of the building as a canvas for mural artist Will Barras to spray his paint, a return to the streets movement, which also reflects the East District style and spirit continuing to integrate art into the city. In the end, the everyday values of East District depend on the attitudes and perceptions of its people. In the process of organizing Very Fun Park, we have experienced the friendly response of this district in which re-explaining the distinctiveness of this community is a key long-term goal of the exhibition. The success of this public art project, the museum without walls, lies in the persistence of the Fubon group’s ideals, the open artistic creation and the astute awareness of the owners of the adopted spaces.

This year the old-time Songshan Tobacco Factory leaves us yet another exploration of the traces of time; in between artworks, one can stroll through the decaying elegance of the Japanese tobacco factory buildings, a step back in time to the Meiji Restoration’s renewal and transformation of Western culture. Although a tobacco factory, it contains elaborate mosaic tiling and imitations of European animal and human sculptures. The high-ceilinged warehouse is currently a hot spot for cultural events.

At the Taipei New Horizon building, completed in collaboration between government and private companies, you can take a peek at internationally acclaimed architect Toyo Ito’s impression of Taiwan. You can also peruse or shop at the Eslite Spectrum, a “Select Shop” where designer goods are specially chosen. Very Fun Park’s inclusion of the Songshan Tobacco Factory area creates a nice contrast between the modern and the historical, the juxtaposition of contemporary artworks and historical Japanese tobacco buildings. We call on our fans to follow us to our new domains. In the artistic exploration of these spatial treasures, we are encouraging viewers to realize the infinite possibilities of these unique spaces!

A Dialogue between Art and Space

The exhibition maintains the dialogue between art and space as its backbone, giving art a voice in the community. Very Fun Park is dedicated to presenting a full variety of artistic expressions and is interested in the communal response from the audience, consumers and shop owners. In Lane 553, Sec.4, Zhongxiao East Road, Chih-Wei Chuang adopts light to show the spiritual side of lives and objects, transcending everyday imaginations and creating a picturesque little universe. Pin-Tong Huang uses wood to carve sculptures personifying and simulating nature. In doing so a dialogue with XIE XIE is facilitated, where they use books to interpret the taste, smell and properties of tea. Yi-Chun Lo expresses her concern for agricultural planting at Artista Perfetto, making guidelines for balancing living in the city with caring for the land. Chuan-Lun Wu hunts for the best shots of the virtual and the replication of fake nature. His imaginative interpretations interact with the space of Golden EggRoll Café. Ting-Ruei Syu uses iron to show his heartfelt concern for the care of animals, a feeling shared with the animal hospital in which his sculptures are fittingly displayed. In the Whiple Lib and JAMEI CHEN stores, both of which emphasize fabric texture and handcrafts, Kuan-Chun Huang and Shang-Ling Ku explore the differences of material experimentation and visual recognition respectively. Returning to basic mediums they narrate the meaning between objects and information. Café Showroom, a space advocating that all the good things in life should be collected, absorbs the strange and beautiful planetary imaginations emerging from Yi-Lung Lin’s mind. What possibilities exist in life? Is it transforming time and space with our imaginations or subverting logic with an absurd sense of humor? Yun-Ting Hung and Yao-Chung Liu start from opposing emotional and rational ends of the spectrum as they explore the often unnoticed corners in Eslite Spectrum Songyan Store. CANLOVE brings used spray cans back to life, rearranging them in visual splendor. The colorful artworks remind us that despite the digital age, persistent environmentalism is indispensable to our existence.

In the East Tobacco Factory at Songshan Cultural and Creative Park, the imprints of times past are the eternal protagonists of this space. We leave the original state of the building, the decaying walls, pillars and walkways, untouched. We have spread artworks from six contemporary artists over a floor space of more than 650 square meters. The curatorial idea has transitioned from “bringing art into the everyday” to “the everyday becomes art”. Everyday objects are transformed by these six artists’ conceptualization, followed by the process of collecting, piling up, collaging, repositioning, detaching and transforming to reproduce an artwork. The artists’ imagination and humor, while lightly touching upon the industrial and social transformations under capitalist development, also transcend established patterns and prejudices, all the while reflecting the new values produced by contemporary re-exploration of the old space.

In this way, art becomes our raw material, as we reenact the reproduction process of a factory, converting the everyday into some sort of artistic expression and attitude. We organize our respective positions, simulating the visual experiences of the audience. In the reassembling process, one eventually reaches the work flow of packaging, taking the audience on a stroll down memory lane back to the 1960s when Taiwan's economic structure underwent a transformation from agriculture to industrial development.

Ei Wada、Chung-Kun Wang put our aural imaginations to test using the technology available. Sheung-Chuen Pak is concerned with humans. He interweaves life stories by establishing a dialogue of exchange, creating new human relations in the process. Michael Johansson collects and juxtaposes objects that have mostly come from mass production lines yet in their process of deterioration have absorbed traces and qualities of everyday life. Yu-Yang Wang takes sentences from text, runs them through a 3D program, reproducing them as giant sculptures. The process challenges the real quality and quantity of textual representation in the digital age. Finally Pip & Pop carpets the factory floor with colorful sugar, and in a beautiful aesthetic visual illusion, emphasizes the basic values created by the century of excess. Amongst the seemingly romantic and colorful inebriation, the artist sneaks in the problem of excess and scarcity.

The outdoor plaza allows people the joy of being physically there in contact with the artworks. Chao-Tsai Chiu’s mechanical Bubble Cannon uses manual hand rotation to produce romance in the Baroque Garden, echoing the manual operation in the factory production process. Slicing through the Cultural Corridor, Buff Diss uses tape to make graffiti, which displays a Greek myth transformed into contemporary philosophical thought. Wen-Fu Yu and YODOGAWA TECHNIQUE respectively use natural mediums and human waste materials to create works incorporated with the landscape. More than just a visual feast, these artworks are also banging the warning drum of our environmental crises. Séverin Millet turns his observation of people into a collection of metaphorical characters, humorously responding to the plethora of different people on the street. Upon seeing these characters, the passers-by have their self-awareness called out from their subconscious. The glass façade of the Fubon Financial Center, which has always been at the forefront of visual display in Taipei, invites the Japanese artist Akinori Oishi to create a graphic work which provides positive and joyful energy for Taipei. Using a sea of dynamic colors, the artist gives something to smile about when passers-by look up.

Using spaces not purely designated for art allows art to enter everyday dialogues. The re-interpretation of the properties of each space (or brand) and the space-time transformation in the creation of the original work are all themes that the curator wants us to think about. Bringing art into everyday life settings is always experimental. The difficulties in executing Very Fun Park are that the educational threshold required often goes way beyond the exhibition itself, challenging ingrained consumerist values of finished products, and encouraging people to accept new way of seeing things. Paradoxically, it is in this adversity and complexity that we discover the unique charm of the exhibition.

For many years, Very Fun Park has successfully linked over a hundred disparate artists with equally disparate local spaces. Very Fun Park is the product of a mighty collaboration of those with similar beliefs and values - the artists, proprietors, supporting volunteers and the residents of East Taipei are all important collaborators on site. If culture is to be inherited, if the city is to be appealing, and if our future productivity is to be based on innovation, then the persistence of Very Fun Park’s artistic actions and the spreading of culture seeds are both great strengths of the Fubon Group’s social responsibility.

By sharing the beauty of everyday life, Very Fun Park is slowly yet steadily leading the collective energies of our whole society forward to our final destination. So embrace Very Fun Park, experience it for yourself and give your full encouragement and participation in this marathon race. See you at 2014 VFP!