Since 1996, The Art Exhibition of Chiayi City has been held in the city for 27 years, transforming from a local art exhibition to a national art competition. It has evolved into an exhibition of calligraphy, eastern painting and western painting held in odd years, and sculpture and photography held in even years, allowing artists to explore their artistic imagination and creativity through various media. Through mutual observation and learning, the exhibition has deepened Chiayi's diversified cultural scenes, raised Chiayi's visibility in the nation, and revived Chiayi's reputation as a "The City of Paintings" that is splendid and abundant. The first prize winning works will also be added to the Chiayi Art Museum's collection, becoming the precious cultural assets of Chiayi City.   "Open The Door to Art - Collection Art Exhibition of Chiayi," as a series of exhibitions of Chiayi Art Museum "Open The Door to Art," features collection artwork as the content of the exhibition, in order to reflect the context and lineage of the Chiayi Art Museum's collection, hoping to encourage the inheritance of culture and art, and accumulating more substance for the future research.   This exhibition is a collection of the first award-winning works of The Art Exhibition of Chiayi City in recent years, which are inspired by the artists' own experiences, presenting their diversified creative concept and life styles, reflecting the profound realities of life and contemporary values. The artists have transformed and broken through the traditional art forms and frameworks to develop brand new styles, and by viewing the exhibition, hopefully the audience will be able to experience and open their own doors to art.  

From the Qing Dynasty, the Japanese-occupied period to other various colonial eras, the development of Taiwanese fine arts over the past centuries is as diverse as the multiple colonial experiences it has experienced. Whether people moved for education, work, business, emigration or war, migration, contact, fusion and conflict are inevitable when artists travel between different countries. This exhibition is titled “Painted Identity of a Homeland” and Chiayi is set to be the spatial endpoint to explore issues such as art mobility and cross-cultural communication between painters from Taiwan and China from the Japanese-occupied period to the post-war period. At the same time, it analyzes how the artwork highlights the ambiguous land identity of "hometown" and "foreign land" when time and space interact during the time while identities are blurred or overlapping, and what kind of mixed national identity is presented. The exhibition includes two major categories: (1) Taiwanese painters from Chiayi who went to China during the Japanese colonial period, and (2) Chinese painters from various provinces who crossed the sea and settled in Taiwan after the war and worked in Chiayi. It also involves (3) A few Chinese painters who immigrated to Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period or came to Taiwan for travel and art exchange. When living in Chiayi, this “homeland” or “foreign land”; the complicated interpersonal networks are also formed between host and guest/ insider and outsider. These people were teachers and government employees, or they made efforts to creative works and promoted art education activities, making huge contributions to Chiayi. Through communication, group consciousness was formed, maintaining one's own cultural attributes or expanding ethnic connections, highlighting complex identity characteristics of different eras, generations, regions or origins, forming a phenomenon of interaction and correspondence in style and spirituality. According to the relationship between different groups, the six subtopics are: "The Other Land of The Shore", "Transgressing the Boundaries of Time and Space", "Images of Residence", "Typical Culture", "Inherited Art of Ink Painting and Calligraphy" and “Elegant Gathering”, displayed by comparing each other through multiple viewpoints. Through the connection of cultural theories at different stages from colonial, post-colonial to trans-colonial periods, this exhibition examines the diverse aspects of the development of art in Chiayi from the Japanese-occupied period to before and after the lifting of martial law and analyzes the contemporary significance of migration, mobility and the intersection of space and time in the artworks of different groups. At the same time, under the special political situation, the exhibition expresses what kind of cultural negotiations are entangled between the nation, homeland, group self and a place, what kind of conflicts and media are used to reconcile the contradictions and differences between Taiwan, Japan, China and the West, and then finds the answer of the reconstruction of self-image and self-identity.  

The Displacing Gaze  is an exhibition that offers a curatorial perspective based on “inheritance” and “dialogue.” In addition to their close cultural and geographical connections with Chiayi, the six artists also formed bonds with each other because of marriage, education, and art.   Chang Yi-Hsiung (1914-2016) and Chiang Pao-Chu (1917-2003) represent the development and imagination of the progress of modernity in Taiwanese art, as well as the time when people aspired to be “painter” and viewed it as an ideal career. The life of Chen Che (1937-) and Hou Chun-Ming (1963-) interweaved due to high school art education. They both render body images in their works, which display distinct creative ideas and natures, indirectly projecting two completely divergent thoughts on the system. Lii Jiin-Shiow (1953-2003) and Ho Ming-Kuei (1978-) formed a relationship through their works purely by chance. Lii’s surreal and unconscious series with black patches implies her anxiety for life, religion, and family on the brim of college graduation, which later became a successful series that marked her signature style of that phase. Ho’s works are composed of scripts of past existence, present life, and fate, which form an intriguing connection and resonance with the religious views embedded in Lii’s works.   This exhibition is not so much based on the intersection of relationships (husband and wife, teacher and student, and generations) but rather on the interactivity and the difference derived from these relationships. Through the rules of art and among the flesh, substance, field, and form constructed by the works, the meaning of artworks is thus displaceable and interchangeable, becoming the comments of each other and reversing each other’s gazes to open up dialogue.