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.