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.  

In the 3rd year of “+1 Art Base Program” of Chiayi Art Museum, the art residency theme of the year “Mapping the Sound and Landscape” encourages creative workers in sounds and visuals to submit their projects that absorbs the local culture, history, or natural context to unleash their creativity on the basis of the museum and urban spaces. The topic for the artist residency exhibition is “Add A Missing Place.” The artists are LEE Li-Chung and “You Don’t Know Me At All.” “Add a missing place” is a function on Google Map. Any user can add a place on Google Map as long as it passes the review by Google.

For decades, Chiayi has been known as the city of paintings. Through the efforts of numerous artists and artist collectives, the Chiayi Art Museum was inaugurated in 2020. The exhibition “Humanity and the Relational Space – Chen Cheng-Po and the City of Paintings” is based on a group of significant works donated by Chen Cheng-Po Cultural Foundation after the museum's  inauguration. From the works of Chen Cheng-Po (1895-1947) and his collection of paintings and calligraphy, how do we understand the art of Chiayi in the last century? How can we value the modernity of Chiayi from the scale of spatial context? The concept of the city of paintings was formed in the mid to late 1930s. Based on the Kyoto School philosopher Watsuji Tetsuro's (1889-1960) book Climate and culture: A philosophical study (1935), Taiwanese philosopher Hung Yao-Hsun (1903-1986) developed a “view of climate and culture” to investigate the artistic and cultural development in Taiwan, China and Japan and to explore how natural climate historically produced the sensual experience of art. The “human” that Watsuji Tetsuro discussed also implies the sense of “interpersonal” or “relationship,” which defines human essence through the relationship between people. Also, the “relational space” is composed of the interaction and exchanges in art between people, which inquires about the state of human existence. In other words, within the relationship between humans and the interactions between humans and nature, relational space is the subject historically created with the other. The exhibition centers around “Chiayi, the City of Paintings,” focusing on the local community where Chen Cheng-Po spent the latter half of his life. It aims to explore how Chen Cheng-Po, who returned to Chiayi after studying in Tokyo and teaching in Shanghai, re-established his painting career within his interpersonal network in Chiayi. In addition, the exhibition will further investigate the mental construction of his local cultural identity.