2019.05.24 – 2019.07.07
In My Room

Opening summer 2019, “In My Room” gathers new and recent works by six artists reflecting on personal narratives and quotidian attachments. Spanning video, painting, installation and sculpture, the works on view evince three distinct and sometimes overlapping themes: challenging the notions of stable identity and authorship via the interplay of autobiographical and fictional materials; observing the architecture of the body and its extensions; and contemplating the profound entanglements of private sentiment with social life.
The exhibition takes its title from the late French writer Guillaume Dustan’s eponymous 1996 novel, in which we are taken on a hedonistic cruise through the rooms and beds wherein the narrator (also named Guillaume) finds himself, through the debauched gay bars and nightclubs of Paris, where bodies—his and his conquests’—entwine. Spare to the point of detachment, Dustan’s portrayal of his protagonist’s day-to-day actions, the comings and goings of bodies and objects in the spheres wherein he moves, stretches the novel’s interior space into a mesh that links his room with the world.
Dustan’s debut novel has been touted by Francophone critics as a provocative work of “autofiction,” a denomination first coined by Serge Doubrovsky in 1977 to describe a genre of fictionalized autobiography to which the literary establishment of the time was paying some attention. Despite remaining a contested literary field with no clear definition, the autofiction genre characteristically pinpoints the way our relations both internal and external, to ourselves and to others, are always already mediated by the attachments and biographical structures we develop in the course of life—not Life in the abstract, but everyday life with all its hymns and hums, its tiniest hinges of little somethings. The autofictional novel arose as something that “entrusted the language of an adventure to the adventure of language”; the works on view in the exhibition, with the same fixation and yet audacious in their own ways, venture into uncharted territories of filmic, sculptural and painterly rumination.
The driving importance of attachment and self-narrativization is not to be dismissed as speculative proposition or hyperbolic metaphor, as it concerns simple facts: human life is structured, to the same profound extent, by desire (or a cluster of desires, of parallel but divergent durations) and by the stories we make up, edit, and tell (about) ourselves. As a cabinet of fantasy, indulgence, introspection, refuge… and a million other things, all arranged to your own liking, the room promises at once foreclosure and openness to the world. When we are in the right mood, you are welcome to come in too.
Installation Views
Artworks
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Evelyn Taocheng Wang:Eight View of Oud-Charlois, No.3
Ink, acrylic, fabric, on rice paper
91 × 96 cm
2019作品信息Information -
Evelyn Taocheng Wang:Untitled-Platypus, Divisionism, Proletariat
Ink, pencil, tea, mineral color, flower powder, acrylic color, water color, ink, raw rice paper, mounted on japanese rice paper
75 × 340 × 60 cm
2013-2014作品信息Information -
Motus Machine
Juan Antonio Olivares
Glass, mineral oil, aux cable, mp3 plyer, audio file
44 × 18 × 17 cm
2019作品信息Information -
Memory Puddle (Razors)
Juan Antonio Olivares
Glass,steel razors
34 × 36 × 4.5 cm
2019作品信息Information -
Memory Puddle (Teenager)
Juan Antonio Olivares
Glass,burned photograph
33 × 29 × 4.5 cm
2019作品信息Information -
Evelyn Taocheng Wang:Hospital Conversations
Single-channel video, colour, sound
14’05”
2018作品信息Information -
Evelyn Taocheng Wang:Three Versions of Change
Animated video
13’50”
2018作品信息Information -
I think about Lam Qua everyday III
Jes Fan
Ceramic, glass, melanin, silicone, plexi-glass
Plexi-glass: 82 × 42 × 24 cm
Ceramic: 25 × 27 × 23 cm
2019作品信息Information -
Evelyn Taocheng Wang:Eight View of Oud-Charlois, No.7
Ink, acrylic on rice paper
46 × 104 cm
2019作品信息Information -
Evelyn Taocheng Wang:Eight View of Oud-Charlois, No.5
Ink, acrylic, fabric, on rice paper
93 × 88 cm
2019作品信息Information -
Diagram VI
Jes Fan
Epoxy, composite resin, pigments, glass
Shelf: 68 × 36 × 18 cm
Glass: 11 × 13 × 5 cm; 11 × 12 × 5 cm
2018作品信息Information -
Man In the Closet
Bruno Zhu
Navy blue men’s trousers, wool socks, cheesecloth, canvas
Dimensions variable
2017-2019作品信息Information -
Falling Stars
Bruno Zhu
Digital print on matte paper, wrapping paper, aluminum foil, chicken wire
Dimensions variable
2015-2019作品信息Information -
Handwriting Machine
Tao Hui
Installation
2018*Tao Hui, The History of Southern Drama, Scene A, 2018, Commissioned by Chi-Wen Gallery. Image courtesy of artist and Chi-Wen Gallery
作品信息Information -
A Young Leng Shuihua No.3
Tao Hui
Photography, digital print
10 x 15 cm
2018*Tao Hui, The History of Southern Drama, Scene A, 2018, Commissioned by Chi-Wen Gallery. Image courtesy of artist and Chi-Wen Gallery
作品信息Information -
A Young Leng Shuihua No.2
Tao Hui
Photography, digital print
69.6 x 48.4 cm
2018*Tao Hui, The History of Southern Drama, Scene A, 2018, Commissioned by Chi-Wen Gallery. Image courtesy of artist and Chi-Wen Gallery
作品信息Information -
A Young Leng Shuihua No.1
Tao Hui
Photography, digital print
64.6 x 45.5 cm
2018*Tao Hui, The History of Southern Drama, Scene A, 2018, Commissioned by Chi-Wen Gallery. Image courtesy of artist and Chi-Wen Gallery
作品信息Information -
An Interview with Leng Shuihua, Writer of The History of Southern Drama
Tao Hui
Single-channel video, colour, sound
10’46”
2018*Tao Hui, The History of Southern Drama, Scene A, 2018, Commissioned by Chi-Wen Gallery. Image courtesy of artist and Chi-Wen Gallery
作品信息Information -
Double Talk
TAO Hui
Two-channel HD video, color, sound
23’44”
2018作品信息Information -
Up Against It
Lewis Hammond
Oil on canvas
160 × 130 cm
2019作品信息Information -
Black Rain
Lewis Hammond
Oil on canvas
140 × 100 cm
2019作品信息Information -
Truth at Hand (after Bernini)
Lewis Hammond
Oil on linen
30 × 24 cm
2019作品信息Information -
Your Place and Knowing it
Lewis Hammond
Oil on linen
30 x 24 cm
2019作品信息Information -
Lovers
Lewis Hammond
Oil on linen
50 x 40 cm
2019作品信息Information