Tse Su Mei's 'Nested'
Art
- Published 21 May 2019
Su-Mei Tse. Courtesy of the artist and Aargauer Kunsthaus.
The traveling exhibition Nested arrived at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum as its final destination on April 19, 2019, after showing at the Musee d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (Mudam) in Luxembourg; the Aargauer Kunsthaus in Aarau, Switzerland; and the Yuz Museum in Shanghai. The curator, Christophe Gallois has made unique “orchestrations” of Su-Mei’s works to enable a poetic and meaningful viewing experience.
Su-Mei’s works are permeated with themes such as time, identity, memory, music and language. The core of her art includes photography, sculpture, and installations. In Nested, Su Mei’s expresses synesthetic connections between sensory experiences and subjective phenomenological experiences. This amalgamation is, for example, achieved by transposing the subjective experience of attempting to recall a distant memory into an allegorical installation such as the Vertigen de la Vida (Dizziness of Life); a miniature moving sculpture similar to a spinning carousel.
Su-Mei’s work are characterised by minimalistic and clean forms, and yet successfully achieves to possess multiplicities of meaning that can be interpreted at different levels – a strong indication of the artist’s awareness of phenomenology vis-à-vis symbols and forms. A true master, the artist finds herself reversing this relationship by transforming and materialising ephemeral experiences such as images, impressions, moods and memories into concrete form. This demonstrates Su Mei’s ability to operate both on the material and on the phenomenological realm.
Su-Mei notes that her work often, “wander through thoughts, ruminations, references, and intuition but ultimately return to beauty and tranquillity”.
Below is a series of selected videos and installations from Nested:
"Compared to any other three-dimensional form, the cube lacks any aggressive force, implies no motion, and is least emotive. Therefore, it is the best form to use as a basic unit for any more elaborate function, the grammatical device from which the work may proceed". -Sol LeWitt
As reflections of the veneration of nature and the links that connect microcosm and macrocosm in Chinese thought, these stones embodied mountains, landscapes, "bones of the earth", "roots of clouds" or parts of the celestial vault. It is also a matter of letting oneself be led by the found shape, emphasising its singularity by nesting other forms.
Derived from a memory of a film by Man Ray, Le Retour å la raison (1923) still present in the artist's memory- some scenes where the lights of a carousel spinning in the night still linger. This installation gives substance to the porosity that exists between visual experience and mental image, between memory and dream. Embodying the 'vertigo' that animates every memory: the mystery of the presence of an absence.
Created during a residency in Rome from 2014 to 2015, the video 'Snow Country' shows the artists raking the gravel path leading to a portico at the Villa Medici. Symbolically she is wiping away the traces of her predecessors, as if smoothing out a canvas, to make breathing space for her own creativity and to respond to the historical and artistic weight of this institution.
Forming from a basin, dark blank ink gushes forth from a garden fountain of baroque inspiration and, as the artist remarks, "expresses the idea of the whole process of language: the way an initial thought or idea develops first into spoken, and then into written words". The sculpture evokes an infinite potential of words and the eternal renewing of creation. The multiple and incessant drops of 'Many Spoken Words' make the fluidity of the spirit, words, and creativity perceptible, and leave indelible traces.
In the movement of a crystal ball manipulated by a juggler, the images of the buildings appear up-side down, as a clear reflection within the ball, creating a contrast between the buildings themselves and the blurred colours and shapes within the sphere. It confronts the question of how to make sense of legacy and calls for a new perspective, an inner look. The artist circumvents the weight that history might represent, and suggests the possibility of a non-conventional view, opening on a different reading of the world.
The contemplation of the starry sky seems to me such a vital and necessary replenishment - that it astonishes me that it is not more usual, and that on summer nights, cities and fields, forests and the banks of the highways, the coast and mountain slopes are not strewn with dreamers. - Herve Guibert, L'Autre journal
Tse Su-Mei's work presents itself superficially as conserved, minimalistic and simple; however the concepts, ideas and philosophies that underpinned the structures of her work have no shortcomings in their profundity. With simple and minimalistic form, the viewer is able to cast their own projections and interpretations onto the artwork, thus operating on a multiplicity of meaning that can only be revealed on a phenomenological plane. Nested in the Taipei Fine Arts Museum was a refreshing display of artistic originality and writing brilliance that shows that not only does the artist succeed in building on from her own canvas but gives full reverence to the artists and writers that preceded her.
Born in Luxembourg in 1973, Su-Mei Tse was raised in a musical family, with a violinist father and a pianist mother, and she herself became a professional cellist. Later, she received a graduate degree in visual arts from the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In 2003 she represented Luxembourg at the Venice Biennale, winning the Golden Lion for her installation Air Conditioned and rising to recognition in the international art world. In the last several years, she has spent considerable time traveling, residing in such countries as Italy and Japan. During this period she produced many new works, which gave birth to the current exhibition, “Nested.”
Nested is currently exhibiting in the Gallery D&E&F of Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Zhongshan District, Taipei until the 21st of July 2019.
-Leon Jake Lim
