The Taiwanese artist Ya-Wen Fu presents her installation-performance Space-in-between
The result of a two-month production residence at the Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, her work will be shown on Thursday 13, from 7 p.m.
Ya-Wen Fu essays his performance at the installation at LABoral. Photo: LABoral/S. Redruello
The Taiwanese artist Ya-Wen Fu will be presenting this Thursday, November 13, at LABoral Space-in-between, an interactive multimedia installation and performance that is the result of her two-month production residency at the Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial. With this work, Ya-Wen Fu explores how the social context conditions and limits our body, our conscience and our behaviour.
In Space-in-between, sixty stainless steel hoops hang from the centre of the Plato connected to four sides of the truss of the hall through springs and linen ropes. The swinging movement of the body of the artist results in the movement of the structure and the ropes, generating forces and tensions that change the shape of the hoops.
In order to increase the power of the body and the external elasticity, Ya-Wen Fu has elaborated a cloth with calf-skin leather mouldings that minimise the air gap between body and clothing. This airtight adjustment enables the body to take full advantage of its own strength. By using movement detectors and contact microphones she is able to emphasise the dialogue stablished between the body movement and the space installation by means of sounds captured on site.
Ya-Wen Fu’s residency at LABoral is part of the agreement between Centro de Arte de Gijón and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (NTMOFA). With this installation-performance the artist explores the limitations that the social context imposes on the human body and behaviour. The 60 iron hoops of the piece are like the interwoven structures of the social system. The connection between the hoops and body is a metaphor for the fact that we can't escape the society. Through the body movements as well as the mutual constraints and pulls between the installation and the body, Ya-Wen Fu is trying to find the body and bodily consciousness that's no longer limited by society. At the same time, Ya-Wen Fu intends to show the struggle of the body against reality and its difference to the imagined.
Even though our behavior is like the bodily acts designed under the social system, the body is not merely a product of the society. According to Ya-Wen Fu, when the body is detached from the societal gaze, when it possesses not just the role of a narrator, when it doesn't just represent a shape with meaning, when the body, including all the social system imposed on it, becomes visible, when it is finally exhausted by the endless pulling and pushing, maybe that's when we can find a route of escape in all the despair”.
Ya-Wen Fu (Yunlin, Taiwan, 1980) graduated at the National Tainan Girls’ Senior High School in 1999 and completed studies of Fine Arts at the National Taiwan University of Arts in 2003. She has a diploma and a bachelors degree in Media Arts by the HGB Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig, Germany; and Meisterschüler of media arts HGB. Between 2005 and 2006 she worked as software designer at the private art school Von Erlenbach Kunstschule, in Berlin, and at Titanic Magazine in Berlin as animator in 2007. Her works have been exhibited in Berlin, Leipzig, Wiesbaden, Hamburg and Taiwan between 2008 and 2014. In 2011 she joined the art association tamtamART as director where she carries out numerous curating projects. (http://www.bearfuinberlin.com/)
