"Cutting, Building & Sketching -- Ceramics by Pai Tsung-Chin" American Cultural Center July 1 - September 24, 1999

PR9936E | Date: 1999-07-01

The American Cultural Center lobby will showcase the small-scale art exhibition "Cutting, Building & Sketching -- Ceramics by Pai Tsung-chin" from July 1 through September 24, 1999.

The American Cultural Center lobby is open to the public from 9:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m. Monday through Friday and from noon until 6:00 p.m. on Saturday. It will be closed on Sundays, holidays, and July 24, August 14, September 4. The American Cultural Center is located at 54 Nan Hai Road, Taipei.

"Cutting, Building & Sketching" will present a series of sketching and writing on the ready-made porcelain dolls as well as on three-dimensional paper cutting and ceramic shards. In the past few years, Pai's favorite way of creating artwork is combining ceramics with machine products and ready-made objects. By juxtaposing the organic and inorganic and by applying the reciprocal concept of Ying and Yang, he intended to explore the formation of the universe and the current situation of human civilization. Whatever the contents are in his large-scale sculptures and installations, his emphases are always on the structures behind the contents. In other words, Pai has been trying to reduce the importance of the narration in artworks, and to amplify the grammar within the narration. Consequently, Pai's sketching and writing in this exhibit are not shown on the neutral paper or canvas, but on porcelain dolls or paper cuttings which have equipped with their own meanings and textures, and which have provided an playful background for the artist's autographs Because of the specific characteristics of the ready-made objects, the tension between the content of the sketch and the structures of the background could thus emerge. In these works, structures have dominated their contents, and structure is the actual "content" to the works.

Pai's sketch and writing on the objects are done randomly, and his writing is always abstract, outdated, didactic or unreadable, while it also reveals the literati's atmosphere. Pai's paper cutting and ceramic shards are often made in the forms of an architecture, therefore, the abstract writings on them disclose a certain memory and thinking of our culture. The factory-made dolls or the paper cuttings juxtapose with artist's casual sketches and writings display a sense of contrasted but complimented form of expression and narration.

After graduated from the Physics Department of the Fu Jen Catholic University, Pai Tsung-chin learned ceramics at "Tien Mu Ceramic Studio", and furthered his study at Chicago Institute of the Arts in 1989. He has been granted Edward Ryerson Fellowship and received his M. A. degree in 1991. Since then, Pai has received several awards and has been known as a young artist with unique characteristics. The pieces in this exhibition have been done in a humorous tone. They present a series of discourses that the artist has delivered through the playful background elements.