Mountains‧Waters II | Personal Structures

After being invited to the Parallel Show TIME SPACE EXISTENCE of La Biennale di Venezia in 2016, Taiwanese designer Chu Chih-Kang cooperates with The GAA Foundation again in 2017 to show the sequel of his works Mountain‧Water in Palazzo Mora. Themed on PERSONAL STRUCTURES - open borders, the exhibition is hosted and supported by the European Cultural Centre in two of its prestigious Palazzo's in the centre of Venice -Palazzo Bembo and Palazzo Mora-and the Giardini Marinaressa.

The GAA Foundation chooses the two themes TIME SPACE EXISTENCE and PERSONAL STRUCTURE alternately every other year. The selected artists come from many different parts of the world, different cultures resulting in very different artworks. Visually, the artworks may appear very different, but all artists present their own subjective, personal expression of their reflection on the concepts Time, Space and Existence.
The theme of the exhibition "PERSONAL STRUCTURES–open borders" shows the commonness and differences between Europeans in dialogue with works of non-Europeans. In addition, the exhibition stimulates a more conscious relationship from the spectator towards his daily surrounding aiming to increase the awareness of their own personal Existence as human beings influenced by a specific Culture within Time and Space, which echoes with the hope of Christine Macel, the curator of Venice Biennale, that is to re-build the declining humanistic spirit in current society through art.

Chu Chih-Kang takes Mountains‧Waters as the theme to illustrate his personal concept: ''I want to talk about life. All things belong to nature, among which human being is just a tiny element. All things are with life, the source of nature and life is Earth. Speaking of nature, we Chinese will take mountain and water as representatives.
The world within human being’s reach, after all, is only the surface of Earth, where the lives go through an endless cycle of growth, aging, destruction and rebirth, in a constant circulation like wind and water. For Earth, the reincarnation and circulation is like breath, and all things exist in such process of breathing."
The bronze statues of mountains are set on a round marble plate, they change and grow up gradually by the wind and water in Venice, or like a land where green grass and blossoms grow, wither or die away. These changes are the same as the growth and reincarnation of all things on Earth, we only see the epitome of changes in past hundreds of millions of years.

The work Mountains‧Waters II, in fact, is the epitome of Chu's on-going design project, a lobby space of Tao Zhu Yin Yuan residential building in Xinyi District, Taipei. It will be the largest work that implements Chu's concept — an artwork with life, grows and changes continually in this eternal residential space.

Exhibitions Theme: PERSONAL STRUCTURES – open borders
Exhibitions Venue: Palazzo Bembo, Palazzo Mora and Giardini Marinaressa
Exhibitions Date: 13 May - 26 November 2017