By Wun Kuen Ng
The Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space, a gallery and studio space inside Essex Market on 120 Essex Street, is currently exhibiting works from two artists from Taiwan, YinHua Chu and Ta-Wei Huang.
In her piece, “random-access-memories”, Chua is exploring the themes of memory and imagination. Photographs from a friend’s family album were etched onto cooper plates. What was a familiar photograph is now turned into an image. The viewer’s memory acts as a reference point for the current perception of the experience. The inspiration came from her childhood memory working at the family cooper factory in which cooper plates and parts were taken out of old discarded television sets to be sold. The journey to explore memory was influenced from an experience while travelling abroad in London ten years ago when she called her father to tell him the shops are closed because of Christmas. To him, Christmas did not mean much but once Chua explained its significance is liken to the Lunar New Year celebration in Taiwan, he understood. Chua used a memory to decode current experience and to understand the relationship between physical environment of the city and the psychical images.
To open up the conversation, Chu will also repurpose materials thrown away at the market, remodel them and photograph them as her work in progress. Chu hopes her art will broaden viewer’s sense of the world.
Huang creates an evolving installation layered with new painting, drawing, video, collage, and three-dimensional frames. The daily additions of his observations and impressions are Huang’s narrative of the present moment or now. The cutouts from the images invite viewers to experience the space and objects. As an artist, Huang believes creativity is a moving and fluid process. The role of art is to be able to see something simple in a different light.
Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space has been in the current space for thirteen years. It continues its mission to represent emerging and underrepresented artists.
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