WILMINGTON, DE.- The Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts presents "Journey Through Time", the solo exhibition by Taiwanese artist Hong-Wen Lin, on view in the Carole Bieber and Marc Ham Gallery through March 7, 2010. Journey Through Time features sculptures and paintings selected by the New York-based curator, Dr. Robert C. Morgan, who visited the artists studio in Taiwan last April.
The sculptures are made of metal and stone, which Carina Evangelista (DCCA Gretchen Hupfel Curator of Contemporary Art) notes as typically industrial and architectural in aesthetic as they are two basic components of building construction. She adds, But Hong-Wen Lins sculptures in copper, iron, stainless or galvanized steel, and stone bear the imprint of the hand-forged and manually welded, evoking something less structural and more elemental. Dr. Morgan likened the presence and energy that Lins sculptures exude to qi (pronounced chē), the vital force believed in ancient Chinese philosophy to be inherent in all things. Balance in the flow of negative and positive energies, believed to be at the heart of well-being in traditional Eastern medicine, is here captured in one of the most basic formal concerns of sculpture: the interaction of form in space.
Dr. Morgan reflects on Lins forms in his exhibition essay as having a fundamental structure [that] begins with the brush, the calligraphic source, in which the line bends, twists, and cuts through space in ways that are always the same, but always different. "Journey Through Time" includes three single works on canvas, a diptych, and a triptych. The paintings are enigmatic, featuring abstract washes that call to mind traditional Asian landscape paintings, gestural marks that also evoke calligraphy, and small indeterminate forms within color fields that conjure mineral and stonelike slate, charcoal, onyx, verdigris, and cinnabar.