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Ethereal Minds: The rise of Taiwanese women artists
A merger of mixed cultures leads to great discoveries in visual language.
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Nostalgic: A painting titled "The Small Adventures in Daily Lives" by former school art teacher Yang Yi Shiang who draws childlike figures to express her childhood memories.
(JP/Tertiani ZB Simanjuntak)
A
n ongoing exhibition displaying the contemporary works of four Taiwanese women artists in Jakarta breaks the common conceptions of gender in arts and, to look further, the regional-based aesthetics an artist is often associated with.
On top of that, the fact that the month-long exhibition was being held in a public space conveyed a strong message that good art should not be confined to private galleries.
The title of the exhibition itself, Ethereal Minds, incorporates the personal stories of the artists who share the same struggle of coalescing their backgrounds, traditions and cultures, as well as contemporary ideologies. The output was indeed unordinary, if not otherworldly.
The 13 paintings of artists Yang Yi Shiang, Huang Chia Ning, Wang Liang Yin and Liu Hsin Ying that grace the lobby of the World Trade Center 2 building in Central Jakarta are varied, from abstract to hyper-realistic oil paintings.
Each artist has a distinctive visual language that brought them to the exhibition and has kept their works at different art museums in Taiwan and by private collectors.
Curator Deborah Iskandar, an expert on Indonesian and international art, told a press tour before opening night on Oct. 15 that her team had focused on women artists, who were still deemed as rare in the art world.
