Chou YU-CHENG

Born in 1976 in Taipei, China
Lives and works in Taipei, China

Modified, shifted or transferred elements amounting to new relationships between status and object: herein lies the pulse of Chou Yu-Cheng’s (b. 1976) practice that builds, across multiple mediums, a subtle critique of mass media, institutions and the mechanisms that produce them. A graduate from l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, and the research programme La Seine, Chou has gained international recognition for his dialectical interplay between the source and results
of his creations. Through his selective conversations, Chou shapes a minimal yet deliberate set of intellectual and aesthetic tricks, which ultimately play on the properties of art, object and space.

Running throughout Chou’s practice is the process of cooperation and display. Often borrowing objects from companies, museums or factories, Chou sets to make the mechanism of art production and organisation visible. For example, ‘TOA Lighting’ (2010), a site-specific installation for the Hong-Gah Museum, Taipei presents
itself as a delicate quadrangular ceiling-hung set of neon lights. As the title suggests though, they are lamps sponsored by TOA Lighting Company. Chou thus constructs a deliberate exchange between support for the ‘contemporary plastic arts’ and private enterprise, revealing through titular ownership the exhibition’s commercial element – an interaction that is once more turned on it’s head by the installation’s addition to the Museum’s permanent collection.