Charwei Tsai — Water Moon — Institut d'art contemporain de Villeurbanne — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: June 2 → August 13, 2017

Borne by the notion of impermanence, Charwei Tsai’s oeuvre makes itself part of the continual flux that irrigates each presence in the world. Through a diversified practice, including calligraphy as well as documentary or performance pieces, the Taiwan-born artist creates zones of passage revealing the silent movements animating and traversing the universe.

Using sharing as its modality, it examines the bonds of coexistence uniting phenomena opening our eyes to unsuspected convergences.

Fruits of a deep knowledge of Buddhist philosophy, Charwei Tsai’s works draw upon an interior voyage. The pieces brought together in her project combine the instability of matter and time with such canonical writings as the Heart Sutra.

Retranscribed as drawings, then performances, using materials like paper, incense, or trees, the verses of the Sutra are the vectors of a fusion, at once concrete and spiritual, with the stuff of life itself.

Charwei Tsai, Plane Tree Mantra, 2014 Collection 49 NORD 6 EST — Frac Lorraine

The title of the exhibition, Water Moon, derives, the artist says, ‘from an expression often used in Buddhist literature to evoke the fact that what we perceive as reality is like the reflection of the moon in water; it seems real but is in fact empty. Emptiness, here, does not mean nothingness, but rather the fact that all phenomena are interdependent and impermanent in themselves (…). Physically, all the works in this exhibition are circular, like the moon, or are presented so as to emphasise the cyclical nature of life. This is the opposite of a linear view of life, with birth as beginning and death as end (…).’.

Curator: Nathalie Ergino assistée de Magalie Meunier