Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei

The Reader's Way is the first MOCA solo exhibition of Long-bin Chen, a Taiwanese expatriate artist in America. For a long time, Chen has used recycled books, magazines and printing paper as his chosen material to create sculptures and art installations that possess unique texture and cultural meaning, for which he has been recognized in the international art scene. Processed with his outstanding sculptural techniques, these book sculptures appear to be made of wood or marble, or display fantastic visual effect, making the audience contemplate on the relationships between books and personal growth as well as the development of civilization. The audience would further think about the phenomenon and issue of how physical books have become less dominant in the electronic age of digital culture. For Chen, these recycled books or disposed publications are both material for sculptural art and aesthetic subjects to ponder upon. In order to give new characteristics and artistic life to these objects, he tackles the subject from the aspects of both technique and artistic concept, committing to the task of delivering intangible ideas through physical matter. He intentionally incorporates Western conceptual art and Eastern wood carving tradition, and opens up a new creative path that is founded on his personal values and philosophy while addressing the phenomena in contemporary culture and responding to international art trends. The title of the exhibition is inspired by the German term, philosophenweg (path of philosophy), which refers to the experience of walking on a leafy path far away from the boisterous world. There, the walker could submerge in tranquility like a philosopher. Reading canonical works is considered to be the best way to accumulate and internalize knowledge. Reading art, on the other hand, is like hiking on a winding, precipitous path, which might be a lonely experience blessed with occasional joy of floral blossoms. This time, in the space of MOCA Studio, Chen has chiseled books into stones, paved a winding Reader’s Way that connects the corridor and two gallery rooms. He invites the audience to walk on the book stones; and these “stepping stones” sculpted from books are placed on a real gravel path, leading the audience to two book sculptures, Sleep and Meditate, that encourage us to contemplate and observe two possible “spiritual” realms when our “body” pause from moving forward—the misty, hazy dream or the clear, bright state of mind. At the entrance and exit of the galleries, there are two large installations suspended in midair, entitled Crazy and Civilization. They are individually made of English and Chinese books, embodying the nurturance and influence of Western and Eastern civilizations and knowledge. These installations adopt the concepts of deconstruction and composition as well as disintegration and formation, representing in duality a dramatic inter-transformation and transition between a large human head and a group of books. The two emotional faces created with recycled books symbolize the struggle and anxiety of mankind when faced with the explosion of information and the era of excessive media. In addition to the installations, the bookshelves in the two rooms display contemporary books and ancient rare books. Thus, visitors would walk in between the East and the West as well as the traditional and the modern, witnessing how modern people’s reading behavior is transfigured with the explosion and expansion of contents and platforms due to the technologized media, and resultantly, ventures into a brand new era; it is also a good chance to examine and reflect upon the impact and influence of such modern progress.