Tsong Pu's installation work, “I Take One Only,” is now being exhibited at the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts (KdMoFA), showcasing a “poetic dialectics of implicitness and explicitness.”
The work is formed by spoons hung from thin strings. Printed on the spoons are randomly selected geographic names related to water (e.g. creek, river, lake and ocean).
The strings, according to Prof. Tao Wen-Yueh, are like people's blood vessels. Even though they carry the blood to different parts of a body, they all come from a single source.
Tsong find his expression through the element of water, a reminder of how ink painting is “inextricably” associated with water.
Any symbolic act of using the spoons to take water from any of the “lakes” or “rivers” – despite their different names – actually gets water of the same composition elementally.
For Tsong, a sense of “presence” was vital to the process of creating “I Take Only One.” The process was like throwing out a fishing line.
Thousands of lines are thrown to the sky, but they all eventually fall from the void, piling upon one another to form a beach-like landscape, extending yet merging into a poetic space that is similar to the one described by Zhuang Tzu in his Knowledge Rambling in the North: “The operations of Heaven and Earth proceed in the most admirable way, but they say nothing about them.”
It is an artistic concept that cannot be described with words; it can only be sensed, Prof. Tao explained.
The exhibition, a part of the “One Piece Room” series, runs till July 1.