CHOU CHING-HUI - Animal Farm - Chelouche Gallery for contemporary art – Tel Aviv Israel

CHOU CHING-HUI Animal Farm

Chou Ching-Hui Animal Farm

CHOU CHING-HUI Animal Farm 07.09 – 14.10.2017 Organization Chelouche Gallery for contemporary art – Tel Aviv, Israel chelouchegallery.com Partner Arte Laguna Prize – Venice, Italy artelagunaprize.com Graphic design Arte Laguna Cover Animal Farm No.01 – 2014 194.25x148 cm inkjet print

Arte Laguna Prize Chelouche Gallery Chou Ching-Hui Introduction

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Animal Farm

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Arte Laguna Prize

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The personal exhibition “Animal Farm” stems from the collaboration between Arte Laguna Prize and Chelouche Gallery, which has selected Chou Ching-Hui as the winners of the Special Prize “Artist in Gallery” for the 11th Arte Laguna Prize.

For 11 years Arte Laguna Prize has been promoting contemporary art, creating dissemination channels and an international public participation; it motivates the relationships among people who work in the visual, multimedia and performative arts world; it creates concrete opportunities of growth and of launch of the professional career of artists; it generates special projects which spread from Venice throughout the world, building lots of collaborations with foundations, museums, galleries, art residencies and companies.

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An international network has been built and it is growing and strengthening every edition and every day a system of relationships made by people and ideas is created and it is always looking towards new horizons.

With the special prizes “Artist in Gallery” Arte Laguna Prize created a format of collaboration with international galleries that gives them the opportunity to view a large array of artistic proposals selected by an international jury, composed of ten experts in contemporary art, directors of Museums and Foundations, independent curators and art critics, and then to choose the artist with whom to organize a new exhibition.

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Chelouche Gallery

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Since it’s opening in 1985, Chelouche Gallery has been maintaining its prominence in various fields of art. It is the home of both young and established Israeli and international artists, displaying works in new media, video art, sculpture, painting, installation and photography.

Chelouche Gallery is one of the most prominent and leading galleries in Israel. Located in Tel Aviv, Chelouche Gallery maintains its primacy by promoting an international and local exhibition program and placing itself one step ahead in the Israeli contemporary art scene. The Gallery’s Israeli artists exhibit in world renowned venues, such as Nir Evron at the New Museum, NYC, the 19th Biennial of Sydney, the Israel Museum, the ICP Triennial, NYC, the 6th Berlin Biennial, Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Miki Kratsman at PhotoEspana,

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Madrid, a solo exhibition at MUSAC, Leon, and at La Virreina, Barcelona, and at the Peabody Museum, Harvard University. Established by Nira Itzhaki, Chelouche gallery is located in the historic “Twin House” of 7 Mazeh Street, one of the most beautiful historical building of Tel Aviv right at the heart of the city. The Gallery extends upon four floors (600 sq) offering a variety of exhibition spaces as well as the ‘Chelouche Salon’ on the top floor which hosts cultural activities and a branch of Tola’at Sfarim “Bookworm” a bookstore-café placed on the ground floor. With an outstanding presence in the international art scene Chelouche gallery has collaborated with a vast number of established curators and artists both in Israel and abroad and actively participates in international exhibitions, Art Fairs and biennales.

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Chou Ching-Hui

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Born in 1965 following graduation from Shih Hsin University, Chou devoted himself to both the efficiency-orientated news photography industry and to beginning several time-consuming specialists photography projects, including: Out of the Shadows, Vanishing Leagues: Images of Workers and Wild Aspirations: The Yellow Sheep River Project. His photographic works arise from social realities, and combine artistic representative techniques.

Animal Farm was his first creative venture to make the switch from documentary photography to directed photography. Through delicately exquisite yet vibrantly colored images, he conjured a kind of hyper-real atmosphere to create his own photographic language. While inspired by social issues and events, Chou applies an artistic approach that seeks to interpret true stories through neartheatrical representations. Combined with a surrealistic scene and atmosphere, he guided the audience to gradually inspect all the elements and details in the images, searching for clues for interpreting these mysterious pictures to connect or resonate with their personal experiences. He believes that the story-telling aspect of fine art photography is a more effective way of presenting and annotating familiar stories in our surroundings.

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He has been invited by major art museums, art centers and galleries to show works internationally at exhibitions, including: Frozen in Time – Chronicle of a Leper Colony (1995) in Taiwan Vanishing Breed – Workers Chronicle (2002) in Taiwan Wild Aspirations – The Yellow Sheep River Project (2009) in Taiwan Transition Photography Exhibition (1996) in Japan Humanism in China – A Contemporary Record of Photography (2003-2007) touring group exhibition in China, Germany and UK Home – Taiwan Biennial (2008) in Taiwan Guangzhou Photo Biennial (2007, 2009) in China Dali International Photography Exhibition (2010) in China Taipei Biennial (2014) in Taiwan Changjiang International Photography & Video Biennale (2015) in China Beijing Photo Biennial (2015) in China Snap Taking & Slow Thinking – Social Spectrum in the Age of staged Photograph (2016) in Taiwan Art Souterrain (2017) in Canada

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Introduction

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“We are all imprisoned in a zoo, living a restricted life.

Society is a cage, and we are staring with a smile at other encaged.”

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Animal Farm, is based on his five-year-long photography project that involved a large team and significant funding. In this project, Chou turns to zoos as his muses and sites of actual photo making, where vivid tableaus are created to suggest the sumptuous yet often baffled life of modern civilization. Theatrical sets were fabricated against the zoo environment, where the actors played their assigned roles as photos were taken at dawn and dusk. By so doing, Chou inserted surreal theatrical scenes and lifelike vernacular spaces into artificial enclosures in which wild animals were brought together and domesticated.

Absurdity and displacement were emphasized as the artist situated humans among animals that were reminiscent of specimens. The home now looked like a cage, while the border between manmade interiors and the wilderness became blurred. While creating this so-called “directed photography” that is grand and theatrical in style and serves as a form of social discourse, Chou has also made close-up, sympathetic portraits for individual character on his sets. These secular characters were styled in fashionable clothing and looks from the 70s, revealing the artist’s particular, nostalgic feelings for a certain belle époque in the past. The representation of their clear visages and postures as ordinary people, on the other hand, contrasted the inescapable yet gradually numbing human condition in the contemporary social and cultural environment they lived in.

Animal Farm No.14 – 2014 108x148 cm inkjet print

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Animal Farm No.01 – 2014 194.25x148 cm inkjet print

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CHOU CHING-HUI Animal Farm

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Animal Farm No.03 – 2014 144.37x110 cm inkjet print

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Animal Farm No.09 – 2014 194.25x148 cm inkjet print

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Animal Farm No.40 – 2014 65x75x55 cm wood, clay, plastic and aluminum strip

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