Mind Set Art Center at Art Taipei 2025
This October, Mind Set Art Center presents “Mindscape” at Art Taipei 2025, featuring new works by five artists from Taiwan, Japan, and the Czech Republic: Chou Kai-Lun, Lin Wei-Hsiang, Matěj Macháček, Shinji Ohmaki, and Tang Jo-Hung. Drawing on memory, everyday perception, and lived experience, each artist fashions a distinct inner landscape across diverse media, shifting between abstraction and figuration, narrative and imagination, to form a dialogue that bridges media, cultures, and generations.
For Tang Jo-Hung, painting is a meeting between the self and its mirror image, a negotiation between intuition and reason. His daily ritual begins by catching a spark of inspiration and unfurling it across fiberboard in strokes that drag, spiral, and scrape, like footprints left by a traveler. These paintings resist fixed messages; they invite the viewer into a journey of imagination. In his new work Typhoon, swift yet unhurried brushwork and a poised balance of warm and cool hues conjure mountains and forests lashed by wind, and the nameless force and devastation that hurricanes leave in their wake.
Long a wanderer of mountains and lakes, Lin Wei-Hsiang paints the landscapes of the mind. Through translucent, layered washes, he captures the rhythms of nature and fragments of memory. Calm, steady compositions convey quietude and introspection, composing scene after scene of poetic terrain. In Traces of Travel (49), a sturdy tree stands tall against drifting mists and distant peaks, an almost self-portrait projection of the artist’s roving spirit and his wish to merge with nature.
Japanese artist Shinji Ohmaki works with air, light, and matter to shape spaces that are both serene and in motion, making the viewer’s body part of the spatial experience. Often probing and blurring the line between medium and space, his 2024 work Tsubaki builds vermilion over a black ground, then meticulously burnishes the surface until it reveals a red of depth and resonance. This red is not merely a color; it gathers the profundity of darkness and the glint of light, distilling life’s vitality and impermanence. Here, color moves beyond ornament to become a vehicle for expressing the essence of life.
In Matěj Macháček’s paintings, subtle modulations of light and color meet high-contrast complements to produce a surreal sensibility that transcends representation. In Luminous Hill, stylized tones of earth and forest give the scene both a cinematic clarity and an otherworldly presence. By painting the distant sky in black, the artist forges a markedly personal vocabulary; the stark contrast between sky and land reads as an insight into transience and a gesture toward ultimate pursuit.
The youngest artist in the presentation, Chou Kai-Lun, moves fluidly between photography and painting, translating digital fragments into a painterly language. His works reflect a younger generation’s emotional tenor and sense of presence, reassembling coherence from the fragmentary. In Earth and Sea, a bird’s-eye vantage and near-abstract treatment blur the border between terrain and ocean. Whirling lines, softened planes, and shifting light yield a vivid, rhythmic field, evoking the charged energies at the meeting of land and water.
Together, these five artists reveal multiple pathways for tracing and sensing the landscapes within. Through their varied explorations of “Mindscape,” we enter layered territories of spirit and feeling, and the pleasure of roaming among them continues to unfold.
