Butterfly in a Cube

I stretch the fabric from one end of the frame to the other and then begin to paint.

Just like the French pronunciation rule liaison, it’s about finding and joining the boundaries between myself and others, and between the real world and the unreal world. By repeatedly changing my perspective, going back and forth from here to there, I think flexibly about various things, and create work that shows certain ways of living and thinking in modern society.

Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see” are the apt words of Paul Klee. Liangwen Chu, just as this great painter said, is someone who manifests the world that we vaguely imagined yet could not see. For example, her work Grow (2023)—the trees depicted on the bottom half of the screen is what is tied to the title, but in the middle of the screen a surface of water suddenly appears, and a huge boat (or island) floats, and further above, a mountain-top protrudes from a sea of clouds; an uncanny imagery is depicted. This is not a realistic landscape that we know. However, there are no incongruities like with expressions of so-called surrealism, but a world that could be called a landscape of our minds, that laid asleep deep down in the people’s minds is depicted.

（Public／Selection Committee Yasuyuki Nakai）