Edouard Malingue Gallery is pleased to present, ‘Never odd or eveN’, a group exhibition project supported by the Ministry of Culture, Taiwan and the Taipei Artist Village, curated by Esther Lu, curator of the Taiwanese Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale. Featuring work by Benoit Broîsat, Yu-Cheng Chou, Tyler Coburn, Chitti Kasemkitvatana and Ko Sin Tung, the project examines the relational aesthetics between exhibition norms, as well as cultures and artistic practices. Extending the experience of the exhibition beyond the physical display space, the project will manifest itself in multiple forms, including that of printed material as a paper exhibition in the Taiwanese art magazine Not Today and a series of published artist interviews.

“How to unfold our minds and perceptions so that we may hear the landscape that we do not see is an endeavor and dream that dances with the question of sensibility—mysteries are not in things but rippling from artists’ actions and our ceaseless conspiracy.

The exhibition premise departs from artists’ peculiar actions and sensitivities vis a vis conceptualizing artistic ideas and expressions with their own formal grammars so as to speculate and investigate social relations and agencies. Their actions do not seek representation but rather create agents and sources of evidence that allow us to mobilize ourselves again in reality. In order to read aesthetics informed by the seamless conversations and compositions they initiate, and to connect knowledge, imagery and narration against institutional power and violence, this exhibition proposes to study artists’ action forms and provide ways of seeing contemporary art beyond visibility and display—that is, in multiple layers and dimensions in order to indicate various realms for aesthetic understanding as well as continuity that take the form of lives.

In our post-Duchamp age of media society, we are driven by new quests to understand and rediscover the meaning, presentation and possibility of the art object—material or not, and functioning in complex social fabrics beyond the act of registering new artistic concepts. Correspondingly, the exhibition as a form for art presentation faces new challenges and seeks to access and generate active communication between different systems, institutions, ideologies and realities. The project title Never odd or eveN points to the spectrum between integers in mathematics, or any complete entity in a literal approach, suggesting an unbound space to discover new relations and activations. As a palindrome, it provides a passage for travel and return, while the exhibition itself acts as an aesthetic vehicle for presenting projects in the juxtaposed structure of a parallax, illustrating the rendezvous between art and life on the same platform, or via multiple perspectives, directed by the audience. It is a contemplative medium for meeting more ends or beginnings. It shows how form exercises affection and how we are affected to act and run in a contemporary temporality.”

– Esther Lu