TAIPEI DANGDAI 2025

The presentation is titled Skyline, centering on rare works by two important postwar Taiwanese artists—Chen Ting-Shih and Hilo Chen. The featured pieces, The First Crack of Thunder (1972) by Chen Ting-Shih and City 7 (1981) by Hilo Chen, anchor the booth. In The First Crack of Thunder, a celestial body breaks through the surrounding blocks like a life form emerging from a cocoon—an explosive image evoking the sound of a thunderclap in silence, symbolizing light piercing the darkness. In City 7, Hilo Chen searches for a skyline among New York’s towering buildings, contrasting soft human forms with cold architecture. The twin towers, symbols of ethnic tension, appear in the painting and evoke a poignant reflection on the future as we approach 2025. The young Chinese artist Ding HongDan’s realistic painting Stranger (2024) depicts the bizarre looking of contemporary individuals, arranging their postures like a skyline—both unfamiliar and eerily familiar.

Among the younger generation, Ling Yung’s Orion’s Belt (2025), and Lin YiHsuan’s The Fruit Hunters (2023) and Circle in the Round (2023), weave together objects and abstract elements within space. Their pursuit of greater freedom resonates closely with the concept of the Horizon. Ling Yung, one of Taiwan’s most rising artists, has seen sell-out shows from last year’s Taipei Dangdai, her solo exhibition Body Lessons (2024) at Each Modern to her current solo show at A26 in Beijing. Lin Yi-Hsuan, another standout artist, is set to present a new solo exhibition at ARCOlisboa, one of Europe’s leading art fairs in Lisbon, which has already garnered strong interest and discussion among professionals and organizers. The renowned Japanese photographer Moriyama Daido’s A Room (2015) captures close-up fragments of the human body from an intimate distance. Through light, shadow, and ambiguous postures, abstract lines emerge—an exploration of photographic freedom that is distinctly Moriyama style.