Each Modern is pleased to announce "Cyberpunk," a group exhibition presenting new works by three artists who showed in Taiwan for the first time last year and brought a great sensation to the 2020 edition of Art Taipei.
The term "Cyberpunk" first appeared in the American author Bruce Bethke's story in 1980. Since then, the term has been widely used in literature, movies, video games, music, and even architecture. A cyberpunk world is usually an extremely technological and capitalist society. Cultures, memories, bodies, and ideas have become like digital codes, controlled and distributed by a megacorporation or the government. They constructed sprawling urban worlds of the distant future, often built with glittering technology and cultural hegemony, yet teaming with masses living in derelict conditions. A stark disparity and inequality serve as a basis of these fantasies. As such, a cyberpunk world is an inevitable confrontation with the working and middle classes against omnipotent elites.
Like many once-lofty dreams born from science fiction, the world of cyberpunk has gradually become our reality (if not in actuality, then in appearance at the very least). We are drawn by this conceptual mirage and illusion— whether it's a utopian vision of a technologically advanced world, or the dystopian vista of broken order. Perhaps the proliferation of cyberpunk, and its simulations and products, has already foreshadowed our near future.
Born in the illumination of Cyberpunk, Egan Frantz, Hell Gette, and Stefan Müller grew up in a culturally and emotionally postmodernist environment. The three artists do not create typical cyberpunk landscapes, but express their desire for cultural experience, semiotics, and metaphysics in different ways — all of these guide us towards a kind of future and visualize a possible liberation of a diverse, complex, and progressive society.
Egan Frantz(born in Norwalk, USA in 1986) is an artist connected in multiple ways to contemporary music. In Egan Frantz's paintings, he encodes music, literature, and theology into indecipherable symbols. In the 2021paintings, Frantz makes the digital sketch on the computer before he actually paints. From there, the digital code generates the appearance of the painting, similar to how code creates cultural content in the world of cyberpunk. We could probably guess what these "words" are about: Japanese characters, graffiti, or album covers, we are not able to specifically recognize any of them. For the artist, what the paintings convey is a visual experience beyond any writing system, such as the comic, Coca Cola red, and graphic font in "Word Play"(2021). When Frantz experiments in abstract paintings, both virtually and realistically, it is like how the virtual and reality try to coexist with each other, like the cyberpunk world, unknowable and omniscient.
Hell Gette(born in Karabulak, Kazakhstan in 1986) is an emigrant currently living in Munich, Germany. In past interviews, she has reminisced on the backyard garden of her hometown and the plants, air, and insects that she can no longer see. The motherland, the refugee camp, and the severe changes of the world alter how she sees her reality – a world that we can no longer evaluate within our present circumstance, as the world of cyberpunk often brings us escape to more idyllic views virtually. Gette's works inform us of a future where the primitive, the material, and the essential are made bleak and replaced by virtual, mediated, and projected realities. In these realities, things are reproduced in endless twisted chains. When we are able to express our feeling and memories through digitally coded emojis, her world, built by the virtual images, will gradually become plausible. Then, eventually, it bleeds into reality.
Stefan Müller (born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1971) is an artist whose experience with philosophy and music, have both been transformed into the characteristics of his painting. German philosopher Theodor Adorno has written that the work of art is a closed self. It has its own disciplines and structural logic like "non-identity" in philosophical theory. The concept of a work of art, the referent of the concept, and the work itself, is on three non-parallel lines, so the existence of the work itself precedes the intervention of any knowledge and notion. Therefore, Müller's works are so pure that it is almost impossible to comment. His handling of details, fabrics, materials, and pigments presents the meaning of painting itself. We can say Müller's paintings stay indifferent in the extreme situation, or his practice is more about returning to selfexploration of the media. With the essence of simplicity, the artist disconnects with the digital world and opposes the current society that depends on capitalism and popularity.
Press release courtesy Each Modern.
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