Curated by Á R E A in partnership with Nearby Gallery. For his first solo exhibition, Taiwanese artist Hung-Ju Kan embarks on a journey to retrieve personal memories and bring them to surface in the context of relocation. In an effort to recall and cope with a major life transition, the artist questions how immigration affects the content of autobiographical memory.

The paintings and prints featured in The Nature of Remembrance are inhabited by the souvenir of personal experiences and traces of specific objects—the wallpaper of the artist’s first room and the fabric of his grandmother's dress, among other domestic items embellished by floral motifs—often revisited with the arrival of a new season in the Northeast, Kan’s home for the last three years.

In each work, with perfectly fluent, unhesitating technique, time and place emerge and vanish, forming part of a multilayered emotional environment that emphasizes repetition, change, co-occurrence, and distinctiveness. As part of an exploration of past and current episodes of his personal life, the artist can form no definitive image of a resuscitated memory. Here the intangible act of remembering serves as a tool to domesticate the unfamiliar, and create a new sense of completeness and equilibrium, an intermixture of pleasant and unpleasant states of mind.

About the artist:

efore obtaining a Master in Fine Art from Mass Art, Kan attended the National Taiwan University of Arts in Taipei. During these formative years, the artist explored the character of Chinese paintings and calligraphy which is recognized for an extraordinary variety of strokes and styles of drawing that have been perfected over the centuries. Later on, he also worked as an assistant for renowned Taiwanese artist Wu Chi-Tsung, represented in the U.S. by Sean Kelly. Hung Ju Kan lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.