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Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Paddington and National Art School, Darlinghurst

by Andrew Frost

The Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation doesn’t do things by halves, except of course where a single exhibition is split between two individual shows, one in their Paddington gallery space and the other at the gallery of the National Art School. Featuring the work of two leading Taiwanese artists Chen Chieh-jen and Chien-Chi Chang, the bifurcatedexhibition is Home, a meditation on the nature of the status of the home, from individual dwellings to he shared social spaces of apartment buildings and asylums.

In Paddington is Chen Chieh-jen’s Realm of Reverberations, a multi-part film and sound installation work that forms an expanded documentary on the construction of Losheng Sanatorium in Taiwan. Along with the visuals are audio interviews with women at the site contrasted with four further audio pieces of women interviewed at Sydney’s Wayside Chapel. At the NAS Gallery, Magnum photographer Chien-Chi Chang presents images of chained patients in a mental asylum where the ‘patients’ are required to work on a chicken farm.  Both exhibitions take on the contested style of social realism, imbuing it with poetry that does not forget the reality of the situations of their subjects.

Pic: Chen Chieh-jen, Realm of Reverberations (still), 2014.