Taipei Travel

In 2015, Tate Modern Turbine Hall in London featured a large installation composed of 240 wooden pots filled with soil collected from parks and gardens across the city that was illuminated by a number of lamp posts constructed from ready-made materials. This piece, "Empty Lot", was created by Mexican artist Abraham Cruzvillegas on commission from the museum and deals with issues of the city and the environment. Cruzvillegas, who grew up in Ajusco in the south of Mexico, has adopted a creative form that is strongly shaped by his childhood environment and experiences, with an improvisational and ever-changing character that mirrors the historical context of the district. Their financial instability, need for shelter and the harsh volcanic conditions of the locality prompted these people to build their own houses without a blueprint. These inhabitants built their homes in stages, in a progressive, collective and organic “absolutely unfinished” construction style that has continued to this day, a philosophy of life that is fully emblematic of the notion of Autoconstrucción (self-construction).

Since 2007, Autoconstrucción has been a central concept in Cruzvillegas work. For the artist, he is not so much focused on the construction itself as he is drawn to the needs and reasons behind the creation of such forms. It is a form of understanding reality and approaching things in a particular economic, political and social context, and a metaphor for the process of establishing one own identity. Cruzvillegas also manifests this process in the state or form of the work through the manipulation of various unorthodox materials.

This exhibition at the Winsing Art Place showcases a series of sculptural installations and paintings by Cruzvillegas. The sculptures, which are reconstituted and stacked from a collection of ready-made objects, reflect the artist self-constructed concepts accumulated from his upbringing, and the seemingly unfinished state of the works echoes the history and footprint of Mexico development. Cruzvillegas; work involves flux, incompleteness and unpredictability - in other words, the character of his creations is at the same time associated with chance, variability and hope.

Cruzvillegas has recently held solo exhibitions at the Les Tanneries Contemporary Art Center, France; the Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach; the Aspen Art Museum; and the Kunsthaus Zürich; and in 2015, commissioned by Tate Modern, London, he showcased “Empty Lot” at the inaugural Hyundai Commission. His artworks have been on display at many major art establishments, including the Muséed;Art Moderne de Paris, the National Museum of 21st Century Art in Rome, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Jewish Museum in New York; he has participated in the Venice Biennale, the São Paulo Biennale, the Kassel Documenta, the Biennale of Sydney, the Sharjah Biennial, the Gwangju Biennale and the Havana Biennial. Cruzvillegas’ pieces have been housed by many prestigious art institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; M+, Hong Kong; Tate Modern, London; the Walker Art Center, etc. He was awarded the 5th South Korean Yanghyun Prize in 2012. He currently lives and works in Paris, France.