Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei

Ruan Weng - Mong was born in Taiwan, and has been living in Germany for many years. Ruan specializes in interdisciplinary integral design and his work spans various fields, from exquisite, refined jewelry design to architectural wall decoration, landscape sculpture, and pure sculpture. As an interdisciplinary artist, Ruan believes that contemporary art is "the art of the present," a form of aesthetic exploration and linguistic expression derived from continuous interaction and collision among individual creativity, life experience, and the surrounding environment, space, events and things. Meanwhile, he has attempted to transcend the limit of space-time as well as the barrier of thinking by rearranging and representing aesthetic distance between reality and ideal. His endeavors on this subject, therefore, have imbued his work with interdisciplinary, intercultural, and international attributes. To a certain extent, Post．Vision．Form can be seen as a small-scale retrospective that displays Ruan's psychological journey and artistic career in the past two decades. His work in past years has branched into three major series. Among these series, The Reflection of Landscape that centers on traditional Chinese Han culture is deemed his representative work. Time Traveler, Being with Metal Art, Spiritual Energy are works inspired by personal mental imagery and perception of life. On the other hand, Ruan's observation and contemplation on the Austronesian culture and custom have provided inspiration for works such as Southern Sea Paradise, Subtropical Rationality, Under the Mountain, and Garden Eden . It is clear that the artist not only possesses great artistry and skills, he has been contemplating on his own identity in the past twenty years through comparing and differentiating the adopted German culture and his own cultural root. At the same time, he has been assimilating and integrating both the Eastern aesthetics that values its spiritual concept and the Western art that represents appearance and reality. For Ruan, the course of his journey has evolved naturally according to his realization and perception. In the exhibition, the artist is showing design models of different scales and original sketches, including sketches of realistic subjects and graffiti of mental imagery produced at the stage of searching for inspiration. These precious documents serve as the source of his inspiration while allowing the audience to trace his thinking throughout the years. In addition, Ruan's signature works of miniature metal sculpture and jewelry design, as well as large sculptures and reliefs are also on view in the exhibition. An enormous sculpture of a metal ring with a mirror finished surface is installed on the museum plaza, subtly blending into the public space while reflecting the pedestrian as well as the museum facade day and night. Post．Vision．Form ─ Ruan Weng - Mong Solo Exhibition successfully dissolves the limitation of metal art with superb metal art techniques and deconstructs the concept and form of traditional sculpture in the name of sculpture, perfectly unifying metal art and sculpture and creating an innovative perspective and aesthetics. Ruan has elevated contemporary metal creation to an artistic level, shown us the inherent charm of combining metal art and sculpture, and embodied the vital energy when Taiwanese contemporary metal art and sculpture are incorporated into the local architectural and socio-cultural environment.