Bomb Metal & Fry Jewelry (BMFJ) created a gallery space, called BMFJ Studio, in the art collective’s studio in 2012, and started presenting a series of curatorial projects related to life and art, in which they have subtly embedded featured artworks in their store space. This year’s collaborative exhibition between MOCA Cube and BMFJ Studio originates from BMFJ’s “Let’s put on a show! The Sparkling Metalsmithing Community’s Project,” a recipient of the Ministry of Culture’s grant. Presenting artworks, instruments, working environment and creative behaviors of metal artists, the exhibition explores how metal artists shape and materialize their ideas in this labor-intensive art form that emphasizes on strong physical perception. The exhibition also looks at those visible, invisible, controllable and unmanageable elements characterizing the relations between artists and their instruments, skills, will and body throughout the creative process as well as how these elements can be sometimes mutually reinforcing and sometimes limiting each other.
The founders of BMFJ, Hung Pei-Chi and Tsao Ting-Ting invite six artists from Taiwan and Japan, including KOH, Wang Po-Lin, Wu Shu-Lin, Chou Chin-Tuan, Lin Li-Chuan and Dandy Chao, to participate in this exhibition. Two sections are presented in the exhibition to discuss how artists further refine their art in order to more freely create their works and shatter existing limitations by combining their will power, working sites, instruments and skills after they have already reached an excellent level of artistry. On view in the BMFJ Studio section are the artworks created by the featured artists, along with their individual perspectives on different creative instruments; the MOCA Cube section, on the other hand, is transformed into a metal art workshop, where individual artist will conduct an artist residency on a weekly basis, give guided tours and interact with the audience. Both sections in the exhibition aim to display the profound yet exquisite metal art that can also be diverse, approachable and gentle.