Ed Pien

The grouping of works in the exhibition activated the three-story gallery with a constant and organic flow of movements. The gallery’s basement was entirely taken over by an installation titled Revel (2011), comprised of a hand-cut mylar and plexiglass labyrinth hung from the ceiling, and a video projection featuring a young woman walking through a dingy space while assembling and relocating small mylar houses. The work is situated at a concurrence of changing lighting and wind situations by virtue of a projector and fans installed in different corners of the space. The movement of viewers adds another layer of complexity to the haunting atmosphere and its exploration of the sense of belonging in relation to migration, as it alters the physical presence of the work with a metaphysical effect that goes beyond a static materiality, as if the work could be breathing.

In recent years, Pien has spent time bringing awareness to the history of the Indigenous land on which Canada was brutally built. Through a series of mixed-media installations and works on fabrics, he takes the conversation surrounding land security and ownership back to one of the essential elements in the Canadian landscape: water. The work Sea Change (2017), for instance, a wall-sized cut-out piece that combines reflective film and Shoji paper to trace the silhouettes of sea creatures and humanoid figures, reflects on the unsafe water sources and resultant risk of disease that threaten Indigenous communities in Canada. Sea Change was originally presented at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, accompanied by text projecting a better future for water conservation, rendered in crystals by Merrell-Ann S. Phare, executive director of the Centre for Indigenous Environmental Resources Inc., who regularly writes and speaks on water issues concerning Indigenous communities. Through the fictional underwater world depicted in Sea Change, where a variety of imagined and humanoid creatures co-exist, Pien acknowledges the privileges of colonial settlers and addresses how we are all complicit in erasing the existence of Indigenous peoples, a guilt that is bound to come back and haunt us if we treat it with silence.

While one may describe Pien’s work as otherworldly in some ways and culturally specific in others, it is perhaps more precise to view his work as a portal between the imaginary and the real, as attempts to break down the barrier between material reality and the intangible projections of fears and hopes. As Pien has experimented with bigger and more immersive scales in his practice, there has also been more mirroring of the present moment for us to think through who we are and how we are connected to this world that we live in. On the whole, the exhibition epitomized human experiences shaped by fear, loss and suffering, but also, more importantly, resilience, as reflected in the multiple states of being Pien proposes.

Ed Pien’s solo exhibition is on view at 1700 La Poste, Montreal, until January 20, 2019.

To read more of ArtAsiaPacific’s articles, visit our Digital Library.