Luxury Logico was formed in early 2010 by two artist collectives: Chang Keng-hau and Chang Geng-hwa’s Luxury and Ken Chen and Llunc Lin’s Logico. These four men, all barely in their 30s, together created the group’s foundation, utilizing their own respective specialties in terms of concepts and execution, ultimately orchestrating high-tech machine-software interactions to produce many astounding works, such as the ongoing Project Woodpecker, Dust, and other series. Starting with City of Sunshine from their “Treignac Projet,” this artist collective’s new configuration and orientation have begun to unfold.

During the initial phase of City of Sunshine, the group started by calling for donations of 300 old, worn out household desk lamps to be used in the work. After testing and converting the work to exhibition form, the second phase was unveiled in 2010 at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum’s exhibition “Liu Kuo-sung: Time Unfrozen.” The installation consisted of hundreds of lamps interwoven with an array of energy-saving LED bulbs used as a metaphor for rays of sunshine. Through an electronic program, the artists controlled the flickering of the group of lights, creating a visual shock that was at once remote yet rich in texture. In the third phase of the plan, at the conclusion of the exhibition, the artists gave out pictures of the installation to those who had donated lamps, spreading a concrete sense of participation while giving them some understanding of the environmental concept of the work. Worth noting here is that several of the projects Luxury Logico have put forth are by no means confined to the visual. They also frequently expand their scope of collaboration, working with performance artists and musicians and experimenting with various media so as to reflect on the notion of hybridity within contemporary art.

Luxury Logico’s exhibition “Fruition” employs the vantage of the artists’ identities postentry into the market to explore the dialectic relationship between collectors and artists, and also goes a step further in understanding the desires of the art world. To do this, they first morphed into collectors, heading out to buy works. After taking the initiative to meet face to face with a few other artists, they bought nine works spanning different periods and forms, appropriating them as basic source materials. For example, the artists transformed Hung Tung-lu’s 1999 digitally produced Lyn Minmay II into a lightbox apparatus. Once the audience inserts a ten yuan coin, the dark lightbox switches on and a female goddess figurine emerges, mimicking the way believers make donations to temples— a comparison with how people today use money to gain freedom of belief. The group also converted Chen Sungchih’s glass installation Untitled into a part of an extended space by embedding it in a white wall. Within the confines of the framework of the white wall, the poetic, cold feeling of loneliness in the original work appears even more intense and restless. Among these works, the most interesting is Luxury Logico’s public performance A Performance of One Day. In the gallery, they went without sleeping for 24 hours, making a calendar that divided one day into 366 units— each representing one day— in a tribute to performance artist Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performance 1978-1979.

By way of the overall planning behind “Fruition,” aside from trying to deconstruct the relationship between auteur and work, Luxury Logico also discuss the many forgotten nuances among ossified concepts: guarantee of originality, collection and ownership, and dealership. The act of communication finds its voice in the second-degree exchange on the market through an inspired dialogue between the artists at the level of creative appropriation. In this way, Luxury Logico have taken a gutsy gamble, by attempting to challenge and debate the ways people imagine the collection of art, and the infinite repercussions these may have in the future.

Wang Yunglin (Translated by Caly Moss)