Paintings by Lien Chien-hsing always involve many unconventional symbols, such as a floating whale, a tiger jumping through a hoop alone, and mermaids playing with dolphins. Together they construct a magical world, attracting viewers to wander in this alluring dreamland. These settings appear barren and desolate, but in fact incorporate the artist’s nostalgic sentiments over past landscapes and things. Created in 2006, “Blue Bubble – Heading to the Ocean” of the “Small Puppet Theater” series embodies the artist’s attempt to recreate space with still life. The viewers’ well-known desolate settings are gone. Instead, many seemingly familiar objects and the consumer products derived from rapid social change have formed into a kind of conflict. Ingeniously designed and arranged by the artist, these ordinary objects collected by Lien from his everyday experience become the leading characters of his plays. Suddenly the space turns into a theater where the artist, now serving as the director, leads his “actors and actresses” to play acts of strange but intriguing allegories.

Rather than loudly singing nostalgic ballads through these works, Lien tries to explore his sense of belonging to the land and sea through the symbolic layouts of his paintings. In addition, he also whispers of a particular atmosphere during the time he grew up. Gently pulling on people’s heartstrings, he guides the contemporaries to think back to the time they shared and lost.